Work on Climate (Sep 2021): Looking back on a year of growth

The positive, action-oriented community at workonclimate.org

Welcome to the September 2021 newsletter of Work on Climate. Add your climate friends to our community to keep making it stronger! [Subscribe and read past newsletters]

🎂 A year of growth

It is humbling and inspiring see how far our community has grown since we published our first newsletter So, you want to work on climate? a year ago in September.

We are so energized by your engagement and we are excited for the impact we are creating together. And this is only the beginning! Let us celebrate a few of our accomplishments since then.

⭐ Grew our community member base from 8 to 3600+ engaged people

⭐ Hosted over 38 events with climate companies (See ⏯️ Past Events and 🎥 YouTube)

⭐ Dozens of members have found climate roles and shared their success at #i-got-a-job and #share-your-path!

⭐ Community members volunteered hundreds of hours for 🙃 quick consults and 🧙🏼 office hours to help others learn about the space.

⭐ We created 💎 14 starter packs to help you learn about different climate topics.

⭐ We filed for 501(c)(3) nonprofit status to ensure the growth of our programs for many years to come (share your ideas for the community in #community-meta).

🙏🏼 A thank you to our sponsors

We would like to say a special thank you to Dan Fitzgerald and ReGen Ventures who have stepped up to help support Work on Climate! In their own words, ReGen believes we are the collective stewards of our planet's revival and partners with the audacious founders creating generation-defining companies that will restore our planet.

We are also very grateful to members of our community who are supporting us on Patreon. If you are interested in sponsoring Work on Climate, contact @Cassandra Xia or @Jeremy B on Slack.

❄️ Subcommunity updates

WoCl has a vibrant collection of subcommunities for people in certain roles or interested in certain branches of climate - see if one of them feels like home to you!

We are excited to see a number of new subcommunities spring up:

• #recruiters: @Cody Voellinger has begun congregating recruiters to use their powers for funneling talent into climate tech.

• #circular-economy: @Matt Senesky and @Maddy Brancaccio are organizing a subcommunity around circular economy topics.

• #academics: Several people have shared stories of their transition into climate tech as academics on this channel started by @Grace Lindsay.

• #pms: An action-oriented PM community that hosts monthly events along with promoting regular PM-climate discussions (reach out to @Fady for questions, ideas, or feedback).

And here's what some of our other subcommunities have been up to:

• #learning-group-ocean with @Varun Tandon hosted a widely attended session on Carbon Sequestration with Seagrass. In early Sep expect a session with Scoot Science on Ocean / Climate and Data Science - follow the channel for details!

• #learning-group-regen-ag, led by @Josh Shaeffer, is a year old 🎂 and has grown to 264 participants while keeping regular biweekly calls with 10-20 people attending.

• CTAN peer mentorship program signed up 48 participants and is hosting Max Evans from Climate.ai for their Meet the Founder Q&A.

Do you want to run a subcommunity on WoCl? We want to support you with WoCl resources, visibility, and best practices - contact @Fady Azmy or @Eugene Kirpichov.

🥳 September events

Past events

Missed an event? Find recordings and notes at ⏯️ Past Events and follow our 🎥 YouTube channel! Here are some highlights from August's events:

• Q/A with Meryl Breidbart, founder of Chirps and investor at At One Ventures (video, notes)

• Alternative Proteins with the Good Food Institute (video)

• Interview with Alexis Plair, Product Manager @ Tesla (video, notes)

• Managing Yourself in a Climate Crisis with Melissa Niles (resources) brought to us by @Kamille Johnson and @Ethan Roday

🗓️ Add the WoCl calendar so you don't miss upcoming events!

Upcoming events

Thu Sept 2 @2pm PT - 📣 Chat with WoCl Co-Founder Cassandra Xia. Join on Clubhouse.

With Lilly Tong and Cassandra Xia — Come by and meet one of our amazing co-founders, Cassandra Xia - ex-Google engineer turned climate activist. Cassandra will offer tips on how to transition your career to work on climate, and more!

Tue Sep 7 @9am PT - ❄️ Transforming the world's cooling systems with Axiom Cloud. RSVP here.

Refrigeration improvements help climate via several of the most impactful angles at the same time: energy efficiency (refrigeration accounts for 10% of global CO2 emissions), leaks of HFC gases, and food waste. Dive into how Axiom's IoT and AI technology helps solve these challenges for grocery chains!

Wed Sep 8 @5pm PT - Regen Ag Learning Group with Earthshot Labs CEO Troy Carter. RSVP here.

Earthshot Labs is building tech for ecological restoration at a planetary scale. We are creating global open-source models for forest carbon, soil carbon, water restoration, and biodiversity. LandOS is a platform for every landowner on earth to learn about the specific ecological interventions for their land, as well as access to carbon markets through automated verification to get paid for restoration.*

Mon Sept 13 @5pm PT - 👩🏼‍🌾 GHGs in Agriculture: Knowns, Unknowns, and What We Can Do About It. (RSVP link pending - follow #events-official!)

Ever wondered what the greenhouse gas impact of your dinner is? Or why we don't have barcodes with GHG impacts for individual food products? In this event, we will review the basics of GHG emissions from agriculture, the leading edge of how we're quantifying emissions, and promising strategies to change the mitigation landscape.

Wed Sept 15 @4pm PT - Building the first search engine and repository for laws on climate change: Join us and RSVP here!

What if all the world’s laws on climate existed in one place, allowing people to easily find and compare laws across countries, better understand what works and what’s feasible for countries to do, and build the evidence base to argue for better laws and policies that meaningfully address climate change? We’re creating a custom search engine and repository for global legislation to enable researchers to source and analyze legislation about climate change. We are looking for help - if you have any (even limited) experience with Python and are interested in helping create this search engine/repository, please reach out to Sierra Yit at sierrayit@gmail.com and/or join this session!

Fri Sept 24 @6pm PT - 🕹 WoCl Gaming Social. RSVP here.

Kick back and have some fun with other WoCl community members while playing some online party games via Zoom. We will choose a list of games to help us get to know each other better while having fun.

Tues Sept 28 @11am 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.

Want to host an event with us? Message @Utkarsh Vaidya or @Sam Levac-Levey on Slack!

🏢 Get a new job

🏆 Success stories: This month people on #i-got-a-job shared great news about joining Urban Footprint, Watershed, Women In Climate Tech, and VoteTripling. Post on the channel about your new role in climate and how you got it - inspire others!

#️⃣ Job channels:

• 🍰 Looking for something part-time/short-term? Hop on to #gigs.

• 💼 Full-time? We got you - #jobs, #jobs-alerts, and the all-new 🇪🇺 #jobs-alerts-europe (thanks to #europe organizers for bringing it up).

• 🏗️ Looking for a cofounder? Post on #founders!

Are you a recruiter? Climate tech needs you - join the new #recruiters channel, organized by @Cody Voellinger, to discuss how you can help!

🦄 Climate tech unicorns: Did you know there are dozens of them? HolonIQ published a List!

Some #jobs this month from organizations within our community include:

• QuantumScape is hiring for dozens of technical and business focused roles, including for a VP of Information Security, a Principal Security Engineer, and a Deep Learning expert.

• Cquest in Berlin is hiring for a Geospatial Software Engineer.

• Techstars is hiring a Climate Change EIR and an ESG Project Manager

• Myst.ai is hiring a Product Marketing Lead, a Data Scientist, and Software Engineers.

• Radiant Nuclear is hiring nuclear engineers, mechanical engineers, and material scientists.

• Yard Stick is hiring a Soil Carbon Field Manager and Soil Carbon Field Specialists.

• Third Derivative are hiring across multiple positions to support their climate accelerator.

Ongoing programs

💡 Tip: Want to get more out of the WoCl community? If you introduce yourself on #introductions we guarantee that we will respond to you and point you to useful resources or people!

🎯 Looking for additional resources?

Check out 🗺️ WoCl How To to find other WoCl tools helpful to you as a jobseeker, climate employer, or startup founder. For example:

• 💡 Did you know that, as a founder, you can get a quick consult with community experts on topics such as tech, marketing, design, and others?

• 💡 Did you know that you can find people interested in a given topic using Slack Search, especially when searching #introductions? E.g. try searching for ‘circular in:#introductions.’ Feel free to DM people - just follow the etiquette on cold reach-outs!

🧙🏼 Learn from climate experts at Office Hours

Get advice from friendly climate experts at our Office Hours - simply book time on their Calendly. Here are some testimonials from community members!

• I recently had an office hours chat with @Christopher Round about opportunities in tech vs politics/policy and the intersection between the two. He really helped me understand what I might be able to make a significant, marginal difference. [Editor's note: This person later got a job at the intersection of tech and policy - see #i-got-a-job!]

• I had a good office-hours chat with @Patrick Sheehan recently. I learned, among other things, that machine learning skills are not required for most software development jobs in the climate sector. That's reassuring, since I have no ML training or experience! I'm still really curious to learn ML though :)

📚 Learning groups - Work on a climate vertical

Join learning groups of people interested in the same climate vertical as you, and work together towards something actionable. We currently have learning groups on climate finance, food waste, regenerative agriculture, ocean sequestration, construction, and nuclear. Some learning groups meet in person every other week, and others just exist on Slack channels. Join a learning group on Slack by browsing channels that begin with the "#learning-group-" prefix.

💎 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!

💝 Want to help WoCl?

• As a fully volunteer-run community, we are always looking for people to help! Message @Eugene Kirpichov on Slack if you're the sort of person who wants to help build our community!

Follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn, or Clubhouse for notifications about new events!

👋 We are a non-profit run entirely by volunteers but we do incur software expenses to support our programming. Please consider supporting us on Patreon. Interested in helping provide funding for a specific program or WoCl staff? Reach out to @Cassandra Xia or @Jeremy B on Slack to discuss sponsoring a WoCl program, employee, or intern!