How did the Climatebase Fellowship come to be?

The world’s first Climate Career Fair. 600 people. 24 employers. All in one room in downtown San Francisco. That’s where the Climatebase story began in May 2019, when we gathered a room full of talented people eager to work on solving the climate crisis.

New goal: get more people working on climate. The success of the Climate Career Fair inspired us to scale our impact by launching an online platform with the same goal: to mobilize talent to work on climate solutions.

We founded and launched Climatebase.org in June 2020, and it has since grown into the world’s leading platform for climate careers. Our platform now helps people submit around one million job applications each year to thousands of employers, and our Climatebase Weekly newsletter reaches a community of over 150,000 subscribers.

But we saw a gap. Employers wanted to hire mission-driven talent, and talented people wanted to work on climate, yet many didn’t know where to start. They needed three things that are hard to build alone: accelerated, industry-relevant knowledge; a meaningful professional network; and real-world experience gained through structure and support.

That’s why we launched the Climatebase Fellowship in 2022 — a program designed to help mission-driven professionals accelerate their climate careers by combining a 12-week cohort with year-round community membership.

Across nine cohorts so far, we’ve welcomed 4,000+ Fellows from a pool of 20,000+ applicants. Along the way, 630+ guest speakers (founders, scientists, activists, investors, and more) have joined us, and Fellows have launched 650+ Capstone Projects ranging from startups and research reports to media initiatives and nonprofits.