Writer, Clean Energy Finance Forum

Purpose

Writing for the Clean Energy Finance Forum means following energy investment, policy, innovation and deployment activities around the world and telling stories that engage people who can accelerate the clean energy transition to work with more accuracy and zeal. 

Through this purpose, you’ll help the Yale Center for Business and the Environment fulfill its mission to clarify how business tools can help build a sustainable civilization and to spotlight policy approaches that unleash business innovation. 

Skills you’ll build

You’ll be tracking trends and reporting stories.  You’ll go through a process that we’ll document together to become fluent in finance and focus on an area of clean energy finance that poses strong opportunities or thorny problems. 

Take a moment to absorb what questions you’ll ask as a reporter covering how the world finances its own energy transition. We concern ourselves with finance for clean energy. Who is raising money? Who’s investing? Where are they investing and what instruments are they using? What policies affect where and how capital flows? Where should different kinds of investors place capital? How does capital flow differently in different parts of the world? We care about innovation, justice, marketing and operations, but we always couch these in financing terms.  That means we spend meaningful time on policy, because policy determines taxes and incentives (and sometimes supply and demand) that determine successful finance. 

It also means you’ll deliver stories on your own, working with a coach (who carries the title of editor), while forming and evolving frameworks with a team.  You’ll meet in person with colleagues and with your editor at least every two weeks, and gather for workshops at least four times each year. This fusion of accountability and membership previews what you’ll find in the workplace. We hope it helps you build the humor, patience, empathy, diligence and optimism you’ll need to work on climate after Yale. 

Time you’ll dedicate

The work demands 5-10 hours per week each semester. Sometimes you’ll spend this researching, reporting, writing, rewriting and offering peer support to other writers. You’ll also read and answer weekly emails seeking story ideas and story progress.  You’ll aim to publish two or three articles each semester. You’ll always find work to do, though: when not writing, you’ll be following topics with reading and interviews, searching for sources, and supporting fellow writers.  

Skills you’ll build

As you do this, you’ll build storytelling skills that complement your skills as an analyst and a manager.  You’ll find patterns of expectation, innovation, oversight (as in governance), oversights (as in smart people forgetting things) and psychology. By showing these patterns through stories that feature characters, stakes and consequences, you’ll engage distracted but sympathetic professionals. You’ll coax them to smile, weep, brainstorm, advocate and bring their whole selves to the task. 

You’ll also see your name appear in more specialized searches, and you’ll generate new content to share on your professional networks. This includes the potential cross-posting of your content in GreenBiz and other outlets. 

How you’ll get there

Through this work, you will create insights that professionals look for in other publications, or that they try to capture from their daily interactions. That means you home in on pain points and emerging business and policy models. At the start of your work with us, we’ll start a four-week iterative process that starts with reading and brainstorming and culminates in defining a strategy for a focus area (what we call a “beat”).As you build your beat, you’ll build your network. 

Every week, our writing team receives an email from the editor summarizing the stories in process and what we’ve just published.   

Every two weeks, we’ll ask you to suggest relevant news articles from other outlets to include in our bi-weekly newsletter and on our website.  As we broaden our scope, we’ll ask you to suggest news articles from countries other than the United States for this news roundup. 

Twice each semester, we’ll meet for a writer’s workshop and share-out session. And every semester, we’ll publish an “Editor’s Choice” newsletter that we’ll market to editors of other publications.

Who can apply? 

Graduate or undergraduate (matriculated) students only 

Hours per week 

5-10