I admit to cringing when I get an email invitation to participate in a meeting in the Sergio Vieira de Mello Conference Room at UNHCR. Or when I sit in a meeting in the Julia Taft Conference Room at Interaction. Certainly, Sergio and Julia participated in their share of meetings in their time --- how could they not have? But fundamentally they were humanitarians who imposed their wills on the world to make it a better place. Their legacies and conference rooms don’t mix.
I was moved to reflect on this by the
death on Saturday of Refugees International President Ken Bacon , who was my boss and colleague for more than eight years. Ken detested meetings. You’ve heard of NGOs and their meeting cultures? With Ken at the helm, RI became the polar opposite. Ken was so adverse to meetings beyond a brief morning check-in that there were times when we had to beg him to convene one on a critical topic that seemed to require collective deliberation. It was sad that in Ken’s final days at the office in July, out of sheer sense of duty he had to devote two of them to an Interaction Board meeting.
So we won’t be naming RI’s humble conference room after Ken. But in his typical efficient, effective way, Ken took matters into his own hands before he died. Ken established his legacy by founding through a generous donation, made jointly with his wife,
the Ken and Darcy Bacon Center for the Study of Climate Displacement . Even in the final weeks of his life Ken was looking forward, and wanted to make sure that RI would be active on this critical issue even after his passing.
In the aftermath of Ken’s death all of us at RI are struggling with how best to honor him and live up to what he meant to us and the organization. The best memorial to Ken is to live and act from the belief that every human being is precious, and that the most vulnerable require our tireless efforts. Doing anything less is falling short of the example that Ken set.
