Sayesha Dogra has made it her mission to facilitate meaningful cross-pollination of ideas and partnerships between diverse stakeholders in India’s climate ecosystem. She has made a good start.
She became a fellow cohort at the Women Climate Collective to draw more women leaders into playing a more meaningful role as a community. Sayesha is an entrepreneur with experience in consulting, venture capital and e-commerce. She is on a mission to make climate action cool.
SustainabilityNext Editor Benedict Paramanand caught up with her to chat about her ambitious mission and how she intends to go about it. Edited excerpts:
Sayesha Dogra, welcome to SustainabilityNext’s Conversation Series with Young Leaders. This series is meant to get across leaders’ opinions and perspectives to a larger audience.
You are an exponent of the ‘make climate action cool’. Tell me how are you going about doing it?
When I began my own journey in climate, almost two years ago now, I could read about the problems and the doom and gloom. During my expedition to Antarctica, I figured, and rather I learned that, probably, eco-anxiety is a thing of the first world problem.
Over the course of the next two years, I figured no, it is a real problem all around the world. I figured that my mission has to be – how can you really make people hopeful. And how do you get more and more people involved in climate action?
And how I see it is – if you make anything cool, it becomes aspirational. So how do you make climate action aspirational, making it brag worthy. I want to make climate action cool, both figuratively and literally.
I think it’s a good way to start. That’s our mission as well. With our greenlitfest.com, whose fourth edition is happening on Dec 7, this year, we celebrate and promote environmental conversations around books, films, theater, among students, adults, entrepreneurs and leaders…
That is something we should work on together.
You set up the Climate Party two years ago and its slogan, interestingly, is ‘hot ideas to cool the planet,’ what do you mean by that?
The idea is about building Scenius for climate solutions. Scenius is a word I’ve borrowed from Brian Eno, which means ‘we are better together.’ A collective intelligence where a lot of different perspectives need to come together for us to be able to build holistic solutions. That’s exactly what we’ve been trying to do by connecting people who otherwise may not talk to each other.
Today, people working with a similar mission of building climate solutions are working in silos, say, for example, investors, policymakers, scientists, researchers, journalists. They seldom interact with each other. We want to create a space to come and make magic happen at the intersections. So there’s this whole multidisciplinary approach behind the Climate Party. And that is where the line comes where hot ideas can cool the planet. So it’s essentially an amalgamation of all these ideas, which should convert into action to be able to really cool the planet.
Quite an interesting plan, I must say. The approach could give you a nice framework to work with.
I’ve learned over the last one and a half years of building the Climate Party that collaboration is key. We see that within the community most people are very giving the moment somebody needs help, be it a connection, be it, you know, asking a specific query or hiring or getting a business partner.
Let’s speak about WCC, Women Climate Collective. So, what inspired you to do that?
I see women are at the forefront in being more sustainable when it comes to personal environments. Or anything that’s done voluntarily. They are the ones who are really steering the change in a not so formal environment. But when you come to the formal side of things, there aren’t many. At times, I also feel that when women talk about it amongst themselves, it’s just an echo chamber, it’s not going to change anything.
When it comes to getting a seat at the table, it is important that the right set of women get their voices heard at that table. And it’s about making your own space. We have to go even a step further than just getting a seat at the table, because a lot of times these women get a seat at the table, but nobody hears them. So how do you make yourself heard?
You’re still a young startup in this space, and you’re being quite ambitious and started several initiatives already. What have you learned from your management education and as an early-stage entrepreneur?
The climate party started as a passion project. I have now institutionalized it by setting up a company. A lot of things happen only when you actually go out and do it. You can only plan so much. It’s just about following your instincts and just going and executing. Because execution is what really sets different ambitions apart.
We have taken our mission from one city to six cities now. We feel people are deriving a lot of value from what we have set out to do. Now, the plan is, how do we really make this community bigger and better.
What’s the size of the Climate Party now?
So we’ve engaged with close to 1600 people in the last roughly one and a half years. Out of that, we have about 800 people in our group. We work with committed people and not those just with fleeting interests.
You said the Climate Party is more about doing and less about simply talking…
Exactly. I think when you actually see in front of you those piles of trash, you also realize that you know you are part of the problem. And I think a lot of people don’t understand how over consumption is literally eating them.
It is interesting to see that your initiative is not as an NGO but a for-profit initiative.
I would like to demonstrate that it is very much possible to do good and make money. So, for me, it was boot strapped but what really helped was I built a model where expenses were close to 0. We’ve had partnerships and we devised our events in a way that there weren’t any F&B, and that works very well because expectations are bare minimum. So, we delight our customers with audiences with surprises.
We’ve started charging from this financial year to sustain our efforts. It has been very heartening to see that people are willing to pay for the events. It is a testament to our credibility. We have a repeat rate of close to 43%, which I think is very tough to crack in offline settings. Getting people to come out of their places on their hard-earned weekend, to a place where there is no food, no drink is something I am honestly proud of.
