Product & Operations

As a small organization that grew quickly and organically, many processes and documentation needed to help things run smoothly had not yet been created. None of our lists matched and documentation was scattered. As a product person with a lot of patience, cleaning everything up was actually a ton of fun.

• Volunteer Management: We checked in with all potential volunteers and tightened our team. I created robust onboarding and offboarding processes automated in gDocs, Zapier, and Notion. Systems were designed so others could manage these processes with minimal onboarding and operational load.
• Documentation: I overhauled our Notion and created a new set of workspaces divided by permission buckets to make onboarding, offboarding, and management tasks simple. I organized and created our volunteer handbook, Chapter wiki, and public documentation.
• Email Management: I created automated onboarding emails, steamlined our email lists and integrations, and untangled the product options for our complex email and product needs as a global organization with affiliated local Chapters.

Now our lists are organized, we have streamlined processes for our day-to-day operations, and robust documentation to support it.

Strategy & Management

I led strategic visioning exercises to tighten our mission, vision, theory of change, and metrics of success. Once our KPI’s were more clearly defined, I created processes to capture qualitative metrics and track quantitative metrics over the years.

We honed in on our key pillars of education and community to clarify long term planning. What is our key value? How do we best deliver it? What is possible in this current fundraising environment?

I crunched numbers and explored a number of potential pathways forward. We ideated new educational offerings under a variety of annual budgets. We did a lot of fundraising research.

Given the current fundraising climate we had to put some of these bigger visions on hold as grants and non-profit funding has dried up, but we’re not giving up on the long term for this organization. That we’ve accomplished all that we have as volunteers is impressive. Global Chapters. Multiple podcasts, research projects, and educational content. The strategic work we did laid the foundation for multiple futures.

Content & Events

I have also produced a lot of content and events as part of this work, which are written up in their own posts:

Resource Library: This is a living document. The scope of the resources are broad and systemic, with the intention of connecting designers across disciplines to the principles and industry resources needed to take that first step towards climate action at work.

Newsletter: I created the format for the new Climate Designers monthly newsletter in 2024, and have written and produced it ever since. It’s a community effort providing education, events, opportunities, and inspiration at the intersection of climate and design.

Events & Workshops: I produce local events and have given several talks as part of the Bay Area Chapter. We’ve done everything from speaker series to facilitated workshops and walking tours. Some of my favorite events are outlined in this post.