Catalyst’s Organizational Values

These values are a living, breathing part of how we do business. We didn’t create them as something to aspire to — we wrote them down because they are already true. Putting something so palpable but imprecise into words was not easy, but the process was rewarding and the outcome is uniquely us.

We use these values to guide our decision making and ground our discussions. They are a reminder of what matters and having them written down is incredibly useful!

The International Cooperative Alliance’s Cooperative Principles are also an important touchstone for us — we encourage you to read them in tandem.

🍲 Nourish the Commons

When a problem is fixed in isolation, one person benefits; when it’s fixed in a shared platform, thousands do. Over time, a well-maintained commons attracts more contributors, more use cases, and more incremental improvements — a virtuous cycle that lets people solve larger problems than any organization could tackle alone.

Our work is only possible because of others’ investments in open source software and data. By returning our own work to the commons, we ensure it can serve many downstream users and use cases, ultimately having a much greater impact than if we were to put it behind a paywall.

In practice, this means that we continue building open, freely available tools, we use and contribute to existing open source products, and when we do work for clients, we encourage them to make that work publicly available. We also actively support those who build on our work — like pypsa-usa and PowerGenome — and publish our data and software with sufficient documentation to serve as a solid foundation for users to build on and contribute to in turn.

💞 Foster Meaningful Relationships

By relating to our community not just as economic entities but as whole human beings, we simultaneously strengthen and benefit from the inherent stamina and resiliency of human systems. Cultivating dialog and feedback loops with users and contributors grounds our data products in problems that actually need solving and fosters relationships through which future needs and support can flow — not just from us or to us, but through us as well. We don’t know what problems are coming, but we do know we’ll be better able to face them if we can do it as part of a network of trust built over years of showing up for one another.

Our orientation is fundamentally one of service. We want to empower others rather than just capture value for ourselves.

In practice this means keeping office hours for anyone who signs up, not because it scales, but because individuals deserve real engagement. It means introducing people in our network to one another. And it means open licenses, transparent processes, and governance structures designed to prevent tool lock-in rather than exploit it.

🧹 Raise the Floor

By taking on the basic janitorial labor of preparing data for analysis, we allow our users to spend more of their time answering questions with data, and less time wrangling it. If we can improve the starting conditions for a wide network of decarbonization case makers, we will have a much broader impact than if we focused on making one specific case ourselves.

In practice this looks like offering a wide range of high demand datasets in standardized, accessible formats vs. doing deep dives on specific or niche datasets. We want our tool to be widely applicable and useful to a broad audience. Our offerings need to be good enough to actually reduce toil, but don’t need to be cutting-edge analyses themselves.

We raise our own floor by developing internal tooling to automate basic tasks, ensuring that the worst version of what we produce is still pretty good.

🎱 The Truth Matters

The problems we work on — climate change, energy systems, infrastructure — are grounded in physical reality. Electrons flow or they don’t. Emissions accumulate whether we account for them or not. This is why truth matters to us: not because we’re naive about the power of misinformation in social and political contexts, but because the underlying physical and economic realities will eventually assert themselves regardless of what any narrative says.

This conviction drives our commitment to transparency — with our data and as an organization. We tell users about irregularities and limitations in our data even when doing so might make them more hesitant to use it. We believe this is the only way to build durable trust, and that users who rely on flawed data without knowing it are ultimately worse off — as are we, reputationally, when that catches up with them.

It also drives our commitment to making data open and accessible to all. We are personally motivated by decarbonization, but we believe that maximizing access to accurate information about our energy system is a far more effective strategy toward that goal than gatekeeping or selectively releasing data. We’d rather give everyone the best possible picture of reality and let the work proceed from there.

🐥 Take Little Steps

We found our niche in energy data and are committed to improving it one step at a time. That means publishing semi-finished and in-progress outputs — with proper documentation — with the understanding that many small improvements compound over time.

The same logic applies internally. Small organizational changes are more manageable, both emotionally and logistically, than sweeping overhauls. When something isn’t working, we identify a tractable subset of changes, try them, see what happens, and make more informed decisions from there. Sometimes a small step is all you need.

At a global level, we believe that we already have most of the solutions required to address climate change, and should be focused primarily on implementation and deployment at scale. We don’t get to choose a different starting point, and must find a short path to a zero carbon energy system that starts from where we are today. That process is inseparable from policy and politics, and the unglamorous work of dealing with incumbent interests and actually existing capital investments. Rather than pinning our hopes on a sweeping future social or technological revolution, we focus on doing the things that can be done now, one step at a time.

🏃 Pace Yourself

Climate work is a marathon, not a sprint. The challenges we’re tackling span generations, and our efforts need to be sustainable. We aim for steady, deliberate progress rather than overextension or burnout. Taking small steps is part of this, but it’s easy to fall prey to doing a million small things at once. We remind ourselves not to take on more threads than we can reasonably follow and maintain.

It’s also of utmost importance that we maintain a sustainable workplace for ourselves. As a business, we are oriented around slow, organic growth, avoiding rapid scaling or other forms of manufactured urgency. We allow members unlimited unpaid time off with a generous notification policy so our members can tend to what matters most to them and cultivate a healthy relationship with work.

🗽 Preserve Our Autonomy

Our autonomy protects our ability to act in accordance with our values.

We avoid taking actions that would jeopardize our autonomy, like being owned or controlled by an external organization, being ruled by the logic of profit maximization, or relying on a single source of income.

While it takes work to stay informed enough to meaningfully contribute to team decisions, consistently exercising our autonomy is crucial to ensuring it isn’t silently drained away. This means our decisions are democratically controlled, including deciding which clients to work with, which projects to pursue, implementing new team processes, and other aspects of our daily work. In this, our approach to autonomy is consistent with the International Cooperative Alliance principle 4, “Autonomy and Independence”.