Climate Community, Part 1
And why it's more important than ever
Some of you may know that my last day at On Deck is this Friday, July 29th. I've loved starting and leading all things climate at the company ever since On Deck was just a dozen other folks and me. Building the On Deck Climate Tech (ODCT) network, being in conversation with leading climate experts, and investing in and advising fantastic companies has been a dream. Over 650+ people have come together in ODCT, and at least a couple dozen companies have come out of it (that I'm aware of!), countless people have transitioned into the climate tech space, and hundreds of millions of dollars have been raised and deployed.
After a much-needed break before my next career move, I plan to work on climate finance innovation. I'm primarily digging into super early catalytic capital, risk, and first-of-a-kind project finance. If you share these interests or know folks who do, please let me know!
Given this transition, I'm reflecting on what led me to focus on community and venture building over the last couple of years. In truth, I was looking for something like On Deck Climate Tech, couldn't find it, and ended up creating it. I knew years of working in policy, sales, and on the founding team of a tech company, as well as my stats grad education, gave me valuable skills I could put to use in the climate tech space. But I wanted to be surrounded by people with deep climate expertise so I could rapidly learn and potentially meet great cofounders.
Beyond my desire to go deep in climate, I had a broader thesis that climate change is, in many ways, a coordination problem. We need global policies to create incentives for decisive and urgent action. We also need to develop and scale the technologies that will transition our economy to a just and sustainable one.
For this to happen, experts in different, often isolated fields must sit at the same table to diagnose the problem, let alone build a solution. At this table, there must be expertise in regulatory frameworks, the investment landscape, commercializing and implementing viable and scalable business models, and complex climate science at minimum. I'll write more in a follow-up issue about how we tactically created this with ODCT (for example, an obsessive focus on the mix of expertise and diversity in each cohort). But for now, let's take a step back on other reasons why climate community is essential.
Beyond bringing experts together to diagnose and solve problems, community is fundamental in helping us feel less alone and connected to something larger than ourselves. While that's critical in every field, it's especially so in the emotionally taxing and complex climate space.
My friend Willow Defebaugh recently said, "When you just think that the climate crisis is this abstract thing that you're thinking about in isolation, of course, it's terrifying. And it is terrifying, but when you are working alongside other people, and I see, [you're] doing [your] part over here, I'm doing my part over here. We have the storytellers, we have the engineers, we have the climate scientists. We have all the different members of a functioning ecosystem who are working towards this particular goal. I think that that really does provide that sense of climate optimism."
Community is also the place where creative ingenuity is most likely to arise. Creativity is not the wisdom of the crowd but the wisdom of something in the crowd. We do our most creative work by being connected to intellectually diverse communities where we're exposed to new and different ideas every day. And, as if that's not enough, building large and diverse communities (ideally multiple that you can lean on if one falls away) makes life more fun and interesting.
I'm surer than ever that community building is core to a positive climate future. I imagine it will always be part of my work in the world, even if informally, for years to come.
Temp Check: My Favorite Recent Media
In this section of every edition, I'll share at least one non-climate piece of media that feels essential to climate work and one climate-focused piece that has changed or expanded my thinking.
🔥 Articles on Corporate Buddhism and Mindfulness:
The first article warns that corporate spirituality turns our formal work into a religion that effectively replaces community-based spirituality and our larger community engagement.
And the second article strongly argues that our global economic system eroded the public sphere enough that "the body politic ceases to be a body, but is, rather, a group of individual entrepreneurs and consumers." It sells us the message that the only real way to solve significant social problems is through personal responsibility and individual action, in the same way BP's PR firm sold the idea of a personal carbon footprint to blame individuals, not fossil fuel companies, for climate change. "If 'happiness is an inside job,' then all we have to do is be present, leave judgment behind, and ignore the larger causes of potential distress." Oof.
🔥 Another twofer: Ayana Elizabeth Johnson on "On Being" & Colette Pichon Battle on "On Being"
Ayana talks about how there cannot be another Jacques Cousteau-type charismatic leader as the face of the climate movement. "I think it's also deeply unwise to have so much dependence on one person, who could be assassinated, as we've seen in civil rights movements; who could burn out, as we've seen in environmental movements; who might just want to take a break and have a family. So I think this is a moment that calls for many leaders, because what we need is transformation in every community, in every sector of the economy, in every ecosystem, with the hundreds of climate solutions we have. So I'm…so glad that there are more and more people who are doing what I'm doing and saying these similar things."
Colette: "The head of FEMA said 'The disaster process in this country is designed for the middle class….' The laws as they are written right now are not meant for me, and they're not meant for my community, and they're not meant to help people, and they're not meant to save people, and they're not meant to do those things with the utmost humanity and dignity. They are meant to preserve a middle-class tax base, period, almost every law that we have." & "Organizing is about checking on people."