Climate Community, Part 3
Nitty Gritty Climate Community
In Part 1 of this series on climate community, I wrote about why thoughtful, outcome-oriented community can help solve climate change's coordination problem. In Part 2, I wrote about the high-level details of the first climate network I built.
In this issue, I'll share more details about goals, culture, and tactical things we did and learned to do better.
Outcome-Oriented community
In addition to the high-level, cohort-wide goals we held around stubborn optimism, bringing more people into the climate ecosystem, and accelerating our shift to a sustainable economy with new initiatives and companies, our fellows each identified specific outcomes for themselves. They all came in with different expertise and at different career stages. Given this, we needed to help fellows get specific on their individual goals and hold themselves and each other accountable. Once they did this, we could guide them on taking advantage of the fellowship to help them reach their goals and significantly impact the climate space. Common goals included deep diving into a specific climate tech space, ideating on potential businesses they'd start, finding cofounders and potential first hires, and investing in, advising, or scaling climate companies.
Our first step was ensuring each fellow had a clearly stated goal for their time in the fellowship. I ran live goal-setting workshops to help fellows envision their ideal transformation throughout the fellowship, clarify their high-level goals, design habits required to meet them, and develop a long-term plan for working with them.
Once they had a clear goal, we'd guide them to think about how to use their time in the fellowship to increase their chances of reaching that goal. Often this involved introducing them to others in the fellowship who could be helpful given complementary skill sets or shared interests.
Finally, we'd ensure our fellows had an accountability plan and partners if they wanted one.
Structure
My personal goal for fellows in ODCT was that each would build deep relationships with a handful of people they could lean on throughout their long careers and lives. Having accountability partners was one way we did this.
We also did this through mastermind groups, 1-on-1s with experts in different areas, live sessions and Q&As with leaders across the climate ecosystem, and generally providing a community that had their back on the longer, more challenging days.
The structure of the community was an 8-week fellowship with an ongoing community. We offered a buffet of programming, tools, and resources. My team supported and curated the experience, guiding fellows into shaping their unique experiences based on their desired outcomes.
We also ran an optional build sprint with facilitated ideation and building. Fellows would land on ideas, form teams, attend entrepreneurial workshops, and ultimately build climate tech MVPs, many of which have become fully fledged projects and companies today.
Learnings
Remote has profound benefits, like diversity (i.e. geographic, socioeconomic, ethnic), lower barriers to entry for events and networking, and more. But IRL is also incredibly satisfying. As the programs continued, we started offering more IRL experiences in different cities and fellows stepped up to lead events.
We offered too much programming in our first couple of iterations of the program (1-2 live events a day). It helped us cover many topics, expose fellows to fantastic folks they might not have been able to meet and learn from otherwise, and provide value to the fellows. However, it worked our small team too hard and unnecessarily added to fellow overwhelm.
Even with all the programming, it was impossible to cover every fellow's topic of interest and at the depth they wanted. Instead, we optimized for having a large and diverse enough cohort so there would be some inherent overlap in interest and expertise, knowing the best learning came from others in the cohort.
Community Culture
Beyond the tangible pieces of the program above, I focused my time and effort on the culture of my team (more to come in the next issue) and the community.
I believe that one of the most important things that made ODCT a success was building something I wanted for myself and, as a result, consistently putting myself in the fellows' shoes. We created (I hope) an inclusive, energizing, and focused culture I would want for myself. I let my quirky, sincere, and passionate parts roam free and assumed that the more myself I was, the more others would be themselves, and the better.
I shared our ideal culture verbally during kickoffs and at the beginning of meetings. Still, I mostly tried to lead by example, modeling the behavior and values I hoped to imbue into the culture. One cultural value our fellows have often mentioned being pivotal to their experience was giving two times more than the amount they'd hope to receive. When everyone does this, magic happens. And that's something our fellows and team saw firsthand.
Another was kindness. Anyone who seemed like a jerk or gave us a weird feeling during our interview process was not accepted into the fellowship. **Listening to gut feelings can sometimes lead to less diverse groups of people, but most of our interviewers were diverse themselves. Our investment in interviewing everyone, even just for 15 minutes, paid off. Out of 600+ fellows, we only had one issue with a fellow. And looking back, our admissions lead told me they almost did not accept this person given their gut feeling. Luckily, we also had clear guidelines around letting go of fellows who didn't adhere to our community guidelines as quickly and kindly as we could for the sake of the larger community.
We also emphasized iteration and experimentation. We treated the fellowship like the startup it was, constantly sharing transparently with our fellows and asking for feedback. We built the community with our fellows, visibly iterating based on feedback as quickly and well as possible. We valued their opinions and were building this for and with them. Bringing the community into the creative process made folks feel like a part of something bigger than themselves.
A final note I often share on culture creation, and creation in general, is to get clear and specific on what you want it to look like. The vision I wrote up before we started any formal cohorts in ODCT included the sort of culture I hoped we would have. And I'm both surprised and pleased with how much of the cultural and tangible pieces of the vision we built.
Outcomes
Ultimately over 650+ people came together in ODCT, as did a couple of dozen startups so far, people joining new roles, and hundreds of millions of dollars raised and deployed.
Stay tuned for this series's next and last issue covering tips on managing a remote community and team.
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.
“It’s not a terrible thing that we feel fear when faced with the unknown. It is part of being alive, something we all share. We react against the possibility of loneliness, of death, of not having anything to hold on to. Fear is a natural reaction to moving closer to the truth…Things become very clear when there is nowhere to escape.”
🔥 The Era of Climate Change Has Created a New Emotion
“Have we failed in some more personal realm? Have too many of us convinced ourselves for too long that climate change is the problem of others and that the storms will never rattle our own roof? And if we all faced our grief, would we find the collective will to take the kind of drastic action required to stanch the destruction?”