Our Story

Eugene and Cass had rewarding and fulfilling careers as machine learning engineers at Google. As they learned about climate change, they could no longer justify working on anything else – in the summer of 2020 they quit Google together, with no backup plan, to focus on finding their place in climate.

Through Eugene’s viral goodbye post they met thousands of others in the same boat, and together with the third co-founder Eva Illescas, decided to start a community to help people find climate jobs: Work On Climate was born.

Work on Climate quickly built the world’s largest and most successful community of its sort – with tens of thousands of members around the globe, thousands of whom have found climate jobs and started companies.

We’re just getting started: our goal is to connect everyone with purposeful work that heals the planet, getting hundreds of millions of people to contribute their talent to fixing climate change. That’s what we’re working on now.

Our Mission

We are helping humanity build the workforce it needs to solve climate change equitably and justly.

Our goal is to make climate work mainstream in the talent ecosystem, empowering hundreds of millions of people everywhere in the workforce with the skills and support they need to use their talents for building climate solutions.

Imagine learning about climate solutions in every class you take, meeting climate companies at every conference you attend, and seeing climate work highlighted in every job board you browse.

This is the movement we’re building at Work on Climate – a movement to make climate work mainstream.

Meet the Team

Board and Co-founders

Eugene Kirpichov

Co-founder and Executive Director

Jeremy Brewer

Chair

Sam Levac-Levey

Vice Chair

Eva Illescas

Co-Founder and Board Member

Marie Herring

Treasurer

Richard Kim

Secretary

Cassandra Xia

Original co-founder

Staff

Nicole Sturzenberger

Director of Fundraising

Inbal Nachman

Managing Director, Programs & Communications

Volunteers

Work On Climate has a capable team of 60+ people donating their time, including seasoned executives and founders, employees of Fortune 500 companies, and others who are helping push the organization forward. 

You don’t need to have a climate background to volunteer with us: we need a variety of skills in areas such as events, marketing, business development, research, data analytics, and more. If there’s another area in which you think you can make an impact, don’t hesitate to share how you’d like to contribute.

Join us in building a climate-positive, harmonious, and equitable future.

Lo Bukowski 

Bryan White

Anastasia Lopukhin

Isabel O’Meara

Sophia Chung

Nikolett Berki

David Pearl

Alec Sosnowski

Drew Wilkinson

Clara Mansilha

Madeline Zhu

Aurelia Heitz

Sarah Fowler

Chi Nguyen

Kirsten Konopnicki

Nikki Tetreault 

Julia Pasek

Yishan Han

Xanthe Travlos

Vanya Chun Ling Hsu

Moe Hay Mar Kaung

Audrey Allison

Juliana Linder

Victoire Dumont

Erica Michelson

Priyanka Erande

Mostafa Elkady

Mary Gu

Kenzie Jacobs

Chaehyun Baek

Aidan Hudson-Lapore

Sara Singh

Angela MacDonald

Amelia Oon

Stephanie Lau

Kavitha Bradley

Chia Tan

Brenda Medina-Maldonado

Thomas Lu

Fibinse Xavier

Utkarsh Vaidya

Joshua Stehr

Anne Spalding

Ellie Redding

Shuo Peskoe-Yang

Misha Panshenskov

Joe Lisle

Keenan Johnson

Tegan Holly

Jieyu Chan

Ovi Hentea

Forrest Brown

Jessica Burley

Lena Burova

Rob Chan

Shoutout to Website Contributors

Matt Stobo

Designer

Sean Stobo

Developer

Gabriel Dias

Developer

SeeSay Studio

Branding