Earth Hacks: A Reponse to COVID-19

Over the past months and years, we have been working closely with all of you to change the face of environmental innovation. We wanted to build a coalition of environmental justice-focused tech activists through community-based hackathons hosted at universities across the country. Hackathons are incredibly human-intensive, and we have a responsibility to protect our community and act in the interest of public health while still upholding our mission of empowering hackers to generate solutions to the climate crisis. In light of the COVID-19 pandemic, Earth Hacks will be shifting to online content, resources, and programs for the foreseeable future.

We all have seen the rapid and unsettling changes due to the COVID-19 pandemic. We understand the anxiety and distress that the lost jobs, missed opportunities and disrupted lifestyle have created because we’re facing it too. We are a community of innovators, but some of us will be in circumstances that render us unable to take action to the extent we would have liked, or even unable to take care of ourselves and our families in the way we would hope.

We want to highly encourage dialogue between all of us in the Earth Hacks community on ideas, resources, and stories about family, friends, or your own responses to the pandemic and to let us know if there’s something you think we could be doing better to support you during this time. The COVID-19 pandemic presents a huge challenge for all of us, but environmental innovators and activists are uniquely suited to support healthcare workers and others on the frontlines tackling it.

For those who are in a stable position and are able to contribute to relief efforts, we are assembling resources for you to do so. Here is a list of resources from our friends, partners, and organizations whose work we trust on different ways to contribute to existing COVID-19 efforts. We want to do what we can to support efforts against the pandemic, but we also want to take pre-emptive measures against the climate crisis to prevent scenarios like this from becoming all too common. The response to COVID-19 shows that it is possible to mobilize and bring people together to fight a problem like the climate crisis that affects us all — especially the most vulnerable.

We thank all of the healthcare and essential service providers keeping our society functioning right now. We want to carry the momentum of this moment forward, and not lose all the gains we have made towards a more just and sustainable world. Sit tight, hold on and we’re here for you. Stay tuned for more and stay healthy.

With love,

The Earth Hacks Team