Imagine a place where the people working on some of Ontario’s most promising climate solutions get the support they need to accelerate their success and amplify their impact. This is a place where you’ll find entrepreneurs and innovators rising to the threat of climate change by building enterprises and organizations that create jobs, healthier communities, and a more resilient economy.
The Centre for Social Innovation is launching Climate Ventures – an incubation, acceleration and coworking space for climate solutions (website climateventures.org coming soon).
Climate Ventures will provide coworking, connections, coaching and training to people and companies developing and scaling products, services, campaigns and other interventions that tackle climate change.
Climate Ventures will launch with three programs:
- Agents of Change: Climate Solutions – The roots of Climate Ventures start in this accelerator that supported 18 early-stage social enterprises over 12 months with coaching, training, peer support, impact measurement, workspace and access to capital, and we’re doing it all over again with 18 new enterprises. You can meet the alumni and see their results here, and meet the 2018 cohort here.
- Cleantech – We have launched applications for a new fellowship for 20 cleantech entrepreneurs that will receive workspace, coaching, advisory services, impact measurement support, and connections to leaders, funders and investors.
- Climate Pilots – In partnership with MIT’s Climate CoLab we have launched a competition to select and support pilots that help Ontario’s small and medium enterprises reduce GHGs while saving money. Often ignored by climate action plans, this sector’s GHG emissions are equivalent to Canada’s combined annual transportation emissions—including all of the nation’s cars, trucks, trains, domestic aircraft and ships.
The dedicated space in our building at 192 Spadina Avenue in Toronto will open its doors in September. Startups will be able to apply to become members of Climate Ventures to access workspace and a suite of CSI membership benefits. Stay tuned for our website launch and application process.
Beyond the space and its programs, Climate Ventures is an opportunity for us to go deeper to respond to the many ways in which climate change and climate justice intersects with the social and environmental challenges our members tackle each and every day. Ultimately, we see Climate Ventures serving as a home to a number of programs for enterprises and organizations working towards achieving the Sustainable Development Goals while reducing carbon emissions.
We’d love your help to fully realize this vision. Know of anyone who might want to partner with Climate Ventures or act as an advisor to its members? Please connect with me at barnabe@socialinnovation.ca.
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In the words of environmentalist and entrepreneur Paul Hawken, we can be tempted “to believe that global warming is something that is happening to us – that we are victims of a fate that was determined by actions that precede us. If we change the preposition, and consider that global warming is happening for us – an atmospheric transformation that inspires us to change and reimagine everything we make and do – we begin to live in a different world.”
Climate Ventures will be a platform for the leaders helping to build that world – a world with new jobs, healthier communities, and a flourishing, low-carbon economy.
To your impact,
Barnabe Geis
Director of Programs, Centre for Social Innovation
