MCJ Community Roundtable & Preview of Our 2022 Annual Survey Insights

+ weekly climate art, community highlights, jobs and events!

Aug 09, 2022

Hi all,

Leone here, MCJ’s new(-ish) Community Lead. If we haven’t met yet - a huge HELLO! Over the past few weeks, nearly 300 MCJ members have taken a few minutes to tell us more about themselves in the MCJ Annual Survey - equalling ~12% of the total community. Thank you to those who participated!

More than a year ago, MCJ community members started a project to better understand the makeup of the community itself: who is in it, what are their needs, and how diverse is the space that we’ve created. This project was driven by many factors, of which a key one was ensuring that as the community grows we keep in mind MCJ’s mission: breaking down knowledge silos to accelerate climate solutions. We know that we can only do this effectively if we have a diverse range of voices and perspectives in our ecosystem – that is limited in a community that has been majority male identifying and white. Through interviews and our first ever annual insights survey we learned some key areas of improvement: we need to have better onboarding, instigate more member to member connections, increase the cadence of MCJ events – and underpinning all of these is ensuring that the community is more inclusive and diverse.

This year’s Annual Survey both reports on our progress over the past 12 months, and gives us insight to fuel the next 12 months of learning and growth on our journey. Sticking true to MCJ core values, and in the spirit of transparency, we want to share these results with you.

First, let’s take a look back. What have we focused on over the last year?

We’ve prioritised and invested in creating moments for 1:1 connections. Our aim? To help support networking and cross-sector understanding. This has been via our Lunch Roulette Virtual Coffees, and our Interest Based Coffee Chats.
We’ve focused on a more personalised onboarding experience. Every new MCJ member gets a tailored welcome, and is screened closely for our core requirements: optimism, determination, ambition to tackle the problem, and an inclusive and collaborative spirit.
We’ve expanded, and become more diverse, as a team. It was a top priority for the MCJ team to become more diverse ourselves. Since the start of 2022, the team has welcomed four new team members - myself, Jenn (Content Lead) and Yin (Partner) as well as our Artist-in-Residence, Nicole.

With this in mind, here are some high level takeaways from our Annual Survey:

Net Promoter Score (NPS) increased 14 points – from 40 to 54 between Q2 of last year and this year.
Non-male identifying respondents increased from 27.3% to 32.6%. There’s a long way to go, but this is an improvement on last year.
Racial Ethic identity still remains skewed ‘white’ at 78% vs. 76% YoY.
Respondents who are ‘entrepreneurs and/or work at startups’ dropped from 49.3% to 43% YoY, whilst respondents who ‘help invest in companies’ increased from 18.9% to 21.6% YoY.

Net Promoter Score (NPS) is an indicator of how much members love the community and feel like they get value from it. ‘Value’ looks different from one member to the next, so we’re excited to see our NPS score come in significantly higher than last year considering our growth to 2,500+ members.

Other results we’re watching closely include our Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) metrics. We’re really happy to see an increase in our non-male identifying respondents. However, we have more work to do to promote diversity in the ethnic identities found within the MCJ community, as respondents remained mostly ‘white’, with small increases in East Asian and Multiracial ethnicities represented.

We’re aware there’s a long way to go, and so we are being really intentional as to how we’ll move forward. Outside of the MCJ community, we’re leaning into being more transparent with where we invest our capital, and we’re investing more time into featuring historically excluded voices in our content pipeline too. The conversation doesn’t end here - you’ll see a standalone report on MCJ’s DEI efforts in coming months.

Since the beginning, we’ve committed to learning in public and co-building this community with our members. We'd love to chat through our learnings from the MCJ Annual Survey in more detail and invite you to share your thoughts via an MCJ Community Roundtable on Thursday 1st September. Interested? Register here to attend. If you have any questions ahead of time, please don’t hesitate to reach out in the MCJ slack.

Thanks, as always!

Leone, and the MCJ team.

Wins of the Week

Spotlighting our incredible MCJ community members.

3️⃣2️⃣ new faces joined the MCJ community! A HUGE welcome to some more amazing individuals, we’re so happy to have you.

👏 S/O to @Ilan Gur on his new role to head up the Advanced Research and Invention Agency – the UK’s new, independent science funding body.

✍️ The Draw-down

Weekly climate art by our MCJ Artist-in-Residence, Nicole Kelner.

🍿 The Leanback

Learn about Coreshell this week with Pique Action’s mini-documentaries.

🎙My Climate Journey Podcast

🤝 After a few spats on Twitter, Jason sat down with Ketan Joshi, a writer, data analyst and consultant working in climate and energy. Despite what appeared to be opposing views around climate, this episode sheds light on an important lesson about the polarization of social media platforms.

🧬 Cody caught up with Jacob Nathan from Epoch Biodesign about their solution to the plastic problem and how they plan to leverage modern compute power to unlock biological innovations in the future.

Listen Now

✨ Highlights

⚡️ We’re hosting a MCJ AMA with our latest pod guest, Benji Backer, Founder and President of the American Conservation Coalition (ACC). ACC is a Right-of-center environmental organization Benji started in 2017 while in college. Check out #c-mcj-ama to submit your questions.

💥 Reminder for this Thursday’s MCJ Welcome Call! New + not so new MCJ’ers welcome!

👩‍💻 Climate Jobs

For more open positions, check out the #j-climatejobs channel in MCJ Slack as well as past newsletters.

Artyc is hiring a Mechanical Engineer to help decarbonize cold chain logistics. (Bay Area, CA)
bluemethane is looking for a Chief of Staff to join their efforts in developing technology to capture methane from water. (London, UK)
Breakthrough Energy has an open Manager, Government Relations role to support innovations that will lead the world to net-zero emissions. (Washington, DC)
Carbon Ridge is hiring a Lead Marine Engineer to help their carbon capture technology for maritime shipping. (Remote)
Charm Industrial is hiring a Head of Finance to join their carbon removal efforts. (San Francisco, CA)
Clean Energy Ventures is expanding with several open investment-track roles to support early-stage climate tech. (Hybrid/Boston, MA)
Deep Science Ventures has several opportunities with their portfolio companies for those interested in being early stage or a founder. (Various)
Heirloom is hiring their first Frontend Software Engineer to guide the overall vision and execution of how people interact with their carbon removal systems. (San Francisco, CA)
Lumen Energy is searching for a Customer Success Manager to help automate clean energy deployment. (US/Remote)
Odyssey Energy Solutions is hiring a Vice President of Engineering (open to CTO) lead the company in developing a technology platform to scale distributed energy globally. (Flexible, East Coast/European time zone preferred)
OhmConnect is hiring a Senior Software Engineer to create a world class solution that reimagines how people use energy. (Remote)
PosiGen has several open roles, including Electricians, Customer Communications Specialist, Sales Reps, and more to join their solar efforts. (New Orleans, Springfield (MA), Bridgeport (CT), and Philadelphia)
Yardstick is looking for a VP/Head of Software to help fight climate change with soil. (Remote)

🗓 Events

For more climate events, check out the #c-events channel in MCJ Slack.

MCJ August Social (London, 8/15)
MCJ Minneapolis Meetup (8/16)
East Bay MCJ Collective Meal (Oakland, 8/23)
SOSV Climate Tech Summit (Virtual & Free, 10/25-10/26)

Climate Voices is a free weekly email curating news, jobs, My Climate Journey podcast episodes, and other noteworthy happenings in the MCJ member community.

💭 If you have feedback or items you’d like to include, feel free to reach out.

🌳 If you’d like to become an MCJ community member, apply today.