In the summer of 2019, my good friend Cecile called me with a thought that struck a chord: "Isn’t it about time," she asked, "to coordinate the people in technology who care about using tech for positive impact, so they can become stronger together?"
It struck a chord because, at that point, I had been using technology to contribute to a better planet for all life for more than 20 years. And while I saw many others working toward the same goal, the collective progress still didn’t seem to match the scale of the challenges we face.
I wasn’t the only one Cecile called. Together, we gathered a group of like-minded individuals and launched the Global Impact Tech Alliance in Tel Aviv in January 2020.
Of course, as is often the case with new ventures, we didn’t have a clear blueprint for what we were doing. We had plenty of ideas about what we wanted to achieve, and we set out to pursue them, but we also knew that a long learning journey lay ahead. From the very beginning, we asked the community of impact tech practitioners what their biggest needs were, and then we focused on helping the community co-create solutions to address those needs.
In hindsight, we now call this phase one. It produced beautiful results, with countless active practitioners across Israel, Germany, Finland, and many other places. However, it also required us to ask deeper questions about what we truly meant by "impact" and "technology." For those of us working to build GITA, these questions became the core focus of phase one, prompting us to refine our understanding and intentions as we moved forward.
As we dove into deep thought and conversation around these and many other questions, we encountered incredible individuals who had spent significant time understanding and articulating the systemic shifts underlying and driving our ambitions with GITA.
Phase two emerged naturally from this journey in the form of the Master Series, an invitation for the community to engage directly with some of the leading minds of our time. Our hope was that these encounters and deep discussions would generate profound insights for participants, helping them see the world in a more nuanced and interconnected way. As a result, they would become more precise in targeting technology and more thoughtful in allocating resources toward meaningful impact.
While some of this might have happened for participants, the most significant insight came for us—the team building GITA. We finally started to see where, how, and why technology could be applied to make a fast and meaningful contribution. We also began to understand what kinds of technology were truly appropriate for this task. Based on the principles I described last week, we now refer to these as **heliogenic technologies**—technologies that, like the sun, foster and sustain life, working in harmony with natural systems rather than depleting or disrupting them.
The other insight, which now seems almost obvious in hindsight, was that cities are on the front lines of climate chaos, experiencing the full brunt of its challenges. This gives them a strong incentive to solve a new set of urgent problems. At the same time—and in contrast to rural areas—cities have access to a wealth of resources, both in terms of capital and infrastructure. Most critically, cities are better positioned to make political decisions quickly and decisively, as they are not as entangled in the multipolar traps that often paralyze national governments. This combination of urgency, resources, and agility makes cities powerful agents of change.
We paired this insight with a growing index of over 5 million impact startups and a large language model capable of identifying the ones most relevant to specific needs. The result is a not-for-profit consulting product targeted at cities: we help identify infrastructural gaps that can be addressed with heliogenic technologies and then direct exactly those solutions to tackle the issues at scale. This approach allows cities to rapidly implement impactful, sustainable technologies that align with their unique challenges, leveraging the best innovations to create lasting change.
I began this series with GITA because it perfectly highlights both aspects of the pathway toward a heliogenic civilization: coordination and materiality. GITA's work embodies how these two pillars come together to create meaningful impact. Next week, we’ll continue by focusing on coordination within the national political space, exploring how systemic change can be driven at a larger scale.