Climate communities

For folks looking to become more climate-conscious with their business, there are some amazing free communities that offer support, guidance, mentoring, training, recruitment help, and lots more.

However, for us self-employed folks there’s a pretty large gap, at least in the communities I’ve come across.

The big communities I’m aware of are:

• Terra.do – a broad learning platform covering everything from setting up a regenerative farm, to angel investing in climate tech, to decarbonising, and many, many more courses on all things work + climate
• WorkonClimate.org – a huge Slack community of 30k+ members consisting of climate-tech founders, climate-conscious companies looking for talent, newbies looking for help and guidance, and various other mentors and experts running workshops, training… lots of great stuff
• WorkforClimate.com – a movement, training platform and job board intent on getting employees to ignite climate transformation from within organisations

These are amazing communities with big, powerful missions. I’ve been part of all 3 for many years.

But as a soloist, each one feels a bit like wearing someone else’s clothes that don’t quite fit.

The pattern I see is that they’re geared towards big businesses and their employees, so all of the related learnings, workshops, and advice either applies to them quite specifically.

Very little for the self-employed folks: the big business and start-up stuff is far too complex and often irrelevant to a soloist; and the employee resources are sometimes relevant, but again, they just don’t quite fit someone who’s not inside an organisation.

“Soloists” is a smaller pool of people, and their relative impact on climate issues probably also seems smaller.

But when you consider this:

…bringing the number of small business in [Australia] to 2.4 million. Of this total, 1.5 million are sole traders.

insidesmallbusiness.com.au

And this:

The number of sole proprietors filing 2020 returns (in the U.S.) was 28.4 million individuals.

bigideasforsmallbusiness.com

And this:

There are approximately 27.66 million self-employed people working in the European Union, as of 2022.

statista.com

That’s a significant pool of people without dedicated resources, mentoring, guidance or training to aid their climate transition.

I’m certain my list of online communities is incomplete, so if you know of other communities that cater to soloists more than those I’ve listed, I’d reeeeeally love to know about them 🙏