Penji’s Non-Profit Community Coordinator, Oliver, talks with Eugene Kirpichov about sharing his inspiring journey from a career in big tech at Google to leading one of the world’s largest professional communities focused on climate solutions. Together, they explore how professionals across industries can transform their skills into powerful levers for climate action, the challenges and breakthroughs of starting a nonprofit during the pandemic, and why building leadership from the ground up is key to creating systemic change.
Here are three things you’ll learn in this episode:
Why your professional skills—not just personal habits—can make a massive difference in solving climate change.
Eugene explains that climate solutions are built by people in every industry, from software and manufacturing to healthcare and energy. While recycling and calling representatives are helpful, real systemic change comes when professionals apply their expertise directly to building solutions.
How Work on Climate helps people shift careers, build community, and step into climate leadership.
Through programs like expert office hours, peer mentorship, and workplace climate leadership initiatives, Work on Climate guides professionals to see where their skills fit, connect with others, and gain the confidence to lead change within their companies and industries.
The vision for scaling bottom-up, industry-wide transformations over the next five years.
Eugene shares the organization’s long-term goal: creating a distributed movement of professionals who can coordinate across cities and industries. By empowering people to work together—such as tackling food waste across an entire supply chain—Work on Climate hopes to spark systemic shifts that no single company or policy could achieve alone.
About Eugene Kirpichov & Work on Climate:
Website: https://workonclimate.org/
Socials: https://www.linkedin.com/in/eugenekirpichov/