Work on Climate (Nov 2020) — ready for part-time or full-time work? Sign up to be matched
Welcome to the November 2020 Work On Climate newsletter! (archive)
We are so excited that you have made the commitment to meaningful climate action. Since the last newsletter, we have almost tripled - to over 300 members. All of our growth so far has been by word of mouth: add your friends to keep making our community stronger!
📣 Announcements
New look for workonclimate.org
We just shipped a shiny new workonclimate.org website that showcases all the new programs we have. This new site was designed by the wonderful @Eva Illescas.
Climate Fellows and Climate CTO
Work on Climate is excited to announce two new matchmaking initiatives.
climatefellows.org — matches you with part-time work at climate organizations (both paid and volunteer). Our hope is that this program will allow you to try out climate work without needing to leave your current job.
climatecto.com — matches you with early stage climate startups looking for a CTO. We've run into many early startups who have climate expertise, but need a traditional technical founder.
Sign up at the respective websites if you're interested! Are there any other matchmaking programs that you think should exist? Would you use either of these yourself? Message @Cassandra Xia on Slack with feedback.
🧙🏼 Chat with experts
9 amazing climate experts are offering to help community members transition into climate.
This is a great way to learn, ask for 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.
🎓 Study together
Community Learning Groups have started. Each group researches a topic and produces a report with an overview of the topic and actionable opportunities in it.
🧠 Social science learning group - what makes us care about climate or behave in climate-friendly ways? What makes us switch careers? How does the climate threat affect our well-being?
👩🌾 Regenerative agriculture learning group - are there better ways to farm? Soil carbon capture? Managed grazing? Are these legit, or not?
🌊 Marine sequestration learning group - the ocean holds enormous potential for sequestering carbon, but marine solutions are little-known and underfunded. Let us study this area together and come up with tangible promising ideas!
🌍 Climate justice learning group - intimidated by climate justice but know that you want to know more? Let's figure out it out together! Starting to form now!
Join a learning group or start a new one on this thread!
🥳 Attend events
We have held fascinating Q&A sessions with experts working on plant-based meat (Impossible Foods), geoengineering via increasing the Earth's albedo (Reflective Earth), climate action in India (Arun Krishnamurthy), and soil carbon capture via regenerative agriculture (Indigo Ag).
Access recordings/notes at Past Events, and see upcoming events on the calendar and on #events.
🗓️ Thu Oct 29 @10am PT - Elio / Kami Krista - Q&A. RSVP here.
This event is an open-ended Q&A session with Kami Krista, founder and CEO at Elio, and also a student on-leave at Harvard. The goal of Elio is to establish a central coordinating body for effective climate action that prioritizes actions, as well as manages and dynamically monitors their implementation for governments, corporations and funding agencies to deploy resources efficiently and maximize our chances of avoiding catastrophic climate change.
🗓️ Thu Oct 29 @2pm PT - Guided Brainstorm Session: Drones and Climate. RSVP here.
Drones can gather immense amounts of data that can be used to combat climate change. From firefighting to agriculture, we're increasingly seeing more innovative deployments of drones for climate. Join us for an exciting brainstorming session led by mechanical engineer Sam Levac-Levey. Sam has previously worked at SpaceX, Tesla, Lilium aviation, for drone company SkySquirrel, and more.
🗓️ Mon Nov 2 @1pm PT - Q&A Session with Terrafuse AI. RSVP here.
At Terrafuse our mission is to provide actionable climate intelligence for the entire planet. We are building an AI platform that delivers accurate and granular forecasts of climate and weather risk at a fraction of the cost of traditional computational models. We will give a brief overview of Terrafuse, the team, our technology and mission and then open the discussion to questions.
🗓️ Thu Nov 5 @5pm PT - Hal Harvey Tedsday. RSVP here.
Every Tedsday, a community member hosts a discussion about a short (<15 min) TED Talk or other video that has profoundly impacted or inspired them. This Tedsday’s video was proposed by Cassandra Xia; “Hal Harvey can give you a dose of hope. This video shows how one person can make a difference in climate policy if they are hyper strategic.”
🗓️ Thu Nov 12 @5:30pm PT - Open Mic. RSVP here.
Have something to share about your journey in working on climate? This is an open mic event where anyone can speak their mind!
🗓️ Wed Nov 19 @6:00pm PT - Q&A Session with Terra.do (Kamal Kapadia). RSVP here.
Terra.do is an online climate school. Their mission is to get 100 million people working to solve climate change by 2030. Kamal is happy to chat about career transitions, the climate careers landscape, the joys and challenges of online climate education, what this all means for you, and anything else climate-related that comes up!
🗓️ Thu Nov 26 @2:00pm PT - Guided Brainstorm - Food Waste. RSVP here.
According to Project Drawdown, reducing food waste is the single most impactful action that we can take towards mitigating climate change! Sam Levac-Levey will lead the group in thinking through applications for reducing food waste, using a design thinking process. We encourage participation by community members of all knowledge levels!
🧪 Volunteer at climate nonprofits
Hop on #dip-your-toes for opportunities to get involved with climate projects via short-term, part-time, or volunteering work!
Reflective Earth, a nonprofit working to reduce albedo of the Earth by making man-made surfaces more reflective, has two projects. Project 1: Making Reflective Roofs (needs UI designers and web developers). Project 2: Reflectivity Optimization Map (needs PMs, SWEs, data scientists) Read/watch Michel Gelobter's Q&A under Past Events for more context and message @Eugene Kirpichov on Slack, if interested.
Project Drawdown is looking for a volunteer web developer. To get involved, talk to Denton Gentry, a volunteer who led their computational climate modeling at Office Hours. Or, message @Sam Levac-Levey on Slack.
ClimateScience, is looking for a volunteer web developer. ClimateScience is a registered UK charity providing free educational resources on solutions to climate change to schools and individuals, with 140 contributing volunteers and a few hundred community managers around the world. Message founder @Eric Steinberger on Slack, if interested.
WORLD Policy Center is the largest quantitative center examining law & policy in all 193 countries. They are looking for a full-stack web developer to work with them on creating the first public sites with information on global rights & legislation on climate and reproductive health. Message @Jeremy Brewer on Slack, if interested.
Oceana is one of the world’s oldest and largest nonprofits protecting the oceans. They are looking for an experienced marketer or data scientist to help them better engage their millions of followers to take action. Message @Jeremy Brewer on Slack, if interested.
🏫 Climate school
For a deeper immersion into studying climate change, check out Terra.do, a 12-week online climate bootcamp and community. Applications are open for their core program, Climate Change: Learning for Action, which launches November 15. This is a paid program; WoC members can receive 25% off using "WoC" as a discount code. Needs-based scholarships are also available. Talk to the founders @Kamal Kapadia and @Anshuman Bapna on Slack.
🏢 Find a full-time job
Looking for a job in climate? Here are two things you can do:
Climate Job Fair
You can meet dozens of climate employers in a 1:1 setting at the free Climate Job Fair organized by terra.do on November 13! Sign up ahead of time to connect with recruiters and circulate your resume!
Fresh postings on #jobs
We have partnered with Climatebase to deliver alerts when companies post new jobs. You can find those and other opportunities on our #jobs channel on Slack.
Here are some other highlighted jobs from community members:
@Michael Lee writes
Hi all. Michael here from Octopus Energy. We are the rare Climate-tech / Energy-tech unicorn. Just several years old and have enabled millions of people to switch to renewable energy globally while saving money. All because of a proprietary tech platform. We're hiring all across our team. Engineers, designers, product, etc. We're a mobile-centric product and looking to bring more SV best practices on user experience to simplify the complexity of managing and optimizing EVs, storage, solar, etc. Check out our job listings. If you don't see anything that fit's your specialty, send me a note as we will be hiring for many more roles soon. We have a great score on glassdoor and our #1 metric is customer NPS. https://octopus.energy/careers/
@Michael Legett writes
Ecosystem Services Market Consortium – a carbon market working in the ag space is hiring for numerous roles: https://ecosystemservicesmarket.org/job-opportunities
🧘🏼 Community projects
New efforts are frequently proposed on #community-meta - see if you can help some of them:
@Tammy Tseng is leading a group to write an "Absolute beginners’ guide to getting a job in climate as a data scientist." Join in on this thread!
User profiles - How can we understand who is in our community? You can search #introductions, but we will soon hit the limit of our Slack free plan. Is there a better way?
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?
Work On Climate is looking for people wishing to help run the community - see what we're looking for here and message @Eugene Kirpichov if you want to get involved!
🚀 What are you doing this month?
People's paths to a career in climate are different - we would like to understand what successful paths look like and how the community is facilitating them.
Please take this 2-minute survey to share your steps this month!