If you grow and do not have good diversity policies in place, you will miss out on financial returns and opportunities - Wallis van Oorschot Grant, Climate-KIC

‍Wallis van Oorschot Grant is a Social Impact Delivery Lead at Climate-KIC, where she focuses on supporting startup founders, innovators, and leaders to embed inclusivity and diversity into their businesses, investments, and programmes. Her work ranges from advising a startup building sustainable electric vehicles for gig drivers (such as those in food delivery or ride-hailing) on how to better address women’s safety concerns, to helping a highly technical startup diversify its leadership by hiring a female CTO after previously having an all-male team.

She led the development of Climate KIC's Gender and Inclusivity plan for 2025-2026, and co-founded Climate-KIC's justice, equity, diversity and inclusion working group. She’s also the co-founder of Feminist Climate Action in Amsterdam, collaborative network running events and meet-ups on the theme of gender equality and the climate crisis.

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At Climate-KIC, as they work mostly with climate-focused startups, Wallis says that given their commitment to making a positive impact in the world, it gets easier to show them how social inequalities, such as gender, are something they should be thinking about as they grow their business. 

“We work closely with start-ups through personal evaluations, workshops and one-to-one mentoring to understand where they currently are in terms of gender imbalance and how they can take actions to address this in their hiring, leadership, product/service development and marketing. 

We don’t want this to be something ‘extra’ they have to add on but a way to tweak and change the processes they are already doing to make them more inclusive. We always say that once you’ve done it once, it becomes a habit and that’s our goal. 

Practical actions can include anything from doing first-round interviews for a new role with only women candidates to offering equitable parental leave policies, to representative testing groups that are gender balanced. 

As Climate KIC, we’ve created a free-to-access resource - listed at the end of this interview - for start-ups to be able to assess their own position on gender equality and give tailored actions on how to improve this across your business operations.” 

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As startups grow, however, competing priorities can easily push inclusion down the list. For Wallis, this is a critical mistake, one that can have both social and financial consequences.

‍“If you do grow and do not have good policies in place to have diverse staff or to target diverse customer bases, we know that you will miss out on financial returns and opportunities to expand and grow your business. 

What we always try to drive home is that making small changes and tweaks to the processes now can save you time and money in the long run. For example, thinking about an anti-harassment policy now as a small business can allow any issues in the future to be dealt with swiftly and effectively for all involved.”

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While much of this work focuses on startups, Climate-KIC is also working to influence the wider ecosystem that shapes them. This includes partnerships with entrepreneurship support organisations (ESOs) as well as investors.

‍“Beyond start-ups, we work with entrepreneurship support organisations (ESOs) to help them embed inclusion in their organisations and programmes and also to run dedicated programmes for under-represented founders, such as women, youth, people with disabilities, etc. We do this through giving funding, workshops and technical assistance to help the climate innovation ecosystem strengthen their skills when it comes to inclusion.

VCs are definitely the hardest nut to crack when it comes to inclusion. This is because they do tend to be dominated by men from a particular background and we see this reflected in the fact that worldwide, less than 2% of VC funding goes to women-founded start-ups. To change the system, first and foremost, we need to see more women and diverse people taking roles in VCs to shift the system from within. 

Beyond diversifying VC staff, we also need VCs who are more aware of impact and social inclusion to be leading the change and sharing examples and practical tips of how they have achieved this. There are already a lot of great resources from organisations such as 2X Global that showcase case studies on how to embed gender more effectively in funds and portfolio management. 

At Climate KIC, we are currently working on a practical guide for investors to embed inclusivity throughout the investment cycle, and this will be openly available by May so keep an eye out!”

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When it comes to concrete actions, Wallis emphasises that inclusion is not just about policies, but about creating real opportunities within organisations. For startups, this can start with investing in internal talent and building pathways for growth.

“For example, we worked with Deed Technologies, a circular start-up based in Nairobi that refurbishes second-hand laptops to offer them at an affordable price. They offered structured technical training with clear career progression pathways for low-income workshop staff, and they had a former cleaning staff member upskilled to technician, now holding a permanent contract. This is about seeing potential of someone already invested in your organisation and supporting them to achieve a new career path.”

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From an investor perspective, she believes accountability is key to driving change across the industry. 

“For VCs, I think making clear, public targets for gender parity at an organisation and fund level pushes the industry to change, which in turn creates better funding opportunities for women-founded impact organisations. VCs like Atomico who track, measure and publish their diversity statistics every year to have accountability over their actions, and Rubio Impact Ventures who have a majority female General Partners (GPs) and a strong internal commitment to team diversity that is then present in the businesses they invest in.”

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At the same time, she stresses the importance of understanding the local context in which inclusion efforts take place.

"It’s very important to be aware of the political and social context of the countries and communities you are working with. However, as a global organisation, we cannot be experts in the nuance of every context. What is important is that we offer space for participants to share their experiences, whether it’s how issues of social inclusion have impacted them in the professional setting or in a personal setting. This gives us more of an in-depth understanding of what the context is and can allow us to tailor one-to-one mentoring sessions to meet participants at the level they are at.” 

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Looking ahead, Wallis remains optimistic about the direction of the climate startup ecosystem, particularly as more diverse founders enter the space with firsthand experience of the challenges they aim to solve. She also points to artificial intelligence as a force that could both accelerate and challenge progress in the space.

“Every day I get to work with incredible founders from all walks of life that are passionate and steadfast in their mission to bring solutions to some of the biggest issues we face in the climate crisis. 

I believe we will only see this grow as more people are personally impacted by extreme weather as those on the frontline often have the most interesting and effective solutions to offer. However, we need VCs and the wider funding landscape to wake up to the untapped potential out there and to start fixing their own biases as these are getting in the way of creating impact and making money.

As for AI, its impact is a bit of a double-edged sword. I think we’re going to see AI tools lower the barrier to building technical expertise, for example, reducing the need for expensive and drawn-out prototyping phases, and this is great for founders that lack capital in the early stages of venture building. 

In addition, there are many AI-powered ideas that offer interesting decentralised solutions to climate adaptation issues such as community-monitoring tools. However, the current governance and roll out AI lacks political oversight and risks deepening inequalities and climate impacts by concentrating its power in the hands of the tech bros in Silicon Valley. I’d like to see genuine policy innovation on a national and European level to distribute ownership of AI and its potential, allowing it to be used positively for people and the planet.” 

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If you want to learn more, here are some useful inclusivity-related resources for startups and VCs:

“From Climate-KIC's side, I would recommend our gender mainstreaming handbook for start-ups (in English, Spanish and French) which is an easy-to-use guidebook for start-ups to assess their gender mainstreaming level and learn about the practical actions they can take to embed further gender equity across hiring, leadership, brand building and marketing. 

For VCs, I would recommend the JEDI investing toolkit & the Gender and Climate Toolkit from 2X Global.”

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Thank you, Wallis van Oorschot Grant!