I should have posted something along these lines a while ago, especially when we had three Carleton University interns help us (Azka, Anshika, and Mihir) and a number of other volunteers. But no time like the present to welcome new folks to the team and to send thank you’s to prior ones!

Julia Curran, in her discover mode.
First, you can find on our About page who has been helping us along the way the past five years as we’ve built up content and ideas for tools to help people plan climate action. The first to help us were folks serving as moderators in our Facebook group. (Thank you Hugh, Diane, Carrie, Alex, Tonia, Heidi, Tamara, and, Breton for a while.) Then content and design volunteers came along, photographer Chris Bernacchi, our Board of Directors, of course, and others helping with social media. Guest authors, such as Julia Curran, have been contributing as well along the way!
Website designer Lisa Howard continues to help us tremendously during different semesters of a year creating wonderful website designs, as well as finding resources and references. Other website and marketing designers who’ve and continue to help tremendously this past year include Linda Cotton, Kim Bumgarner, and Clare Talbot, plus Amelia Chucholwoski, who has helped us with social media as well as industry research.
Our summer 2023 intern Chase Howard is helping us create automatic tools, such as our new Weekly Climate Steps note on the home page, and in the next two weeks, live pulls of actions from our long-time partner Earth Hero to display online here within CSteps! We’re so excited!

Mark Stewart
And now, in 2023, we have two regular columnists for Climate Steps, a new content lead for our Energy program, and great, albeit temporary, leads for our Education, Community, and Food/Ag programs. The three folks leading the last set of programs came due to our pilot grants from Wikipedia Foundation and the WikiCred Foundation at the start of the year. Educator Mark Stewart, who was a contributing writer for a year before with CSteps on community articles and pages, is leading research on community-level actions for our Wikipedia collaboration and improving our pages as we go. Shoshahana Risman, a volunteer editor for us in the fall, is helping lead the compilation of list of food/ag-related actions that individuals can take for the collaboration. Educator Becky Hirn, who is not funded by Wikipedia but by a Facebook fundraiser, is providing structure and resources for Schools and Parents for our new page for that. Becky and I have worked for years together on the Earth Hero app, and this work will overlap with that too!

Anthony Lanzillo, in the obviously cold Duluth, Minnesota.
And this is even before we get into our three new contributors. I would first like to welcome two new columnists to Climate Steps – Anthony (Tone) Lanzillo, who is a major climate activist centered in Duluth Minnesota, who already has one column in the Duluth News Tribune called Climate > Duluth, and has a TV show of the same name on PACT-TV. Tone will be writing for us at least quarterly on his incredible experience as an activist and giving insight into how individuals can create action.

Dr. Krista Kurth
Dr. Krista Kurth, a Senior Fellow at Green America and a member of the Leadership Council for World Resources Institute, has been writing climateactionsforeverydaypeople.org, a science-based blog in a similar tone to CSteps articles – i.e., that individuals can make a significant impact on multiple fronts. She has served as an advisor to individuals and organizations in the environment and is on the board for four environmental foundations. Her educational background is basically on how to get things done (useful stuff for climate action), with a doctorate from George Washington University on organizational development, and teaching graduate-level Leadership courses at the University of Maryland University College. She’ll be sharing her blogs with us on a roughly monthly basis.

Dr. Cat Russell
Recently, Dr. Cat Russell (they/them) joined us to lead our Energy program development and further develop the Climate Action Mapping Tool that we have presented via our Personal Planning Tools page. Dr. Russell is a PhD electrical engineer who quit their teaching job in 2020 to become a residential solar design engineer and help solve the climate crisis full time. As part of their activism work, Cat developed Climate Action Maps in 2002. A Climate Action Map is a one-page tool to organize and motivate climate action steps for individuals, households, and other organizations. Over the past 20 years, Cat has given Climate Action Map trainings via high school climatology classes, teach-ins, meetings of community groups, and their website climateactionmaps.org, and NASA created an editable pdf version for a workshop for science teachers. We’ve long had their map template on board CSteps under our Planning Tools, but now we also get Dr. Russell’s experience and knowledge in further development and writing. Further, Cat has been blogging about their own climate action map (https://www.climateactionmaps.org/climate-friendly-house-project), with steps including installing solar and heat pumps, EV charging, vermicomposting and even soap-making. Now we’ll be combining efforts – with the goal of linking CSteps’ upcoming search-and-filter tool to the Climate Action Map template and our own Climate Action Plan Templates.

Samantha Panchèvre
And we’ve just now added Samantha Panchèvre (she/her)! Sam is a passionate environmental storyteller and communications specialist from San Antonio, Texas. When she was attending Georgetown University (GU), she spent much of her free time as a student activist for the GU Fossil Free campaign, which successfully mobilized campus support to divest the University’s $1.7 billion endowment from fossil fuels in 2020. In the coming months, Sam will be volunteering with Climate Steps to share video resources. Her goal is to curate videos that highlight solutions to climate change, from TED Talks to optimistic documentaries to movies with sustainability messaging.
We are all so grateful to be working together here at Climate Steps – pulling this organization together, but more importantly, providing the needed knowledge and tools to help people rapidly change their homes, lives, and our culture to make our planet healthy again.
THANK YOU to all team members, but also to those who have donated to help make this possible. If you would like to take a turn at volunteering in some form or fashion, – and we can use you – please check out our Get Involved page for many different options!