Vrinda Manglik

Manglik is a Venture Portfolio Manager at Growald Climate Fund. She works in a grantmaking capacity, focusing on new and emerging organizations working on transforming the energy sector. She is a board member of Earthworks, a board member of Corporate Accountability, and a member of the Sarah Lawrence College Alumni Council. She was previously a Data Storyteller at Google via Adecco. Her role involved communicating about Google’s data centers and related clean energy and economic / community development activities through a variety of media, including podcasts, blogs, and white papers. They won two Webby Awards in 2022 for Season 2 of the podcast “Where the Internet Lives” (Best Technology Podcast, and the People’s Voice Award in the same category). She has also been continuing a practice of graphic nonfiction, using illustration to explain environmental issues for the San Francisco Bay Chapter of the Sierra Club. She was previously a Program Associate for Climate & Energy at the Pisces Foundation. She supported the organization’s philanthropic grantmaking to groups involved in reducing short-lived climate pollutants from global transportation, energy, waste, and manufacturing sectors. She communicated with prospective grantees and evaluates proposals, worked with the Grants Manager to ensure completion of financial and legal due diligence for each grant, prepared programmatic materials for quarterly board meetings, and presented a portion of the portfolio to the board. She was previously the Campaign Representative in the International Climate & Energy Campaign at the Sierra Club. She worked to shift public finance away from fossil fuels to renewables. and advocating for increased use of off-grid renewables and mini-grids for bottom-of-pyramid energy access in developing countries. She was also Secretary of the Yale Alumni Nonprofit Alliance of the San Francisco Bay Area Chapter. She received a Master of Environmental Management from the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies in December 2013. She was awarded a Foreign Language and Area Studies grant from the U.S. Department of Education for her first year. She participated in the 17th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in Durban, South Africa (November/December 2011) as part of a group of advisors to the Maldives. She also interned with the Permanent Mission of Papua New Guinea to the UN in New York, as part of a UN Environmental Diplomacy class she took during the fall semester. In summer 2012 she conducted independent research in Peru about mining conflicts there. She investigated the political, social, environmental dynamics, and the role of NGOs, regarding clashes between primarily foreign companies and local communities. She worked as a full-time Field Organizer on the Obama campaign in Virginia from late August through Election Day 2012. She took off a semester of school to do that and plans to graduate from the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies in December 2013. She previously worked as a Research Associate with the Environmental Law Institute. She conducted policy and legal research on post-conflict natural resource management and peacebuilding, energy subsidies, brownfields, environmental justice, international environmental governance, capacity building for environmental law and policy. After her fellowship she was hired at NRDC in their International program for a month continuing the work she had done on the India project.