Candice Ammori grew up in metro Detroit’s Chaldean community, where her dad ran a convenience store. Her career took her to microfinance in Cambodia, tech in Singapore and London, and back to Michigan for a master’s in biostatistics. Then the 2018 IPCC report came out, and she knew what she wanted to spend her life on. What she couldn’t find was a place where policy people, investors, founders, and scientists actually sat down together. So she built one. Climate Vine runs small, curated cohorts where people who rarely share a room learn each other’s language and leave with about 25 new friends they can call. We talked with Candice about translation, mundane bottlenecks, and why the hardest parts of climate work usually aren’t technical.
What does Climate Vine do, in your own words?
Climate Vine brings together people who should be working together on climate but usually don’t end up in the same rooms: policy folks, investors, founders, nonprofit leaders, scientists, and people inside utilities and government. We run curated cohorts around a theme (the last one was on distributed resilience). Members spend a few months learning from each other, digging into real problems, and building enough trust that picking up the phone later is easy. The typical member leaves with about 25 or so new professional friends they can call, and those relationships keep paying off for years. Between cohorts, I take on aligned projects, most recently with NYSERDA and the Rockefeller Foundation. They use the same muscle: getting people with different incentives and timelines to a shared plan.
What got you into climate work in the first place?
I grew up in the Chaldean community in metro Detroit, surrounded by small business owners (my dad ran a convenience store). I spent my early career in microfinance, business and tech in Cambodia, Singapore and London. Around 2015 I got deep into AI and its ethical questions and realized I needed to actually understand the math, so I went back to Michigan for a master’s in biostatistics.
Then in 2018 the IPCC report came out with that 2030 timeline, and I realized that that was the problem I wanted to spend my life working on. I kept the stats and added sustainable finance and engineering classes. I graduated in 2020, right into the pandemic. A fellow Michigan alum pulled me into On Deck, where I started the Climate Tech fellowship, and Climate Vine grew out of that. I built it because I wanted it for myself. I couldn’t find anywhere that people from different corners of climate were gathering in a thoughtful way.
“I couldn’t find anywhere that people from different corners of climate were gathering in a thoughtful way.”
Climate Vine brings together people from policy, investing, nonprofits and startups. What happens when those groups end up in the same room?
At first, a lot of translation and bridge-building. Everyone uses the same words, like “risk,” “affordable” and “scale,” and means completely different things, because they work on different timelines and get rewarded for different outcomes. Once people get past that, what surprises them most is how mundane the real bottlenecks are. When we brought utility leaders, regulators, investors, technologists and policy experts together on grid transformation, the barriers weren’t technical ones. They were things like access to smart meter data and vendor lock-in. An investor can’t see those from the outside, and a regulator might not know an investor would fund the fix. When we put them at the same table for a few months, we get solutions nobody could have designed alone. Just as important, you get people who trust each other enough to keep working on it after the cohort ends.
Members get in by application. What are you looking for in a new member?
Givers, first and foremost. The people who make a cohort great want to contribute as much as they get, and they’re generous about what didn’t work, not just what did. Beyond that, I look for real depth in something, whether it’s years inside climate or expertise from another field they’re bringing over, plus genuine curiosity about everything outside it. I’m also building a room, not just picking individuals, so I’m always thinking about the mix: who brings a perspective the group doesn’t have yet, and who someone else will be really glad they met. We accept about 14% of applicants. It’s less about titles and more about whether you’ll make the people around you better.
What's something about climate tech that most people get wrong?
That it’s mostly a technology problem. A lot of what we need already exists and is cost-effective today. What slows it down is everything around the technology: incentives, permissions, data access, procurement rules, and who’s allowed to own what. Utilities mostly earn returns on the capital they deploy, not on outcomes, so a cheaper grid-enhancing technology can be a harder sell than a big new build. I’d add that people underestimate how much ownership matters. Whether a community, a cooperative, its employees or a utility owns an energy project shapes who benefits, who fights it, and whether it survives the next political cycle. That’s a big part of what I’m focused on now.
Who else is doing good work that more people should know about?
There are so many great people I'm a fan of:
Kai Heron, Keir Milburn, and Bertie Russell on Radical Abundance
Samantha Power and Leon Seefeld on Bioregional Financing Facilities
Margaret Wheatley and Deborah Frieze on the Berkana Two Loops model
Janine Benyus on Biomimicry
John Fullerton on Regenerative Capitalism
Kate Raworth on Doughnut Economics
Brett Christophers, Naomi Klein, and Vanessa Machado de Oliveira on our current systems and how to change them.
