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In two hours, at 9am PT, Katie Gilbert runs Climate Drift's Thought Leadership Clinic and Office Hours. It's free and it's live. If any part of the story below lands for you, this is the lowest-effort way to test whether the program is a fit.
Katie runs a six-week program inside Climate Drift called Thought Leadership for Humans. The second cohort starts June 1. Today’s clinic is your chance to meet her, ask whatever you want, and see how she teaches before committing to anything.
Now to the interesting part: Maria Gomez’s story.
Maria leads the Climate Venture Lab at Mercy Corps Ventures, and she came into the first cohort with six pilots wrapping up at once, a mountain of lessons the broader field needed, and no plan for getting any of it out. Katie and I worked through what shifted for her over those six weeks, and Maria wrote her own account below. If you’ve ever sat on work you know is useful and just never posted it, read hers.
If you do one thing today, join the clinic. 9am PT, two hours from now.
🌊 Let’s dive in
But first, who is Katie?
Katie is a Philadelphia-based writer, editor, and educator with over 20 years of experience and a longtime focus on climate and social impact. As a journalist, she’s covered sustainable finance for Institutional Investor and Responsible Investor, and her longform feature on an economic and political experiment in Jackson, Mississippi was one of Oxford American’s most-viral stories of the year. Her journalism has also been published in The Atlantic, Al Jazeera America, Psychology Today, and elsewhere.
She works with universities, brands, and mission-driven organizations to connect their people’s ideas to wider audiences. Current and past clients include Stanford Insights, Columbia Business Magazine, Yale School of Management’s Yale Insights, and impact investing nonprofit ImpactAssets.
Katie also teaches a writing course for visual art students at Massachusetts College of Art and Design, and she previously taught journalism at Manhattanville College in New York.
Starting on June 1st, Katie will be running the second cohort of a six-week program inside Climate Drift called Thought Leadership for Humans.
Think of Thought Leadership for Humans as a classroom, lab, and community space rolled into one. The goal: equip would-be climate leaders with the structures, processes, inspiration, and feedback they need to finally step into their own voices.
Each week of the program will include an audio lesson to kick off the theme of the week; two live calls; visits from guest experts (including investors, established thought leaders, and content-strategy experts); show-and-tell sessions where cohort members get feedback on projects-in-process; and weekly challenges to get participants sharing publicly, right away.
In the climate space, we talk a lot about what’s missing.
Missing capital. Missing policy. Missing technology. Missing time.
What we talk about less (because it feels somehow less serious, more self-promotional, more optional) is missing voices.
But here’s what I’ve come to believe after years of working with researchers, founders, and practitioners doing important work in relative obscurity: a public voice isn’t a vanity project. It isn’t a personal brand exercise you get to do once the real work is done. For people doing serious climate work, a recognizable public voice is load-bearing infrastructure, and it’s as essential to the work as the technology, the data, or the funding it exists to attract.
Think about how climate work actually moves forward. Investing runs on relationships and reputation. Procurement runs on trust. Hiring runs on recognition. Partnerships form because two people read each other’s work and thought: this person gets it.
None of that happens in silence.
Maria Gomez leads the Climate Venture Lab at Mercy Corps Ventures, an impact investment fund running grant-funded pilots for early-stage climate startups in the Global South. After two years of building the lab, running pilots, and accumulating hard- won lessons, she had a mountain of knowledge that the broader ecosystem needed and wasn’t getting. Sharing it wasn’t optional. It was, in her words, “a core part of what our organization is here to do.”
But knowing something needs to be shared and knowing how to share it are different problems.
Maria arrived at Thought Leadership for Humans with the first solved and the second wide open.
What she worked through over six weeks traces an arc that I’ve watched many serious people move through, and that I think will feel familiar to a lot of you reading this.
First: permission.
Before Maria could think about strategy, she had to reckon with whether she was entitled to a public voice at all. She’d moved into the climate space only two years earlier. She doesn’t have a scientific background. Looking around at researchers and veterans with decades of experience, she couldn’t figure out how to position herself as any kind of authority.
What she found, and what almost every cohort member finds, regardless of their credentials, is that this feeling is nearly universal. And it’s based on a flawed premise. Thought leadership doesn’t require being the foremost expert in a field; it requires a genuinely held, specific perspective and a real motivation to share it. Maria recognized that her unique perspective (two years inside the messy, generative reality of running climate pilots in emerging markets) was not a liability, but a useful lens.
Then: clarity.
With permission in place, the next problem was coherence. Maria’s instinct had been to share her pilots’ findings as they came: story by story, insight by insight. What the program surfaced was how incomplete that approach is. Without a through line, without a bigger story that everything connects to, content becomes a series of isolated moments rather than a body of thought. It doesn’t build. It doesn’t compound. It doesn’t give an audience a reason to keep coming back.
The work of Week 3 (defining your core themes, articulating the thread that connects everything you want to create) shifted Maria from “here’s what this one pilot found” to “here’s the bigger story I’m intentionally building.” That shift, she says, was the biggest one.
And finally: motion.
Even with permission and clarity, there was still the problem of perfectionism. Maria is someone who wants to get things right before she puts them out. In her professional life, that instinct serves her well. In building a public voice, it had been keeping her stuck.
It turned out that the mindset shift she needed was surprisingly close to home. Maria’s work is built around running small, structured pilots: low-stakes experiments designed to generate data, not to be definitive. When the program introduced tiny experiments in Week 1 (basically the same methodology she was used to, but applied to thought leadership) something clicked. You don’t need the perfect piece. You need a low-stakes test that teaches you what resonates, so you can iterate toward something more powerful.
The arc from permission to clarity to motion is not linear, and it doesn’t look the same for everyone. But it is, in my experience, the arc that almost every serious person needs to travel before their work can reach the people it was built to reach.
Below, Maria describes what that looked like for her.
By Maria Gomez, Climate Venture Lab Lead at Mercy Corps Ventures
I lead the Climate Venture Lab at Mercy Corps Ventures, an impact investment fund. Our lab provides grant funding to early-stage startups in the Global South that are developing innovative, climate-resilient technologies. We run pilots (small, structured experiments) that give startups a chance to test and prove out their products with real funding behind them.
After two years of setting up the lab, finding partners, and running pilots, I suddenly found myself at a turning point at the beginning of this year: six or seven pilots were wrapping up at the same time, and I had a mountain of lessons learned. Sharing those lessons publicly isn’t just a bonus celebration; it’s a core part of what our organization is here to do. We want the broader ecosystem to know what technologies we’re excited about, and what worked, what didn’t, and where challenges remain.
The problem was that I had no real plan for how to do that. I felt disorganized and all over the place. I worried that if I just randomly shared each pilot’s story as it came, none of it would be very cohesive or compelling.
When I saw the information about Climate Drift’s Thought Leadership for Humans program, the timing felt exactly right.
Before I could get into the strategy and mechanics of thought leadership, I had to reckon with something more personal: I wasn’t sure I deserved the label.
I moved into the climate space only two years ago. I don’t have a scientific background. When I looked around at others in this field, people who’d been in it for decades or who came from research, I struggled to frame myself as any kind of authority. I wanted to share what we’d learned in a way that felt authentic to me and with an approach based on my actual experience.
What I came to understand from the other (credentialed, impressive, impactful) people in our TL4H cohort is that this feeling is almost universal. The program helped me see that thought leadership doesn’t require being the foremost expert in a field. It requires having a genuinely held, specific perspective and a real motivation to share it.
For me, that motivation was clear: a key part of my job is to share what we learn. And the investment world, in particular, runs on relationships and reputation. Building a recognizable voice isn’t vanity; it’s how this work gets done.
If I could go back and give myself advice a year ago, it would be this: being intentional before you start sharing is everything.
Before the program, my mindset was: I have these stories, I’ll share them in a compelling way, and that’ll be it.
What the program helped me see is how incomplete that is. Sharing content without a strategy leaves you at the mercy of inspiration’s whims, and that makes it very hard to actually build an audience or achieve anything consistent or meaningful.
What changed for me was learning to ask a specific set of questions before I publish anything:
What do I actually want to achieve with this?
Who is my audience, and what do they need from me?
What are the two or three themes I want to be consistently associated with?
What’s the through line across everything I share?
How will I know if it’s working?
Moving from “here’s what this one pilot found” to “here’s the bigger story I’m intentionally building” was the biggest shift for me.
One of my favorite parts of the program was the concept of tiny experiments, which came in the very first week. It resonated with me professionally, because running small pilots is literally what my work is built around, but I hadn’t applied that mindset to my own thought leadership.
I’m the kind of person who wants to get things perfect before sharing. I want to make sure everything is polished and complete. What the program pushed me to see is how counterproductive that instinct can be when you’re trying to build a public voice. You don’t need the perfect piece; you need a low-stakes way to test what resonates, learn quickly, and iterate.
Paired with the metrics-focused session, which got me thinking clearly about what I actually want to measure and what I want to learn from each piece I put out, I came away with a much more practical and less paralyzing framework for actually getting started.
Here’s something I didn’t expect: the process of going through the program clarified things for me that had nothing to do with posting on LinkedIn.
Working through the exercises, thinking about my themes, doing the audience research: all of it helped me think more clearly about my organization and my work. Something happens when you’re forced to articulate what you believe and why it matters. It sharpens you, even privately.
This feels especially worth naming in a world where it’s easy to outsource all of that to an AI tool. You can generate something to post in two minutes, check the box, and move on, but two minutes later you probably won’t remember it, and it probably didn’t say anything that original. The thinking part of thought leadership is where the real value lives, and you can’t skip it.
Coming out of the program, I have a document with my themes mapped out, audience research done, and a real communication strategy for the rest of the year. It’s a work in progress, and finding time is still hard, but I feel I’m much more organized and focused on my next steps than I was when I came in.
My thought leadership archetype is, at its core, about storytelling: telling the stories of the startups we work with and the things we’ve learned together. That felt daunting at first. Now it feels like something I actually have a plan to achieve.
Maria works at Mercy Corps Ventures, where she leads the Climate Venture Lab. You can follow her thought leadership on LinkedIn and through the Mercy Corps Ventures LinkedIn page.
Maria’s closing observation is one I want to leave with you before we get to the program details:
“Something happens when you’re forced to articulate what you believe and why it matters. It sharpens you, even privately.”
That’s not a marketing claim; it’s someone describing what happened to her thinking, separate from any post that got published, any audience that grew, any metric that moved. The process of working through these questions has value that doesn’t depend on anyone else seeing it.
But people do see it. That’s also the point. And when they do, things move.
Maria came into TL4H without a plan, without a through line, and without permission to call herself any kind of authority in the climate space. She left with her themes mapped, her audience identified, a communication strategy for the rest of the year, and, perhaps most importantly, a method: a way of thinking about starting that doesn’t require everything to be perfect before anything gets shared.
That arc (permission → clarity → motion) is available to you too.
We’re forming the cohort now, inside Climate Drift.
What the six weeks includes:
A complete, sequenced curriculum, built specifically for serious climate leaders, not for generic content creators. The six weeks move in a deliberate order: you build the inner foundation first (experiments, beliefs, themes), and only then move to the outer architecture (audience, strategy, metrics). As one first-cohort participant put it: “The outer architecture is only as useful as your inner clarity behind it.”
Two live calls each week, including guest experts who have built real audiences, raised funding through their public thinking, and led communications at major climate organizations.
A cohort of peers who understand the urgency of what you’re building. The community inside TL4H is one of its most quietly powerful features; participants consistently name their fellow cohort members as among the most generative creative relationships they’ve built: “The diversity of perspectives in the room created a kind of creative momentum that’s hard to replicate. I zeroed in on my project in a way that thrills me.”
Async flexibility: all calls are recorded, all feedback is available outside of live sessions, and the program is designed to be valuable even when life gets in the way. Perfect attendance is not the price of admission.
The program is for you if:
You have more ideas than output.
You suspect your visibility gap is costing you real opportunities: funding not attracted, partnerships not formed, influence going to people doing shallower work.
You’ve tried to build a public voice before and stalled. You know your work deserves to travel further than it currently does, and you haven’t been able to make that happen alone.
You don’t need to already see yourself as a thought leader. Maria didn’t. She just needed to find her through line, and step into the structure to follow it.
$947 USD includes all six weeks of curriculum, live sessions, guest expert access, cohort community, async feedback, call recordings, and three months of access to the full Climate Drift Community.
Need-based scholarships are available because we don’t want cost to be the only barrier to doing this work with us.
⚠️ Scholarship deadline: Monday, May 25. If you’d like to be considered for a scholarship, you must reach out to schedule a call with Katie by the end of the day on Monday, May 25.
This isn’t a sales call. It’s a real conversation about where you are, what you’re trying to say, and whether TL4H is the right structure for you right now. Some people are ready. Some need a different starting point. Katie will tell you honestly which one you are.
Cohort 2 begins June 1. The scholarship deadline is May 25.