(October 27, 2024) On a mission to make climate cool (literally and figuratively), Sayesha Dogra has consistently strived to demystify complex concepts with holistic solutions. As the founder and CEO of The Climate Party, a platform building India’s collective genius for climate solutions, and the brains behind the weekly publication Anticlimactic, the 30-year-old is bolstering India’s climate-tech ecosystem.
A leader in the 2024 cohort of the Women Climate Collective, supporting emerging women leaders for a just, gender-inclusive climate transition, she participated in New York Climate Week, actively leading discussions on making a difference and educating communities. This Global Indian has dedicated herself to building a better tomorrow, from studying to become a Chartered Accountant to becoming a green entrepreneur.
Sayesha Dogra at the New York Climate Week, as part of the Women’s Climate Collective cohort.
An unconventional life
Moving across five cities before she turned six, the Dogra family, though originally from Batala in Punjab, settled in Gurgaon in 2000. Sayesha was an extroverted and outdoorsy kid who loved playing sports. In an interview with Global Indian, she recalls, “I really enjoyed traveling with my parents during holidays. Because we were based in the north, we used to travel to the Himalayas, and I enjoyed going to the mountains and hiking. Looking back, I think that triggered my initial love towards nature.”
Even while she was studying for her Chartered Accountancy, she took up a job at KPMG, where she consulted large corporations for mergers and acquisitions. Though it included a lot of 6 am classes and consulting job hours, she thrived on the challenges and picked up skills that would stay with her throughout her career.
At 22, Sayesha became a founding member of the boutique consultancy Transaction Square, where she handled a multitude of roles. “It was basically like a start-up where I figured out how a business is set up and understood everything from setting up a printer to hiring staff and speaking with founders to raise funds.”
Wanting to explore different facets of her personality as well as to ramp up her professional credentials, what followed was graduating from the Indian School of Business (ISB), where Sayesha blossomed—be it leading the Finance Club, analyzing investments for a VC fund, playing racquet sports, or trying her hand at stand-up comedy!
Finding her groove
It was towards the end of her course at ISB that the young entrepreneur applied to and got selected for a program called “Leadership at the Edge,” run by Sir Robert Swan’s 2041 Foundation, which selects about 70 to 80 people from across the world and takes them to Antarctica to help them understand what climate change means in the most fragile ecosystem.
Owing to the COVID pandemic, Sayesha’s expedition to Antarctica was deferred to 2022 while she was working in Dubai with the e-commerce firm, Noon, where she received life lessons and insights on culture, consumerism, and consumer behaviors. It was this journey of a lifetime that changed the course of life for Sayesha. She calls it a turning point and states, “It was a deeply meaningful trip that helped me find my purpose. Because of COVID, they combined three batches, and we were a group of 150 enthusiasts in total from 37 different countries and diverse walks of life. It opened my eyes to the fragility of our ecology and gave me a first-hand experience of climate change.”
Actualising impact
Soon after the trip to Antarctica, the change maker quit her job in Dubai and briefly worked with a venture philanthropy fund in the environment space before starting Anticlimactic in 2023, a weekly newsletter to reform the climate change narrative from grim and boring to a lighter space with insights, analogies, and memes.
She explains, “Until last year, the mainstream media largely focused on the climate problems, which tend to induce eco-anxiety, especially amongst the young readers. So I wanted to bring out the opportunities that climate change has to offer and help people understand what they could do in their daily decision-making to play their part.”
Simplifying jargon and giving readers hope, the newsletter is delivered to more than 30 countries, helping people figure out opportunities in the fight against environmental degradation.
Soon after, Sayesha Dogra started The Climate Party as an experiment to bring like-minded groups together so that they could exchange ideas and collaborate towards a common goal. When Sayesha sent out a post on LinkedIn inviting people for a meet-up at a community park in Gurgaon, twenty showed up, resulting in fruitful discussions and validation of her hypothesis that the discovery of people working on climate solutions is a wide gap that existed in India.
Sayesha Dogra in Antarctica
Today, the meetings happen across six cities each month, bringing more than 1200 interdisciplinary stakeholders, from CXOs to students, together to pursue tangible solutions. It helps those working in silos interact, ideate, and collaborate. Due to Sayesha’s efforts, The Climate Party boasts of being the largest interdisciplinary network for climate-tech in India.
The founder expounds, “The initiative helps, as climate change is not easy to understand. It’s quite complex and has multiple layers. So, everybody is learning on the go, and because science keeps evolving, this is a great way to stay connected and on top of things that are moving fast.”
The way forward
Fresh off speaking at the New York Climate Week, Sayesha says that it has been an enriching experience meeting policymakers, start-up founders, thinkers, and writers. “I got to learn from different businesses employing the best practices in the world. I met like-minded allies and some potential collaborators who were interested in the growing India climate scene,” she states.
Calling her journey completely unplanned, Sayesha credits her ability to make unconventional choices as crucial to her personal growth—be it insisting her parents on changing schools to be in a more demanding environment for learning and growth or leaving a lucrative career to work in a field that is still evolving—she believes that magic happens at the intersection of different fields, which she has been exploring since the beginning of her career.
Currently, she has big plans, including building a media company centered around climate change and building physical hubs for climate solutions akin to a Wall Street for finance or Silicon Valley for technology. While she is not driving change, you can find her curled up reading non-fiction or on the field playing racquet sports.
Just like in the sports she enjoys playing, Sayesha Dogra knows that persistence and agility are key to driving meaningful change, whether it’s in a game or in tackling the environmental crisis. No wonder she is making an impact!
Read a similar story of Priya Donti, powering a global movement through Climate Change AI.
