After our yearly celebration event, our Year in Review presentation and recording are now public! 🎉
Why CAT remains important
Climate action at work is getting more difficult. Waves of tech layoffs, pressures to adopt genAI, rising cloud emissions, and the politicization of climate action are increasing the risk for tech workers to take climate action. All the while, our our planet’s vital signs are flashing red.
We need safe spaces outside of work to support each other in climate action. CAT aims to provide just that. Learn more about our Theory of Change.
Highlights of 2024
Our community is alive and well and enabling connections
We passed 10k members on Slack this year and our weekly active members range between 300-500 members. Our most active channels are our #3-questions-and-ideas, #share-your-work, and #greener-webdev channels. Learn more about our channels
Our publishing outputs are developing a shared understanding beyond our community
Our weekly newsletters go out to over 10k subscribers and have a regular open rate of about 50%. This year the newsletters included community news, external events, podcasts, news highlights, and job listings. Subscribe here | View archive
Our mini grants enable member-led projects that spread and deepen the climate & tech conversation
Mini grants allow us to give small amounts of money to community projects that align with our Theory of Change. This program is made possible through donations via OpenCollective. This year three projects were completed: 1️⃣ GreenOps survey results, 2️⃣ CAT Hackathon in Switzerland, 3️⃣ Generative AI Exploratorium
We help our members learn, connect with others, and take action at work and in the wider industry
Taking action can take many forms and our members shared what they were up to in 2024 in our member 🐾 PAWS (Projects, Actions, Wins, and Stuff we learned at CAT) presentation.
📣 Shout-outs
We are a 100% volunteer-run community and we couldn’t do this work without our volunteers. A big thank you to Hannah Smith, Alja Isaković, Andrea Magnorsky, Brett Duboff, Elisa Escapa, Łukasz Mastalerz, Claire Thornewill, Owen Rogers, Tom Kennes, Aïda Cissé, Caroline Schneider, Nat Darke, Clare Tomassian, Ben Tongue, Dan Robinson, Gaël Duez, Evan Hahn, Mobolaji Ladega, Nicola Bonotto, Irene Lily, April Bates, and any other CATs who volunteered at events, or throughout the year.
And a big thank you to those who supported us financially this year with recurring or one-off donations via Open Collective. Your donations pay for the software we use (e.g. Zoom for events) as well as our mini grants (see this slide).
Goals for 2025
- Keep supporting things that work: With the help of our volunteers, we want to continue enabling connection through Slack and developing a shared understanding with our newsletter, website, blog, and our knowledge base Outline.
- Enable more member projects with mini grants: We’d like to support more projects that help tech workers understand their levers for change, green their craft, speak up, and advocate & influence. We captured some project ideas here and we’d love to hear what you come up with!
- Implement CAT restructure: We want to establish an assembly to enable more community decision making and participation and we’re also looking to fill our Comms organizer role.
Help us achieve our goals in 2025
🌱 Move from dormant seed to active sprout with these easy actions
- Become an active community member by…
- …starting and/or contributing to conversations on Slack and at events
- …connecting to other CATs for meaningful dialogue or collaboration
- …sharing knowledge, your lived experience, and/or resources
- …highlighting any Community Guideline or Code of Conduct violations
- …taking climate action in your role (be that through greening your craft, speaking up, or advocating and influencing) and sharing back with the community
- …sharing ideas for improving the community in #6-cat-community-feedback
- Donate via Open Collective
- Give feedback and share ideas for improving the community in our member survey