An Important Update

Dear Community,

I have some important news about my personal and professional life.

First, I've stepped down as the Executive Director at Impact Zero and transitioned to a new exciting role. Second, with the full support of the Board of Directors we will be ramping down operations of Impact Zero in preparation for dissolution.

TLDR; This change is to better achieve my mission to build climate solutions. I’ll continue my volunteer work with ecosystem building initiatives including co-hosting Climate Coffee, and providing sliding scale pricing for founders in the earliest days through my new for-profit growth agency called The Green Growth Lab.

What we've been able to build with Impact Zero is something I'm incredibly proud of. Since hosting our launch party at The Centre for Social Innovation (CSI) in February of 2020 - I have always been excited to offer opportunities to anyone to help us build climate solutions in Toronto.

In that time, our team has been able to support over 100 climate founders across Canada to build their business from the ground up. I'm forever thankful to our funders, sponsors, and partners who have made our work possible.

Unfortunately there is a severe lack of funding for high-impact, forward-thinking climate startup programming. Our economy of course doesn't incentivize corporations to commit significant investment to solve shared challenges. Similarly, our federal government tracks the number of startups that flow through their funded programs, not how valuable their programs are to founders who spend their limited time taking part. These two factors are what makes it incredibly challenging to fund the innovation work we desperately need.

So, in response, I’ve decided to continue my personal mission to prove that climate technologies can grow, scale, and change our trajectory as a society. Doing this work as a for-profit will allow us to serve climate companies and startups much more effectively by offering sliding scale pricing to newer founders. I will be pursuing this mission through my new venture called  The Green Growth Lab - a growth agency to help everyone from lab-scale to larger climate companies grow their business (and impact) to achieve scale and profitability.

If you have a climate startup or want to know about the companies we’re supporting, join the Climate Founder Club to meet like-minded people (we match members for coffee chats) and hear about events we’re co-hosting!

For those who want to join a robust in-person founder ecosystem, CSI is offering our members a special invitation to continue the momentum through a $49/month Community Membership and access to their new Climate Cluster. Members gather monthly to connect, co-create, and collaborate, plus get all the perks of being CSI Member! Learn more about this opportunity here if you sign up by March 31st.

If you've made it this far, thank you very much for your support. I am deeply optimistic about the future, and can't wait to support startups much more intentionally with my new venture.

Erin Andrews
Founder
Impact Zero