Bringing the transformative power of digital campaigning to the climate movement

ABOUT DCC

The Digital Climate Coalition (DCC) is a network of communications organizations committed to winning the climate crisis through a digital first approach. We work closely with partner organizations to identify the right-sized digital support they need to tell their story more effectively. Whether it’s accessing new tools and technology to manage constituents, using data analytics to develop new audiences, or learning how to harness digital organizing to reach your community via trainings, we’ll work with partner organizations to develop and build their digital capacity. 
Whether it is regarding the pandemic, the insurrection on our capitol, or disinformation about our elections, digital platforms are increasingly where the general public makes sense of the world, or fall prey to efforts to divide us. In the climate fight so far, our investments in digital tactics and strategy are vastly outmatched by opponents who delay, distract and sabotage the necessary will to act. While they spend billions, we spend millions. Frontline advocates are often under-resourced and siloed from broader digital campaigns. 
 
By uniting eight highly effective field-supporting organizations, the DCC levels the playing field through storytelling, sharing, and rapid learning. We don’t need to match polluters and climate deniers  dollar for dollar. The DCC believes our movement has the knowledge, tools, and resources we need to end the climate crisis. We are building the mechanisms to share, coordinate, amplify and leverage  our collective power and wisdom. 

COALITION MEMBERS & PARTNERS

Check out the incredible work of our coalition members!

Our coalition is designed to work in tandem with Communicating Our Power, an effort put forth by a coalition of frontline coordinating organizations including CLIMATE JUSTICE ALLIANCE, CENTER FOR STORY-BASED STRATEGY, and THE SOLUTIONS PROJECT

Meet The Coalition Staff

Andrea Aguilar
Director of Partnerships

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Andrea Aguilar

Director Of Partnerships

Andrea Aguilar is the Director of Partnerships at the Digital Climate Coalition where she spearheads the coalition’s Frontline engagement. Andrea initially joined the DCC as the Deputy Director of Digital Strategy before moving into her current role.

Andrea has spent the past six years working in progressive campaigns. An organizer at heart, she got her start in 2016 as a Field Organizer in Colorado, where she successfully built relationships with local businesses, activists, and religious organizations in one of the most ethnically diverse neighborhoods in the state. In 2018, she worked at the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee during their most successful cycle to date before pivoting into digital. Most recently, she was a Senior Digital Strategist at Sapphire Strategies, a progressive digital firm where she had the opportunity to help Congressional, Senate, and Presidential candidates reach voters online.

Andrea is a graduate of Wellesley College. She currently lives in Oakland, CA with her 2 year old Corgi named Coco.

Dom Leon-Davis
Managing Director

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Dom Leon-Davis

Managing Director

Dom Leon-Davis is an organizer whose work focuses on mobilizing and empowering those closest to the center of our most pressing issues, especially black, brown, and immigrant communities. Prior to joining the coalition, he served as senior staff for several national, state, and local campaigns, including Cory Booker’s presidential campaign, Reverend Warnock’s Senate race, and Stacey Abrams gubernatorial. He has also worked at several advocacy organizations including MoveOn where he ran a national voter mobilization campaign for the 2020 general election and Working Families Party where he ran communications for New York and served as part of the New York Renews coalition. Dom believes that social change starts internally, both personally and within movement spaces, dismantling exploitative practices and focusing on long term impacts. He lives in Miami, FL with his husband Daniel and their two Mini Schnauzers, Raj and Rowan.

Kate McKenney
Director of Programming

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Kate McKenney

Director of Programming

Kate has a deep history of using data to innovate and learn from users to build better advocacy campaigns. She develops new opportunities for audience engagement via messaging guidance and campaign strategy. She loves using data science, research and programmatic analysis to ensure that campaigns and strategies are grounded in the audiences they are trying to advocate. Kate also loves digging into data architecture and building digital engagement ecosystems that drive advocacy and listen to the feedback organizations receive from their supporters.

Kate has led digital, web, and CRM development at many nonprofit organizations including NRDC, Free Press and consulted other large national advocacy organizations. Kate  has a master’s in Conservation Biology focusing on how to communicate to communities about environmental issues. Kate’s passion is for climate advocacy, but has been known to take breaks to make cheese and ski with her kids in western Massachusetts.

Sha Merirei Ongelungel
Director, Digital Strategy

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Sha Merirei Ongelungel

Director of Digital Strategy

Sha Merirei Ongelungel is a Micronesian (Palauan) artist, designer, multimedia content producer, speaker, and consultant. She has dedicated the past two decades to cultivating her skill set in order to educate and raise awareness on issues affecting BIPOC communities throughout Turtle Island and Pasifika.

She was born and raised in Portland– the ancestral lands of the Multnomah, Wasco, Kathlamet, Clackamas, Cowlitz, bands of Chinook, Tualatin Kalapuya, Molalla, and many other Tribes who made their homes along the Columbia and Willamette Rivers.

Her childhood was spent surrounded by activists, including her parents, who fought against the exploitation and militarization of Indigenous lands. She strives to uphold those same values that guided her parents and mentors through her professional work and personal activism. She’s best known for her hashtag (#BeingMicronesian), it’s associated Twitter thread, and being an all-around rabble-rouser. 

In November 2021, she was featured in them magazine’s “9 Activists and Educators to Follow for a Revolutionary View of Climate Justice” which was part of a series that looked at “how queer and trans folks are working to protect our planet through organizing, creative expression, and insurgent pedagogy.” 

In the article, Sha Merirei explained her guiding principles behind her work: “My dad taught me that decolonization work that only focuses on your own community isn’t true decolonization work and my aunt taught me that solidarity that’s built on transactional relationships isn’t true or lasting solidarity… When it comes to the climate crisis, which is deeply rooted in anti-Indigeneity, those are two of my major guiding principles.”

Karina Sahlin
Director, Digital Strategy

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Karina Sahlin

Director of Digital Strategy

Karina is Co-Director of Digital Strategy at the Digital Climate Coalition. They bring over 10 years of strategic and organizing experience in issue advocacy, electoral work, and environmental justice.

Before joining the coalition Karina helped secure progressive victories in Minnesota, Michigan, Montana, Hawaiʻi, and New York City. She has worked with everyone from grassroots candidates who refuse to take oil, defense, or real-estate funding to large PACs advancing victories such as state-wide free and universal early childhood education and the legalization of gay marriage.

Karina specializes in creative solutions to intractable problems. They’re particularly interested in the intersection of labor and environmental justice, Indigenous-led dam removal, building power in rural communities, and anti-capitalist tactics in the impact investment space.

Cristian Sanchez
DEPUTY DATA DIRECTOR

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Cristian Sanchez

Deputy Data Director

Cristian Sanchez is the Deputy Data Director at the Digital Climate Coalition where he leads the effort to harness data and insights from across the coalition and its partners to benefit the climate movement broadly. Bringing equity and empathy to data, he spends most of his day working towards answering the question: “what is working and why?”

He began his career in energy as a mechanical engineer in Houston in 2015 where he took data from the world’s largest land-based drilling company to make energy production safer and more efficient.

In 2020, he took his analytical skills and blended them into organizing with a pro-climate congressional candidate in Iowa where he built a volunteer base that consisted of over 90 individuals, the largest volunteer network on record for his area.

He co-organized with leaders of BIPOC organizations including NAACP, LULAC, Iowa Democratic Black Caucus, and No Justice No Peace. This effort was largely due to his commitment to amplify and center BIPOC voices in the environmental justice movement.

In 2022, he looks forward to using his data analytics and engineering skillset to accelerate action on climate change with a focus on providing pro-bono data work for small-scale activist organizations.

Vanessa Zaehring
Chief of Staff

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Vanessa Zaehring

Chief of Staff

Vanessa Zaehring is the Chief of Staff at the Digital Climate Coalition. Educated at Mount Holyoke College specializing in Anthropology and Economics, Vanessa finds purpose and connection in everything she commits to. From farming to social work, from labor negotiations to scented candle production, she quickly and clearly hears echoes from past generations to envision how our actions of today ripple into the future. She joined the DCC after 7 years building and running operations at RepresentUs & RepresentUs Education Fund, a national, cross-partisan democracy reform organization. Her experience at RepresentUs as a first time COO greatly influenced her concepts of leadership and how culture, people, policy, and procedure can knit together to create coherence and flow or burnout and chaos. She believes decentralized decision making and authority is fundamental to combating burnout culture and knows integrating justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion into every fabric of work and life is the only way out of the darkness engulfing the world right now. She joined the DCC and Partnership Project because they know it too.

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