How Minneapolis Climate Week Is Organized

Last updated: October 2026 · Minneapolis Climate Week, February 1–5, 2027

Minneapolis Climate Week is built by dozens of independent hosts, not by one organization running a conference. That only works if everyone knows which decisions belong to whom, and what kind of room we're all agreeing to build. This page covers both.

Table of contents

1. Who organizes MCW
2. What the week is trying to do
3. What's centralized
4. What hosts own
5. Event listing guidelines
6. Topic areas
7. Code of conduct
8. Guidelines for hosts: building a room people stay in
9. What we're committing to
10. Questions

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Who organizes MCW

Minneapolis Climate Week is organized by the Twin Cities Climate Collaborative (TC3), with support from Structure Climate, the Climate Week Network, and a growing coalition of local volunteers, hosts, and partners.

TC3 runs the calendar, the communications, and the coordination. It does not run the events. Each event during the week belongs to the organization or person hosting it.

The week takes its second run in 2027, after an inaugural edition in February 2026.

What the week is trying to do

Four objectives. Every decision we make about the week gets measured against these.

1. Make the Twin Cities climate ecosystem legible to itself. There are hundreds of organizations and thousands of people working on this across Minnesota, and most of them don't know about each other. We measure this by how many distinct host organizations program during the week, and how many first-time cross-org collaborations come out of it.

2. Drive measurable adoption of existing public programs. Rebates, enrollments, applications, and sign-ups for named city, county, and utility programs that already exist and are already funded. We collect baselines in advance so the change is provable rather than asserted.

3. Create the on-ramp this metro demonstrably lacks. It is genuinely hard to find your way into climate work here if you don't already know someone. We measure the share of attendees who are new to this community, and how many are still connected six months later.

4. Celebrate practitioners publicly. Nonprofits and public agencies get a real platform during this week, not a logo slot. The people doing the unglamorous work get named.

If you're hosting an event, you don't need to hit all four. Pick one and aim at it.

What's centralized

TC3 keeps a short list of things central, because a distributed week falls apart without them:

• The public calendar, and keeping events from colliding with each other
• Central communications, press, and the newsletter
• The brand kit, and how the MCW name gets used
• The rulebook, the review process, and — rarely — the right to remove a listing
• Sponsorship. One pipeline, so no host sells sponsorship under the MCW name
• Collecting stats after the week, and publishing what actually happened

What hosts own

Everything that makes an event an event:

• The event concept, its content, and its speakers
• The venue, catering, and logistics
• Their own outreach and messaging
• Local customization, within the brand kit

If you're hosting, you are not waiting on us for permission to shape your own event.

Event listing guidelines

• Free to list. No fees, ever, for anyone.
• Eligibility is geographic and date-based — Twin Cities metro, between February 1 and 5, 2027. It is not a taste test.
• A short description, 200–300 words, then one round of edits, and then it's locked.
• A hard freeze one week before the week, on January 25, 2027. Nothing changes after that date. This is what makes a printed daily guide possible.
• Every listed event reports basic stats afterward. That's part of the deal, not optional. It's how we can say anything true about the week when it's over.
• We publish, in advance, the grounds on which we'd remove an event — so a removal is never a surprise.

Topic areas

These aren't tracks with gatekeepers. They're tags, so hosts can see who else is working the same ground and avoid scheduling three heat-pump workshops against each other on a Tuesday night.

1. Buildings and homes — efficiency, electrification, heat pumps, weatherization, rental housing
2. Energy — utility-scale, community solar, microgrids, the grid, Xcel and Great River Energy proceedings
3. Transportation and land use — transit, bikes, EVs, parking reform, zoning
4. Food and agriculture — regenerative ag, food waste, urban ag
5. Waste and circular economy — Fix-It Clinics, repair, reuse, procurement
6. Nature and winter — trees, lakes, snowpack, the winter we're losing
7. Careers and business — jobs, startups, corporate sustainability, procurement
8. Justice and health — Green Zones, environmental justice, frontline organizing, public health

Code of conduct

Who it covers: organizers, volunteers, hosts, speakers, sponsors, and every attendee. No exceptions, including us.

Where it applies: event spaces, our online spaces, official social gatherings, and event-related communication.

What's expected: respect, consent, and making room for people different from you.

What's not allowed: harassment, discrimination, and retaliation against anyone who raises a concern.

How to report a concern. Two people, both reachable during the week:

Cameron Popp — cam@tc3msp.org Rohan Bhatia — rohan@tc3msp.org

What happens next. A report goes to one of the two responders, who talks to the person reporting first and decides next steps with them, not around them. Consequences range from a conversation to removal from an event or from the week. We will not retaliate against anyone who reports something, and we won't ask you to report in front of the person you're reporting about.

Photography. Every event offers a way to opt out of being photographed. Ask the host; they'll have a plan.

Guidelines for hosts: building a room people stay in

A code of conduct tells you what not to do. It doesn't tell you how to run a room where someone new actually wants to come back. That's a different skill, and it's learnable.

The framing we're using comes from Stanford social psychologist Claude Steele's book Churn, published in March 2026 (Stanford Human Sciences). Steele's word "churn" names something most of us have felt without having a word for it: the mental agitation and physical stress of being in a room where you're not sure how you're being read (W. W. Norton). It's a tax on attention. Someone spending energy monitoring how they're perceived has less left over for your workshop.

Steele's argument is that the antidote is trust, and that trust is built by specific, small, unglamorous behaviors — "a game played on the ground" (Stanford Human Sciences). Here's what that looks like at a climate event in February in Minnesota.

Send cues before anyone walks in. People read a room before they enter it. Say who the event is for, in plain language, in the listing. Name the venue's actual accessibility instead of leaving it blank. Say whether there's food, whether there's parking, and what people will be wearing. Ambiguity reads as exclusion to anyone who's been the only one in a room before.

Be interested in people, specifically. Steele's finding is direct: being genuinely interested in others tends to elicit their trust, which lowers churn for both of you. This is not "network harder." It's asking someone what they're working on and then actually listening to the answer. At a 30-person event, an organizer who talks to 10 people properly has done more than one who greets all 30.

Don't run an event where people are only observers of each other. Steele draws a distinction between an observer's perspective and an actor's — and argues that the effort to take someone else's actor perspective builds trust even when you get it partly wrong. Practically: give people something to do together. A panel where 40 people watch 4 people talk produces less trust than a room where everyone says something in the first ten minutes. If you're running a panel anyway, build in something that makes the audience participants.

Don't let "we're all here for the climate" paper over real differences. Steele is pointed about this: color blindness is essential in law and health care, but it should not blind us to the different realities people face based on identity. A renter in a Green Zone and a homeowner in Edina are not having the same climate experience, and a room that pretends otherwise loses the renter. Naming the difference is what makes the room usable.

Pair high expectations with real support. Steele's research consistently finds that the combination — communicating that expectations are high and that you'll help people meet them — is what affirms ability against stereotype. For a host: ask something real of your attendees. Then make it genuinely possible for them to do it.

Give people a name to find. Every new volunteer at MCW gets a named buddy from a different team. Do the same at your event: one person whose actual job is to notice whoever came alone.

Ask, afterward. The cheapest useful thing you can do is ask two or three people who didn't already know you what would have made the event better. Then tell us.

None of this requires training or budget. It requires deciding in advance that it matters.

What we're committing to

MCW wants to be a week where people who don't usually see themselves centered in climate spaces actually show up — and stay. That takes more than good intentions, so here's what we're doing about it.

A published code of conduct, above, with two named responders anyone can reach during the week. Not an email address that goes nowhere.

A published honoraria policy for community organizers, Indigenous partners, artists, and anyone contributing labor rather than institutional marketing. Even a modest, published honorarium changes how a space reads to the people actually doing the work.

One hard number we're tracking: how many of our attendees and volunteers are new to this community, not just returning faces. This matters here specifically. A 2019 GREATER MSP newcomer survey found that while most transplants feel welcome in the Twin Cities, 28% of Black respondents reported feeling unwelcome, and most newcomers decide within 18–24 months whether they're staying (Axios Twin Cities). We're measuring against that, not just talking about it.

Host guidelines with something in them, above, rather than a values statement.

A curation committee with real host representation, not just the core organizing team. The people shaping what MCW looks like should reflect the community it's for, not only the people already in the room.

Actively looking for hosts we haven't heard from yet. Faith communities, unions, libraries, neighborhood associations, immigrant-led organizations, trade groups, farmers, artists. We go looking before the open call goes out, not after it closes.

Reaching out directly to local environmental justice organizations to ask what would make MCW worth their time, rather than assuming we already know.

Accessibility, in practice:

• Free or pay-what-you-can by default. We ask every host to hold to this.
• Transit-accessible venues, and we note the nearest transit on every listing.
• A virtual option wherever a host can manage one — it's February in Minnesota.
• Mobility and childcare noted honestly on each event listing, including when a venue can't accommodate something.

This is a starting point, not a finished answer. If you have ideas — or you're one of the organizations we should be talking to — tell us.

Questions

Email hello@mplsclimateweek.org. We're volunteers, so give us a couple of days.