Work on Climate (Mar 2021): Spotlight your project!
Work on Climate: Spotlight your project!
Welcome to the March 2021 newsletter of Work On Climate. [Subscribe and read archives]
Work on Climate had a packed February, with several high-profile talks from startups in the climate space. In March, we're excited to announce a new initiative and even more events! Read on for more info!
Need help with your climate project? Ready to offer others assistance? Drop into our Slack community with offers or asks. As always, add your climate friends to our community to keep making it stronger. Let's advance our climate journeys together.
What's New?
🚸 Community projects
We are happy to announce a new Notion page of Community Member Projects. Put your project on the list and we will try to help you get the collaborators and resources you need. Projects on the list have a chance at being spotlighted in each monthly Work on Climate newsletter.
This month, we would like to callout these amazing projects:
Lilly Tong is a software engineer at VICE Media, freelance journalist and the host of the podcast “Make Peas Not Beef” - a lighthearted and informative podcast about climate, tech, life, and pop culture! The “hidden” mission is to bring the average person into the climate fold, and Lilly has interviewed a number of people in the Work on Climate community about their journeys. Listen on Spotify or YouTube!
John Sanchez is running a free 4 week carbon removal course starting March 1st. With content from the Carbon Removal Academy curriculum and two discussion meetings per week, you’ll more deeply understand CDR approaches, learn about companies and organizations in the space, and make new friends. Check out AirMiners Boot-Up for details and to sign up!
Chante Harris and Venture for Climate Tech has just launched the ClimateTech Global Innovation Challenge with cash prizes and resources for those working on problems in Energy, Buildings, Food & Agriculture, or Transportation.
James McWalter hosts the Carbotnic podcast which discusses the founding stories of incredible cleantech startups. Two recent episodes include Carbo Culture on Biochar and HowGood on Food Sustainability.
Sam Steyer and Greenwork have put together a free online course to retrain people to be solar installers. Please share it with people who may be interested!
Leigh Madeira is running ImagineH2O a non-profit accelerator that supports companies inventing better solutions for water resource management. They help with customer introductions and provide non-dilutive funding. Learn more and apply here.
Add your project to Community Member Projects so we can help direct eyeballs to it, or check back in a few days to see what others are doing. If you would like to help with beautifying Work on Climate, we are seeking volunteers as well.
🥳 March Events
We are hosting a number of incredibly exciting events throughout March:
Thu Mar 4 @2:00pm PT - Guided Brainstorm - Grocery Stores. RSVP here.
Grocery stores are low-hanging fruit for climate action. Open refrigerators, food waste, refrigerant leaks, and more. Join Sam Levac-Levey for a guided brainstorm on how we can make groceries greener, using a design thinking process. We encourage participation by community members of all knowledge levels!
Mon Mar 8 @5:00pm PT - Q/A with Joy Dunn, Commonwealth Fusion Systems. RSVP here.
Joy Dunn is the head of manufacturing at Commonwealth Fusion - one of the most exciting companies in the nuclear fusion space. Joy previously worked at SpaceX, where she worked on the Dragon 1 and co-founded both the Women's Network and LGBTQ employee interest groups. She is actively involved in STEM outreach events, including sitting on the Board of Directors for Out For Undergrad, a non-profit that helps LGBTQ students reach their full potential.
Wed Mar 10 @9:00am PT - Talk with Clowdr CEO Ed Nutting and co-founder Benjamin Pierce. RSVP here.
Clowdr’s mission is to reduce the climate impact of academic conferences, both by offering an engaging virtual alternative and by empowering others to build on its open-source platform. CEO Ed Nutting and co-founder Benjamin Pierce will give a tech talk to our community about emerging challenges in the virtual conference space — enabling rich, ongoing social interactions, supporting hybrid physical/virtual events, and maximizing accessibility. Clowdr is looking for an experienced front-end web developer for its virtual conference platform.
Wed Mar 17 @1:00pm PT - Satellites, Methane, Data, and You, with Tom Melendez of MethaneSAT. RSVP here.
Each year, oil and gas sources leak 70–80M tons of methane gas into the atmosphere. MethaneSAT, an Environmental Defense Fund subsidiary and a recipient of the Bezos Earth Fund grant, is a crucial initiative to launch a satellite to detect those leaks from space and make the data publicly available. Tom Melendez, Senior Engineering Director of Data Products at MethaneSAT, will discuss the mission of MethaneSAT, his team’s work at MethaneSAT supporting that mission, and their current and upcoming job opportunities with software and data engineering.
Tue Mar 23 @10:00am PT - Why social movements might be a gamechanger for climate protection (and how they can become successful) - Justus Baumann, Future Matters Project. RSVP here.
In rare moments in history rapid positive change happens - from one day to the next it seems that people changed their minds about what needs to happen and started acting. Social movements have been key for such changes. We will dive into why social movements are a crucial component to prevent "runaway" climate change and what they might be able to do. We will also explore what differentiates the few highly successful movements from the numerous failing movements and how FMP uses those insights to boost new climate movements.
Wed Mar 24 @5:30pm PT - Carbon CREW. RSVP here.
Learn about the Carbon CREW Project, an effective and easy program based on the scientific solutions of Project Drawdown to reduce GHGs by 50% by 2030. Guides lead participants in creating Personal Carbon Action Plans and in replicating the CREW strategy for exponential growth, peer to peer accountability and overall carbon reduction. CREW represents both the team approach and is our acronym for Carbon Reduction for Earth Wellbeing.
Tue Mar 30 @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.
Wed Mar 31 @4pm PT - Climate Justice 101 Launch Party (WoCl Climate Justice Learning group). RSVP here.
Work on Climate's Climate Justice Learning group has been writing an introductory guide to the topic of climate justice for the past few months. Come celebrate the launch of version 1! Project members will share what they learned from delving into climate justice topics and will engage the audience in discussion. All levels of climate justice knowledge welcome.
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.
🏢 Find your next job
Thank you for all the great community contributions to the #jobs channel! Like last month, companies are seeking a wide variety of different seniority across engineering (software, mechanical, chemical etc.), business, operations, marketing, communications, finance, legal, and executive roles.
Here are a few of this month's resources for jobseekers:
Grace Li wrote a guide for mechanical engineers to find climate jobs, which has tips applicable to other roles as well. Check out Breaking into Climate as a Mechanical Engineer.
Terra.do is holding their second Climate Tech Jobs Fair on March 5. Register here.
Lower Carbon Capital and Activate have both released lists of jobs at companies they support.
Several startups, three of which have previously given talks to the community, are hiring!
Afresh, tackling food waste using AI, is hiring for a variety of roles. See talk recording and notes.
Terrafuse, using AI to accelerate climate forecasting and risk models, is looking for a Principal Software Engineer. See talk recording and notes.
QuantumScape, a leading battery tech company, is hiring for over 75+ technical and non-technical roles. Check out all the roles here.
💡 Brainstorm on your project with a learning group
The Social Science learning group and the Climate Finance learning groups have begun offering pro-bono "consulting."
If you have a project that could use co-brainstorming or help with research on a topic within the learning group's scope, see Consult a Learning Group. Examples of past brainstorms include Jim Russell's Climate Nudge and Matthew Hoffmann's Taking action for sustainable cities.
Ongoing programs
📚 Learn via Learning Groups and curated resources
Join learning groups of people interested in the same climate vertical as you, and work together towards something actionable.
🌊 Ocean sequestration learning group has been taken over by new hosts: Varun Tandon and Karishma Inamdar! Join them as they work out how to re-channel the group’s skills and energy into working on ocean projects. The group now meets biweekly at Tuesday 10am PT.
🌍 Climate justice learning group is writing a Climate Justice 101 document, version 1 due to be published in March. Join us for our Launch Party on March 31!
☢️ Nuclear learning group has been having bi-weekly meetings, featuring various expert speakers. For their next speaker, they are looking for someone who knows about nuclear policy and regulation. Join #learning-group-nuclear to get involved.
🧠 Social science learning group produced a set of actionable resources. The group continues to function as a consultancy for community members on social science related topics! Join if you want to help or if you have something to ask.
💰 Climate finance learning group investigated ways to finance climate solutions. See presentations on the group page, and join if you want to help do more research!
🧙🏼 Talk to climate experts at Office Hours
Ask for advice on entering the space from climate experts at our Office Hours - simply book time on their Calendly to meet with physicists, experts in modeling, entrepreneurs, and more.
Our experts are very friendly, and help dozens of people every month!
🙃 Quick consults for climate orgs / founders
We are continuing to pilot a program providing climate orgs and founders with free consultations with expert professionals in business development, strategy, marketing, pitch writing, messaging, design, software, SEO, and more.
If you are a climate org or solo founder and would like to use this service, please contact @Richard Kim on Slack.
🤖 Search community members by interest
A frequent request on #need-help and #looking-for-buddies is "Hey, are there any people here interested in X?"
Usually, there are! And you can find them 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.
We are beginning to develop an experimental Slack bot that will proactively connect you with people and programs relevant to your requests.
Want to help? Send feedback or requests to get involved to @Richard Kim.
🚀 Monthly survey: Paths into climate
In a monthly tradition, please help us understand successful paths into working on climate by taking this 2-question survey!
We are looking for interesting ways to interpret the data! If you're a data visualization nerd and want to play with it, chime in on this thread.