The name Subak comes from 9th century Indonesia. It is a cooperative system developed by rice farmers for sharing water, which allowed them to grow and thrive despite difficult environmental conditions. At Subak, we apply this ethos to data. By collectivising resources and infrastructure, we enable organisations to collaborate to speed progress.

Subak finds, funds and scales not-for-profit organisations that are tackling climate change through a data-driven approach. Our community shares data openly via our Data Cooperative, to remove silos and unlock insights. We have offices in the UK and Australia, but our Accelerator Members and Fellows are global.

Head to our Get Involved page to check out ways you can get involved and support our work.

Whilst our Accelerator programme currently only supports APAC and Europe, our Fellowship programme is global. You can find out how to get involved here.

Organisations applying to Subak UK must be incorporated and headquartered in Europe. Organisations based in APAC should apply to Subak Australia.

Yes, the Subak Accelerator is only open to organisations that operate as not-for-profits.

Subak’s definition for being a ‘not-for-profit’ includes private organisations that are either charities or private companies limited by guarantee without share capital (or the equivalent in your country of operation).

This can include social enterprises/CIC’s, charities, and Ltd companies limited by guarantee without share capital, as well as other incorporations where being a ‘not-for-profit’ is explicitly defined in your articles of incorporation.

Alternatively, our Fellowship is open to any individual with an idea for a data-driven climate project, and all companies, organisations and individuals will be able to contribute and access our Data Cooperative.

We are looking for an explanation of the potential for your organisation to scale its impact. This might mean expanding to new geographies, or moving into new sectors which ultimately allow a growth of your impact on climate action/mitigation.

Tackling climate change depends on engaging people from all backgrounds and sectors of society in developing solutions. Climate change must be approached as an issue of race, class, and gender. We therefore collect demographic data as part of our wider effort to create a diverse, inclusive, accessible and safe space for people of all backgrounds to participate in climate action.

Runway measures how much money does your organisation needs to operate, and how long it could survive without new funding coming in. We would like you to estimate your runway in months, e.g. how many months could your organisation operate (given your current burn rate and booked income) before you would run out of money?

We do not require that all organisations have raised funding or generated revenue. However, we do require that all organisations have at least 3 months of runway at the start of the programme (e.g. from personal savings, other income, etc., and excluding the funding you would receive through the programme). This is to ensure that you are able to engage and fully participate in the programme.

Impact is tricky to measure and there is no ‘one size fits all’ approach, especially given the variation between different approaches to climate action. We do not expect you to carry out a full quantitative impact assessment but we do expect you to have a hypothesis on the size or scale of the climate market/issue you look to influence. Please define the problem area and size (e.g. geographical area or population), describe the baseline scenario versus the project scenario, and estimate the climate impact you would look to achieve if you are successful.

The Accelerator is a fully funded programme and there is no cost to participate.

The UK and Europe cohort will have an in-person kickoff at Subak’s London HQ at the start of the programme. The cost of meals and training will be covered, but participants will need to arrange their own accommodation and transport.

The funding we provide is unrestricted, core grant funding.

We don’t want to waste anyone’s time, so here are a list of things Subak does not fund:

• Organisations that are in the idea stage

• Organisations that don’t have 3 months runway

• For-profit companies

• Startups for which the United States is the beneficiary country

Subak has a preference for organisations that have mitigation as their key focus area, however we do appreciate the importance of adaptation and resilience and still encourage organisations to apply.

Unfortunately, we are unable to give feedback to all applicants. Whilst we would love to share feedback on every application we receive, we are a small team and we receive a lot of applications, so we would not be able to offer high-quality and constructive feedback to each applicant.

However, all applicants who reach the interview stage will receive feedback on their application, including the strengths as well as any areas for improvement.

You can ask clarifying questions about the application form, process, or eligibility criteria via email to joanna@subak.org if you are applying to the Europe Accelerator and rockyath@subak.org if you are applying to the APAC Accelerator. However, as we’re a small team dealing with a large number of applications, we are unable to speak to individual applicants until after you have submitted the form.

We will also be running Q&A sessions before we open Accelerator recruitment in 2023, where you can ask the team any questions you have about the Accelerator.

For the Europe Accelerator, grant payments are phased as follows:

• £3k on commencement of the programme

• £3.5k following the mid-point review

• £3.5k following the end-point review

We consider the following:

• Engagement: At least 70% attendance at programme sessions

• Data ready to be mapped in the Data Catalogue

• Execution against KPIs

• Financial solvency

Applications open: January 23 - March 17

Interviews: March 27 - 31

Offers extended: April 3 - 7

Onboarding: April 24 - May 12

Cohort 2 Accelerator: May 15 - July 28

We will be supporting up to 8 organisations in the Europe cohort and up to 6 organisations in the Australia cohort.

Our programme is hybrid and spans 3 months. We invite up to two leaders from your organisation to attend the kick-off event at our London HQ in person, and participate in the remainder of the programme virtually. We expect the weekly time commitment to be around 3 to 5 hours.

At Subak, we’re focused on helping you figure out the best ways to build strong fundamentals to scale your organisation and achieve the most impact. Our programme is bespoke and informed by the needs and stage of where your organisation is in its journey.

At the start of the Accelerator, your organisation will undergo a bespoke diagnostic assessment and we will guide you to set relevant milestones around our four key pillars of business, data, tech and impact. Each week will consist of 3 hours of interactive workshops, 1 hour of peer working sessions and 1:1 office hours with the Subak team, mentors and advisors.

The topics covered include marketing, branding PR, finance, legal, people operations, leadership, policy, fundraising, data, tech and impact.

At the end of the Accelerator, you should have the fundamentals to:

• Execute a fundraising plan

• Create a marketing and comms strategy

• Manage a team and board

• Manage data effectively

There will be an in-person kick-off at our London HQ at the start of the programme. All other sessions will be run virtually.

We’re also actively searching for mentors who have the skills, time and passion to enrich our programme, and for funders who want to learn more about our members.

Find our how you can get involved.

The Fellowship is awarded to an individual applicant, but you can be working as part of a team to deliver the project. You could be working for a company or a non-profit, where you are extending the work that is being conducted. If this is the case, please do ensure you have the full permission from the organisation in question to use any of their data or assets.

We accept applications from anywhere in the world. Subak currently has two nodes in Australia and the UK - and growing. We support Fellows from the closest node to them.

Measuring impact is one of the hardest areas of climate action. For the Fellow projects in particular, we are looking for results which will enable others to make analysis, reports or insights into the climate crisis and solutions which would not have been possible otherwise. Things you should consider when evaluating the impact of your project are: if there is a gap in this data, is this data in an area of importance to tackling climate change, would this gap be filled by other parties, who are the users of the results of your project?

No. Subak supports action in preventing future greenhouse gas emission or removing greenhouse gasses from the atmosphere.

There are many cloud hosting tools which allow you to publish data or analysis. Some are paid, but there are many free, such as GitHub or figshare. We do not make recommendations, or have preferences for tools to use, as long as the results are accessible to others and have a permissive licence. Subak can give advice through the project on tools to host data and licences.

Yes. We understand that there may be some data which is not desirable or possible to make open. We assess the applications on the basis of the data which is made open, as long as you are clear in the application which parts are open and closed.

Yes, you can engage partners to help you perform some of the work or to pay for services such as data. However the grant may not be used for hardware purchases and the amount of the grant given to third parties should not exceed 50% of the grant.

Each Fellowship project will run between three and twelve months.

We believe open data is a key driver of innovation However too often in the climate sector, valuable insights remain siloed within organisations. Climate data is opaque, messy and locked away. We’re looking to change that by connecting climate data to improve climate outcomes.

The Data Cooperative will allow Subak members, fellows and other climate change organisations to support stronger climate insights, identify climate risks and opportunities, and to measure climate impact.

The Data Cooperative is three things:

• A community of likeminded folks

• Guidance and documentation for your open climate data journey

• The Data Catalogue - a web portal of open data assets, the first of many tools we'll build

The Subak Data Catalogue is a collection of climate and energy data resources, starting with data created and curated by our Member Organisations, the datasets they use in their work, and expanding to a wider range of datasets into the future. We believe curating datasets that are well documented and clearly connected can accelerate our ecosystem - our Data Cooperative community.

Anyone who makes use of climate data. Our first users are the analysts, researchers and engineers at non-profit organisations fighting climate change. We know there are a multitude of different people who use climate data for a huge range of different tasks and we hope to serve a range of different communities.

Visit our Data Catalogue and create an account and let us know at datacooperative@subak.org what data you would like to share. We can then make you an admin for an organisation. You'll be able to create datasets for that organisation. Any submission will need to be moderated before it goes live on the website. Any issues, get in touch.