Battle Creek volunteer Kathy Antaya: Advocate and champion for people who are poor or discriminated against

The fairway took on a different meaning for Kathy Antaya when she left the golf profession to become a community advocate and a voice for people in Battle Creek who are historically excluded and face multiple barriers to economic success.

She chose to focus on looking at the needs of all individuals, not just the average person who is financially somewhere between real wealth and real poverty. For her, this is equitable community development. She’s seen firsthand the spectrum of wealth distribution in the nation.

Once a golf caddie worked her way up to a consultant who helped build golf courses, today she works as Volunteer Coordinator and Chairperson of Friends of the SHARE Center, Battle Creek’s only daytime shelter, where she sees the impact on those who have no place to call home.  And as Third Vice President of the local NAACP, she sees how being unhoused plays out with People of Color (POC).

“You cannot expect anybody to help themselves if they don’t have a stable place to stay and a place to call their own. That’s the American Dream,” she says. “The average person, like me, walks down the street and has use of their arms and legs and can communicate with others. When we get together as a group, we look at that average person to grasp the needs of the whole. We look at individuals and gauge it that way. We all are worthwhile regardless of how we look and how we behave, and we all have lots of differences, which create needs that we all have.”

While equitable community development has always been a focus for city and community leaders, it has increasingly been emphasized in recent gatherings convened by the City of Battle Creek and local organizations including the Battle Creek Branch of the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People); the Southwestern Michigan Urban League; the W.K. Kellogg Foundation; and individuals such as Pastor Monique French with Washington Heights United Methodist Church.

The local NAACP hosted a housing summit April 14 to discuss challenges facing people who are unhoused or struggling with housing issues, followed the next day by a discussion on ways to get these individuals into safe and affordable housing.

The Battle Creek affiliate of “We the People” hosted another meeting, which dealt with issues facing the chronically unhoused and members of the transgender community who find themselves unable to find stable housing.

Kathy Antaya attended both of these meetings.

“What I heard at both meetings was very similar when it comes to obstacles to getting and maintaining housing. We as individual groups based on commonalities need to talk about what’s important to us as individuals,” she says. “There just aren’t enough good rentals or homes to purchase under $150,000. Many apartments that are affordable come with cockroaches and mold inside the walls.”

Meaningful change won’t happen, she says, until the makeup of the majority of those leading the discussions becomes more diverse.

“Most of the people leading these housing discussions are privileged white men. Lots of my friends are privileged white men, and they don’t see or experience certain things. They’ve never had to choose between putting gas in their car or buying toilet paper. They were born into wealth or strong middle-class families, and they had someone to teach them how to budget and save money.”

Poor people by necessity think differently, Antaya says, often in terms of the money they have on any given day. If they have $5 and a friend needs $3, they’ll part with the precious few dollars they have to help that person out.

She cites the example of a gentleman she befriended who had been unhoused for somewhere north of five years.

“When I got to know him better, I learned he had family in Florida, and we started talking about how to get him down there. His goal was to buy a used van in the Fall, load it up, and go to Florida. I said I’d be happy to help him. He was saving some money.”

A few weeks went by, and she hadn’t seen him.

“I finally saw him in a coffee shop, and he said one of his street buddies had a bad foot wound and had to stay off his feet, so my friend gave the few hundred dollars he’d saved up to his buddy with gangrene so he could stay in a hotel for one week. That’s a requirement of his culture, to help each other.”

When she hears those with financial means criticize how those without spend their money, “If you haven’t been there, you don’t know. I get so pi—d at people when they say, ‘All you have to do is pull yourself up by your own bootstraps.’ With the experiences I’ve had in Battle Creek, I know those people who don’t have boots.”

Life experiences lead to a life of awareness

Though Antaya didn’t know the words for it at the time, at the age of six years old, she felt the impact of racist and discriminatory behavior when playing with the children of new neighbors who were Black. The father of one of her White playmates said she could no longer play with his son. That admonishment was counter to what she was taught by her parents, who raised her and her sister in a middle-class neighborhood in Detroit.

“My parents taught me to respect and support people regardless of race,” she said in a story on the Battle Creek Truth Racial Healing and Transformation (BCTRHT) website. “But it wasn’t until I got involved with the NAACP that I truly understood the solidarity between white folk and people of color.”

Before reaching adulthood, her primary exposure to inequality was teed up for when she began caddying at 13-years-old at a country club.

“Being a caddy and carrying golf clubs for private club members, I learned a lot of people had a lot of money, and I knew families and caddies that didn’t. The difference in members of the golf club was something all of us caddies paid attention to. Some members treated us very well despite the fact that we were the dirty kids carrying their clubs up and down the hill.”

Caddying, followed by work on maintenance of the course, opened her eyes to subtle divides between the haves and have-nots while also giving her opportunities she may not have had otherwise. 

She had the advantage of a supportive family. Her mother dropped her off and picked her up from her job, which she says was “huge for a kid without transportation.”

Her parents wanted her to go to college and secured her a scholarship available to low-income families at Our Lady of Mercy High School, an all-girls Catholic school in Farmington Hills. From there, she received an Evans Scholarship offered at Michigan State University specifically for golf caddies. Her Bachelor’s degree in Turfgrass Management encompassed management of the property — the grass, trees, flowers, and the people who did the course maintenance work.

“Out of 60 people in a class, I’d be the only female. When I graduated, I was told by some industry bigwigs that the best place for me would be in sales, so I could use my feminine wiles to sell machinery to male golf club owners. That propelled me to want to succeed on my own terms.”

Antaya graduated in 1984 in the middle of a golf course construction boom, which saw 300 courses built in three years in Michigan, including one on Drummond Island, financed by Domino’s Pizza founder Tom Monaghan. He hired her as an Owner’s Rep to oversee the construction.

She became a well-known and respected member of a male-dominated profession, authoring articles about golf course management, taking the lead on the design and build out of courses at Grand Valley State University, on Drummond, and the former Yarrow Golf & Conference Resort in Augusta, and playing her game on some of the world’s “swankiest” golf courses.

“I got to be well-known as one of the few females in the golf industry, and that turned out to be a distinct advantage,” she says.

Doors close, doors open

Her last job was at Yarrow. She was fired in 2005 by new management during the sale of that golf course, and decided to stay in Battle Creek.

“This really feels like home,” says Antaya, who has lived in 12 different cities, mostly in the Midwest, before landing permanently in Battle Creek.

In 2006, while continuing to work in the golf industry, she was in a car accident that left her physically disabled. She realized she would have to step away from the career she’d worked so hard to because she was physically and mentally unable to do the golf course work required. “I was a little bit embarrassed because I couldn’t function like I used to, and I was fearful that the people I work with could tell.”

But there would be no self-inflicted pity party, and Antaya set her sights on using the skill set she had amassed to help those who didn’t have the advantages she had. “I started volunteering at Leila Arboretum, teaching people the skills necessary to do community gardening.”

In 2010, she began volunteering at Sprout Urban Farms.

This work, she says, exposed her to a lot of inequities in the community that made her stand up and say, “Somebody’s got to do something.”

“Through community gardening, I became involved in equity issues and racial healing initiatives. I’m a full-time volunteer and community activist.”

The individuals who most suffer in a community that doesn’t prioritize equity are those who are the most marginalized — POC, people with mental and physical disabilities, and single parents who are struggling.

From her standpoint, their struggles bleed into the community.

“I think all of our community suffers from a moral perspective,” Antaya says. “I don’t believe in God, but I think we all carry around a piece of the universe and that connects us all. When one person is hurting, we all have a black mark on our souls.”

This story is part of Southwest Michigan Journalism Collaborative’s coverage of equitable community development. SWMJC is a group of 12 regional organizations dedicated to strengthening local journalism. Visit swmichjournalism.com to learn more.