Work on Climate (Dec 2020): What are your climate goals? Read career pivot stories. Talk to climate organizations and scope projects. Get microdoses of @workonclimate.
Welcome to the December 2020 Work On Climate newsletter! Happy Thanksgiving. We are very grateful to be part of your climate family and are grateful that we have all made the commitment to get meaningfully involved in climate action.
If you have yet to join our Work on Climate Slack, we offer a positive, action-oriented community. If you have any offers or asks, drop by and advance your climate journey! Through word of mouth, our community has grown to 500+ people, almost double from last month — keep adding your talented climate friends to our community!
If you have been forwarded this newsletter, welcome to the fold! You can subscribe to this newsletter and read past editions here.
What's New?
🚀 Your climate goals
We are starting a new program to help our community towards their climate goals. Tell us the steps you took toward climate action in the last month. Share what you plan to do the next month. We want to be your accountability buddy and will motivate you towards your goals! Tell us your goals.
✨ Stories of career pivots into climate
Changing careers into climate is contagious - if other people can do it, you can do too!
We have started a Medium blog with these transition stories (follow us!), starting with the story of the "dangerously interesting" Olya Irzak who went from Google to capturing methane in the Arctic, and Archy de Berker whose path lead him from neuroscience to mapping the world's emissions at ClimateTRACE.
Get microdoses of @workonclimate throughout the month!
We also now have social media! Follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn. We post actionable and positive content that is likely to help you pivot into climate. Think of us as your motivational coach. Let us know what you want to see by promoting the content you find useful!
A little announcement about us
We will be incorporating as a 501(c)(3). We expect our first year operating costs, filing fees, and liability insurance to run around $5-10K. If you have found value in our community and want to help others transition their careers into making substantial climate impact, we would love to have your support! We will likely set up a tip jar in the future, but please contact Cassandra Xia at cssndrx@gmail.com if your organization may want to sponsor Work on Climate.
Project scope with climate organizations
Our Climate Fellows program matchmakes people who want to do part-time work with climate organizations (both paid and volunteer opportunities). We need technical project scopers to talk to climate organizations and help translate their projects into specs.
Scoping is a great way to meet climate organizations and immediately have climate impact. Michelle Chang wrote an awesome guide about what the scoping process involves. If you are interested, please apply as a Fellow through the climatefellows.org program and indicate that you are interested in project scoping.
Present at PAW: The First Industry Climate ML Conference
Our very own Eugene Kirpichov is chairing PAW Climate - the world's first conference on industry applications of machine learning in climate tech, happening as part of Predictive Analytics World!
Startups and established companies can submit talk proposals here. Help spread the word to potential speakers and attendees!
🥳 Events
We've hosted several Q&A sessions with amazing leads of climate-focused projects and organizations - access recordings/notes at Past Events, and see upcoming events on the calendar and on #events.
🗓️ Thu Nov 26 @2:00pm PT - Guided Brainstorm - Food Waste. RSVP here.
A guided brainstorm about applications for reducing food waste, using a design thinking process. We encourage participation by community members of all knowledge levels!
🗓️ Tue Dec 1 @10:00am PT - Opportunities with Climate Neutral. RSVP here
An introduction to opportunities with the nonprofit Climate Neutral, which provides a certification and label for brands that offset and reduce all of their carbon emissions.
🗓️ Fri Dec 4 @11:00am PT - Pachama Technical Talk. RSVP here.
Pachama is helping fight climate change by restoring and protecting forests, using AI and remote sensing. Two of Pachama's software engineers will talk about the technical architecture, components, and challenges.
🗓️ Thurs Dec 10 @11am PT - Pitch Deck Practice. RSVP here.
Are you working on an exciting new early stage venture startup? Whether you're a pitching pro looking for a second perspective, or just still trying to figure out how to organize your slides, we can help! Come practice your pitch with us and receive candid and constructive feedback on content, performance and slide design.
🗓️ Tues Dec 15 @6:00pm PT - Q&A Session with Terra.do. RSVP here.
This event is an open-ended Q&A session with Kamal Kapadia of Terra.do. Terra.do is an online climate school. Their mission is to get 100 million people working to solve climate change by 2030.
Program Highlights
Here are some of our favorite programs for kickstarting your journey in climate!
🎓 Study together
Learning groups allow people interested in the same topic to gather regularly, research a topic, and work towards an actionable result.
Two new learning groups have formed:
☢️ Nuclear learning group - join "if you are interested in figuring out what the hell is going on in the nuclear space"! Thanks Rebecca Li for hosting this group and bringing in guest speakers.
💰 Climate finance learning group - understanding funding of climate solutions (did you know that climate VC funding grows 3x faster than AI?), financial interventions for climate, accounting for climate impacts/risks in traditional finance.
Or perhaps you are interested in one of our longer running groups on 🧠 Social Science, 👩🌾 Regenerative Agriculture, 🌊 Marine Sequestration, 🌍 Climate Justice?
Join a learning group or start a new one!
🧪 Try climate work without leaving your current job
Climate Fellows program
We continue to match people with part-time work at climate organizations, both paid and volunteer, via Climate Fellows. Sign up to be matched for these roles!
Know an impactful climate NGO that needs volunteers or a climate company hiring part-time help? Have them apply via the Climate Fellows website.
Assorted opportunities
Hop on #dip-your-toes to browse other opportunities to get involved with climate projects via short-term, part-time, or volunteering work. Here are some of them:
Climate Neutral is a startup non-profit that provides a trusted consumer standard for carbon neutral brands and has many pro bono opportunities of different sorts, as well as an exciting contracting opportunity for a software engineer to help develop the open-source carbon footprint measurement ecosystem. Learn more at their event!
Blue Ocean Barns grows seaweed to add to cow feed to drastically reduce their methane emissions. They’re looking for contractors with background in mechanical engineering, aquaculture, remote sensing, project management, and IP management.
🏢 Find a full-time job
Looking for a job in climate? New job alerts from Climatebase and hand-picked job postings by community members are available on our #jobs channel. Some highlights below!
Terrafuse provides actionable climate intelligence at any point in space and time across the entire planet. They are looking for a principal software engineer with bigdata and ML experience! They recently gave a popular talk for our community.
Running Tide is hiring a mechanical engineer for Portland, Maine. Looks super fun!
Green Ninja is hiring a lead software engineer located anywhere in the US. Green Ninja grew out of academic research that demonstrated how well-designed educational experiences can promote pro-environmental attitudes and behavior in youth, and how these experiences can produce verifiable reductions in carbon emissions.
Find a co-founder
Join #cofounder-matching to connect with people in the community looking for a cofounder. Say who you are and who you are looking for!
If you have a strong technical background, also consider applying to our Climate CTO program, where we match you with early stage climate startups looking for a CTO. Many early startups have climate expertise, but need a traditional technical founder.
🧙🏼 Chat with climate experts
In the past month, 30 people have connected with our 9 experts offering to help community members transition into climate. Chatting with experts is a great way to learn, get career advice, or simply see what a person working in climate looks like! Sign up to chat with these fine folks at Expert Office Hours.
Irina Fedorenko, a serial greentech entrepreneur, has joined the program as a new expert!
Starter Packs
Our Google Analytics tracker tells us you all love our Starter Pack guides to getting started in climate. These are community-sourced resources on how to ramp up on various subareas of climate. Our Starter Packs got 575 views in the last week!
Check out existing Starter Packs, and consider adding a Starter Pack for your area of expertise.
🧘🏼 Community projects
Are you interested in getting more involved with our community? We are always looking for people wishing to help create and run efforts in the community — see here for a list of active and budding efforts.
Some highlights of new efforts below.
Absolute Beginners' Guide to Getting a Data Job in Climate — Tammy Tseng and Troy Hodges have started this guide & living document for data folks looking for climate jobs. Check it out and help improve it!
Who is who in our community - How can we organize the information about people in the community to make it easier for everyone to find people to connect/collaborate with? Dahl Winters and Rohan Nuttall have built a Slack bot that gets this effort started.
Reverse Office Hours - Climate organizations may want to book consults with professionals in our community (e.g. engineers, marketers, SEO experts). What is the best way to connect them?
Feature climate work at university career fairs - Many universities craft rigid expectations of a career path. How can we make climate work more visible and accessible to students?
Comment on the respective Slack threads to get involved!
Happy holidays, climate family!
— Work on Climate organizing team