A Bank.Green Recap

Being good at doing good

Say you've just graduated college, bright, starry-eyed, and passionate about doing good in the world. Your first move may be to join a mission-driven organization where you'll spend a few years working on issues you care about, maybe visiting an orphanage or two, maybe surviving a burnout, and eventually deciding to get a lower-stress job that pays. At the paying job, you'll develop your professional skills and eventually begin to suspect that back in your 20s, while you did your best to, do good," you could have probably done better. You have a career/mortgage/kids now, and you determine that the best way for you to make a change is either to donate money to better charities or to focus on your family and the people around you. Maybe you'll pick up your word-changing dreams when you retire.

At least that's how the do-good career cycle often goes.

I spent the last decade and a half trying to reverse that cycle.¹ Instead of jumping straight to mission-driven work, I used well-paid but often meaningless-feeling work to build my hard skills and a retirement fund, embraced a thrifty lifestyle, and only recently began doing mission-driven work.

Then, during the pandemic in 2021, with the financial means to (mostly) sustain myself and the skills to make an impact, I created a nonprofit. (It launched with this blog post, also by yours truly.) In 2023, I joined it full-time. In 2024, I started earning consulting fees from my co-founder's largesse, and later, a grant.

I did it! At least, the quitting-meaningless-work first part of, "it." Maybe, "it," can also count as the second part, building-a-mission-driven-org. The jury is still out on the making-actual-change third part.

Unfortunately, I've also reached an age where few of my friends talk about their work. This feels unfair since it's only recently that I've begun thinking that work is worth talking about. Moreover, discussing my work with others might lead them to point out lapses in my thinking or obvious mistakes I'm making.

Fortunately, in this email list, I have an interested audience. Here's some more about my work. I'd love your helpful pointers and suggestions, large and small. Maybe I can even inspire you to use your own life to make the change that would make your 18-year-old self proud.

Bank.Green as a lever, banks as a fulcrum

Bank.Green is the organization that I co-founded. It uses technology and law to decrease fossil fuel financing, ultimately benefitting the climate. It also boasts skilled professionals (developers, designers, data scientists, marketers, accountants, and lawyers) from the global north and global south, all of who volunteer for Bank.Green because they believe it's the best use of their time.

If banks are a fulcrum for change^{2 3}, then technology, law, and finance are all parts of a lever. And like all tools, levers often need to be assembled by pros. At Bank.Green, we're trying to build one long enough to move the world.

What Bank.Green actually does

On the surface, Bank.Green rates banks on how climate-friendly they are and encourages consumers to switch to greener alternatives, having moved significantly more than $40 million so far.

Bank switching is an important and visible part of our work but it isn't even close to everything. Aside from bank switching, we coordinate with other groups on media campaigns to raise awareness of fossil banks, create writing campaigns for people to contact bank employees, and work with law firms, journalists, and regulators to expose when banks violate their policies.

At Bank.Green, while accountants design and execute our bank ratings methodology, software developers create interfaces to speed up the rating process, publish, and otherwise use the results. Content writers and partnership managers publicize bank ratings on social media and through partnerships. Meanwhile, data scientists use large language models to understand bank policies, allowing them to find policy breaches that are analyzed by accountants and lawyers before sometimes being passed to journalists and regulators. There are currently 40 volunteers reporting to me, of 62 total active volunteers.

Our campaigns are having a significant impact in the UK. This year, we're working to expand them to the Anglosphere, Europe, [South]East Asia, and Oceania. Other ongoing projects include statistically rigorous measurements of our impact, publishing datasets on bank sustainability policies and practices, and expanding our rating to insurance.

Though Bank.Green doesn't generate revenues, from the outside it looks more like a tech startup than a nonprofit. We have a modern website with well-designed user flows.⁴ Decisions are made in small semi-autonomous teams. And everything is always in the process of being automated.

Never ending fundraising

Fundraising, however, is a constant struggle. Awareness raising and bank switch campaigns are hard to quantify and therefore are hard to fundraise for. The first prerequisite of being a funder is having money. This often implies that funders have been successful at working within the financial system, not necessarily that they have thoughtful ideas or plans for how to change it ⁵

What's more, nonprofit funders rarely seem to understand automation. Automation often means software, and software means uncertainty and overhead.⁶ I'm sometimes frustrated that foundations seem willing to fund armies of low-productivity interns (who perhaps remind them of their younger starry-eyed selves) but don't want to fund software that can better do those interns' jobs.

Next Steps

I've worked on this project for four years. Also, during different parts of those years, I've been a full-time private sector employee, done other contract work, and been a major part of an eco-village. Bank.Green is taking an incredible amount of my time and once/if it gets more funding, it will be able to stand on its own feet. I'm now interested in switching some of my attention to other projects.

In the field of financial environmental activism, I'm interested in exploring ways to use corporate governance structures to create leverage for the energy transition. Unlike most people in the financial industry, I look at corporate governance through the lenses of technology and environmental leverage. Because I'm not financially interested, some regulations seem not to apply. What's more, unlike most of the middle-class and tame people in the nonprofit space, I'm open to taking confrontational approaches in boardroom battles.⁷ There's more leverage to be had here, and I think that with the right partners, I could play those games well.

Please do feel free to put me in touch with others whom you think might be interested.