Our Strategy: Building Green Workforce and Innovation Ecosystems

Last year we published Work on Climate Theory of Change: A Roadmap to Making Climate Work Mainstream. In this post we want to share the crisper, more focused, more pragmatic shape that it has taken today, based on what we learned from our efforts in the past years.

What problem are we solving?

The green economy is quite different from today’s economy — in the new economy, hundreds of millions of people will be using different skills to work on different things. It is a massively large and complex change that can be compared to the Industrial Revolution or to the invention of electricity.

Executing the green transition requires solving hundreds of different workforce and innovation challenges, affecting hundreds of millions of people: talent shortages in specific roles, misaligned career incentives, lack of diversity, lack of pathways to use one’s talent, lacking or inequitable early-stage founder support, the wrong solutions being built due to key groups being not included, and so on.

Every one of these challenges is far too large and complex for any organization to solve alone. Solving each challenge requires a full-stack ecosystem of organizations and individuals, from schools and government agencies to accelerators and industry bodies, representing everyone, and working together.

Yet, the workforce and innovation ecosystems to support the green transition largely do not exist today.

What is our contribution to solving the problem?

Work On Climate builds the workforce and innovation ecosystems needed for the green transition to succeed.

The most important ecosystem we have created so far is our Community, which supports and connects individuals actively working or seeking to work in climate. Our community has been incredibly successful and is at the center of all our work. However, many more ecosystems are needed to build the green economy.

Now we are building two more ecosystems:

• STEM talent pipeline: Climate solutions such as energy storage and alternative materials are bottlenecked by availability of advanced-degree STEM talent. Our Working Group on Advanced STEM in Cleantech is an ecosystem of 30+ stakeholders, including major schools, government agencies, professional associations, startups, and community organizations, united around solving this issue in NY and NJ.
• AI and Energy Innovation: AI has the potential to address 5-10% of global emissions, and the alarming growth of energy needs of AI vendors is a strong driver for clean energy deployment. We started by building our program for founders, providing both general founder support in our community and tailored support for early-stage AI founders in the Energy space. Next, we are recruiting additional stakeholders to assemble a full-stack innovation pipeline for this sector, including US government agencies, AI companies, domain experts, research organizations, corporates, accelerators, investors, and others.

What is our roadmap and our endgame?

Let us put this work in the context of our overall roadmap:

• Stage 1: Community — we will continue to support the community and put it at the center of all our work!
• Stage 2 (we are here): Ecosystem pilots. We partner with other organizations to create workforce and innovation ecosystem pilots unblocking climate solutions, in collaboration with our Community. They allow us to build a collection of repeatable case studies and strengthen the link between our Community and wider ecosystems.
  • Stage 2.1: Scaling. As pilots progress, we can pursue larger scale on the same problem (e.g., scaling the STEM initiative to other states), or similar problems (e.g., creating an innovation ecosystem around a different sector).
• Stage 3: Coalition. As we bring progressively larger stakeholders into the green workforce and innovation ecosystem, we effectively build a community of organizations engaged in such work. Once we reach a critical mass, we will incorporate it as the Climate Workforce Coalition.

The Coalition is the endgame, and it will enable the green workforce transition at large. Here’s how.

As the green economy develops, more and more general workforce/innovation stakeholders will feel that the time has come for them, too, to be part of the green transition, but they may need extra support.

The Coalition will be the place they can turn to: offering a community of peers, a body of resources and best practices to draw on, and activities and services to help facilitate their learning and collaboration. Just like Work On Climate’s community does so today for individuals!

How to get involved?

Help fund our work. We are a non-profit mostly funded by individuals like you who “get it”, and a very small number of forward-thinking institutional grantmakers, such as the Cisco Foundation and Invest In Our Future.

If you’re ready to give, please contribute here! You can also email me at eugene@workonclimate.org to get to know us more before making a larger gift (we can also accept donations via appreciated stock and DAFs) or if you represent an institutional grantmaker.

Partner on an ecosystem challenge. If you represent a major stakeholder organization, agency, or grantmaker, and your progress is blocked by a systemic green workforce or innovation challenge that doesn’t make sense for your organization to solve alone, email coalition-interest@workonclimate.org — let’s see if we can build something together!