Work on Climate (May 2021): From tech to activism, regenerative organic farming, and supply chains!
The positive, action-oriented climate community at workonclimate.org
Welcome to the May 2021 newsletter of Work on Climate. Follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn, or Clubhouse for notifications about new events!
As we have dozens of offerings, we wrote the 🗺️ WoCl How To Guide in order to help you find programs available to you as a jobseeker, climate employer, or startup founder.
🥳 May events
We are hosting a number of exciting events throughout May. Thank you to community members Josh Shaeffer, Fady Azmy, and Iris Guo for organizing some bonus events this month!
Thu April 29 @8:00am PT - PMs Tackling Climate - Interview #1 with Lyndall Schreiner. RSVP here.
We’ll be discussing with Lyndall what it is like to PM at Afresh, PM challenges in the climate tech space, and demystify what PMs at non-climate companies can do to tackle climate change. Afresh is a food sustainability startup with a mission to reduce food waste using data.
Fri April 30 @2:30pm PT - WoCl's First TGIF! RSVP here.
Work on Climate founders Eugene & Cass will kick things off by sharing what led to them start the community. Get to know your fellow community members, answer fun prompts, and share your story, using a platform that simulates in-person interaction.
Wed May 5 @10am PT - From Tech to Activism: A conversation with @Bill Weihl. RSVP here.
Join us for a dynamic conversation with Bill Weihl, former Facebook sustainability leader and Google Green Energy Czar. Bill founded ClimateVoice in 2020 to urge companies to use their massive influence to address the climate crisis. You can read more in his oped decrying Tech's inactivism on climate-policy with Michael Mann, calling on the tech sector to get off the sidelines and into the fight.
Wed May 5 @5pm PT - Regenerative Organic Alliance & WoCl Regen Ag Group. RSVP here.
Elizabeth Whitlow is the Executive Director of the Regenerative Organic Alliance (ROA). She oversees the Regenerative Organic Certified program, which holds the highest standards in the world for soil health, animal welfare, and social fairness. Join the Regenerative Agriculture learning group for an exclusive presentation and Q&A with Elizabeth.
Wed May 6 @2pm PT - WoCl Community Project Spotlight. Join on Clubhouse.
Monthly event for our community members to discuss climate related projects they are working on, and share tips/learnings with one another, as well as seek help from the community.
Tue May 11 2021 10:00am PT - Supply chains and global warming with CarbonChain. RSVP here.
CarbonChain is on a mission to make supply chains green again, offering quantitative and actionable solutions to reduce emissions in the supply chains of the world’s most polluting industries — oil & gas, mining, metals, minerals and agriculture. CEO Adam Hearne will share key insights they've drawn from looking at carbon emissions in supply chains around the world, and answer questions.
Note: CarbonChain is hiring! See postings on #jobs.
Tue May 11 2021 1:00pm PT - Climate Finance Idea Refinery Stage 1: Brainstorm
The Climate Finance Learning Group is holding an "idea refinery" event where people brainstorm company ideas in the realm of climate finance. We then recruit experts to discuss these ideas in front of an audience, producing a concentrated stream of expert opinions and guidance for founders. Join if you want to co-brainstorm and contribute climate finance company ideas! Follow announcements on #learning-group-finance to join, or submit your ideas here.
Fri May 14 @10am PT - ML for policy analysis: Identifying policy incentives using NLP (Daniel Firebanks). RSVP here.
WRI and Data Science For Social Good have developed a tool that uses state-of-the-art NLP to mine policy documents and identify policies that contain specific incentives. Daniel Firebanks will talk about how this helps decision makers understand the public incentives supporting sustainability goals, which is normally an extremely labor-intensive process.
Tue May 18 @5:30pm PT - PMs Tackling Climate - Interview #2 with Laura Wang. RSVP here.
We’ll be interviewing Laura Wang (PM at Kevala), about her climate journey, her experiences moving to product management from public policy, and her role currently at Kevala. Kevala is an SF startup decarbonizing the electric grid using data.
Thu May 20 @3pm PT - Startup Office Hours. RSVP here.
Need help with strategy, product, fundraising, hiring, or marketing? Join us to get help figuring out a way past your startup's biggest roadblocks.
Wed May 26 @11am PT - Carbon Neutralization with Cooler. RSVP here.
Cooler focuses on helping businesses make more money by fighting climate change. They calculate and neutralize (not offset) product emissions and provide roadmaps to further reductions. Cooler's leadership team (with cumulatively more than 50 years of climate experience) will focus on the intersection between climate tech and climate impact -- how to measure it and how to have it.
Watch (or re-watch) Past Events
We've hosted a number of interesting talks from Climate leaders over the past year! Watch recordings & read notes at Past Events and on our YouTube channel; find upcoming events on the calendar and on #events-wocl for official events and #events-external for external events.
🏢 Find your next job
Ready to find climate work? Hop onto #jobs for full-time jobs posted by the community, #gigs for short-term or part-time work, #jobs-discussion for general discussion around job-seeking, or the #resume channel where people help each other polish their resumes for climate companies.
Some roles posted this month by community members in the #jobs channel include:
Climate Neutral, a non-profit that certifies companies measuring and offsetting their carbon emissions from their goods and services, is hiring a Technical Program Manager (remote, US).
EcoCart, a startup helping users and companies offset the impact of online shopping, is hiring a full stack engineer (remote). Applicants can email zain@ecocart.io or connect with @Zain (EcoCart) on Slack.
Climate farmers, a startup helping build infrastructure to promote regenerative agriculture, is hiring a product manager and a marketing & communications strategist (both remote).
Afresh, a startup that helps grocery stores track demand and manage orders for fresh produce, is hiring for a number of roles including customer success, people ops, marketing and engineering (mostly in SF Bay Area).
Form energy is a startup that builds large scale batteries, to help electrical grids rely more on renewable energy. They are hiring across a number of roles including research, supply chain, business development, people operations, and engineering.
PowerX develops sensors and software that enable property owners to reduce their electricity, gas usage, and water consumption. They are hiring for several roles in the US including a data scientist, a customer experience manager, and a growth marketing lead.
Rheaply helps companies reduce waste by reusing the physical assets within their businesses. They're hiring across marketing, sales, customer success, engineering, product & operations roles in Chicago.
🚸 Community projects
Our Community Member Projects directory is growing. Put your project on the list and we will try to help you get the collaborators and resources you need.
This month, we would like to call out these amazing projects:
Alexander Thiel is in search of co-conspirators to help with Climate Hour. "If 100M people spend 1h/week to protect the climate, what should they do?"
Daniel Kriozere is helping organize The Impact, a weekly newsletter that provides analysis of emerging technologies, research, policy and trending news in the clean tech space in a short and informative way.
Justus Baumann raised 250K for the Future Matters Project a German nonprofit for training climate activists in psychology and social science best practices that can scale their movements.
Danielle Erikson helped build Cloud Carbon Footprint to measure the carbon impact of websites that heavy infrastructure usage.
Keep doing great things and tell us about them on #share-your-path or by adding to the Community Member Projects directory for a chance to get featured in our next newsletter.
🌱 PAW Climate Machine Learning Conference
PAW Climate, the first conference featuring commercial software/ML climate tech companies, is less than a month away! Register soon and share with your networks and climate-concerned ML folks you know - climate tech needs as much talent as it can get.
In recognition of the urgent importance of climate, PAW has reduced ticket prices by up to 5x - tickets are now at $100 with code PCLSPEC.
We are also looking to invite more students and members of underprivileged groups to attend.
If you would like to attend the conference, but need help affording the ticket, please use this form!
If your organization is interested in sponsoring a few tickets, please reach out to @Eugene Kirpichov.
Ongoing programs
🧙🏼 Talk to climate experts at Office Hours
Ask for advice on entering the space from climate experts at our Office Hours - simply click to book time on their calendars. This month Patrick Sheehan, a data scientist at myst.ai, has started offering his time!
Our experts are very friendly, and help dozens of people every month:
"I did office hours with Christopher Round today and we had a great conversation about the different routes to working in climate policy (advocacy/nonprofit vs government). Highly recommend his office hours to anybody interested in policy."
"Wanted to thank Patrick Sheehan for hosting an amazing first office hours yesterday!! Really appreciated his insights on...how Myst's working on a specific area within AI energy forecasting." From another community member: "I...was [interested in] the suggestions Patrick had around assessing startups and in particular how important business models are for startups in the climate tech space"
"Thank you to David Fork for talking with me in office hours! We talked about what it takes to work on fusion energy, and the prospects and challenges of the field. A really interesting take-away is that even without fusion we can still get to zero emissions with existing tech!"
📚 Learning groups - deep dive or co-brainstorm on a project
Join learning groups of people interested in the same climate vertical as you, and work together towards something actionable. Do you want to vet your idea / find collaborators within a learning group? Consult a learning group to co-brainstorm with group members!
The Climate Justice Learning Group has produced the Climate Justice 101 Guide!
The Climate Finance Learning Group is organizing an "Idea Refinery", where experts vet climate company ideas submitted by group members in front of an audience. The group will gather ideas via an event and through this form. Consider organizing a similar event in your learning group!
The Regenerative Agriculture Learning Group is bringing in Elizabeth Whitlow of the Regenerative Organic Alliance to speak to their group on May 5 5pm PT. To learn about how ROA is measuring soil health, animal welfare, and social fairness RSVP here.
The Food Waste Action Group at #action-food-waste is working to create a movement around reducing food waste. They developed and piloted a 7 day challenge to document and reduce food waste and are working to scale up the challenge to work for local communities and organizations such as schools and work cafeterias. Shoutout to Luke Madera and Mary Morgan for driving this forward.
The Social Science and Climate Finance learning groups are both looking for new hosts to keep the groups regularly meeting, engaged and producing useful output for the community! This is roughly a 1 hour/week commitment. Contact @Eugene Kirpichov if you are interested.
💎 Starter packs of the best learning resources
New to the climate space? Want to learn from the best resources? Check out the WoCl Starter Packs! New additions to the Starter Packs include My Climate Journey's Clubhouse summaries which cover aviation, nuclear, future of meat, and ESG in a deep but friendly manner.
🤖 Search the community by interest
Looking for someone interested in the same things you are, or located in the same area as you?
Search people's #introductions for keywords by typing /braintrust X in any channel (don't worry, it's visible only to you), e.g. try /braintrust carbon capture or /braintrust canada.
This command will find a lot more people than Slack search, because Slack searches only the last 10,000 messages.
💝 Want to help WoCl?
We would love your feedback! Fill out our survey to let us know whether we have helped you find climate work. We really do make decisions based on what you write!
We love to see grassroots initiatives emerge from the community, e.g. Atticus Graven started the #resume channel where anyone can get resume feedback, Lilly Tong started the WoCl Clubhouse, and Fady Azmy and Iris Guo started a PMs in climate event series. Thank you for making WoCl better.
We are fully volunteer run and would love help with running and scaling our existing programs. Message @Eugene Kirpichov on Slack to get involved.
Invite your climate friends who you think would enjoy WoCl.