What Do You Actually Do? Episode 68: Cass Hebron, Climate Communications Consultant

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Listen to this and all the previous episodes.

Cass is a freelance climate communications consultant in Belgium, working with NGOs, charities and ethical organisations to help them improve their communications and translate the good work they are doing into words the public and policymakers understand.

This is a fascinating conversation for anyone interested in: freelancing, working in comms and making a career in climate activism. Cass has some super interesting things to say about following your values, final year career stress and creating the job you want.

Cass graduated from York in 2019 with a degree in English Language and Linguistics. Long time listeners might remember that we spoke to Cass back in 2019 about her student internship.

Useful links:

Transcript:

Kate 

You’re listening to the what do you actually do? podcast each week we want to bring you an inspiring interview, a useful tip or encouraging message to help you find your place in the professional world. Hello and welcome to this episode of what do you actually do? My name is Kate Morris, and I’ll be your host today. In today’s episode, we’ll be talking about working in the communications sector and being a freelancer. Today, we’re joined by Cass Hebron, who works as a climate communications consultant on a range of climate justice and sustainability projects and campaigns for organisations including Friends of the Earth Europe, World Federation for Animals, European coalition for Corporate Justice and the BBC. So Cass that’s an interesting job title. What do you actually do? 

Cass 

Well, thank you for inviting me. And that is a good question because as a freelancer, my work can be quite varied. But broadly speaking, when I say climate communications consultant, what I mean is that I work with NGOs and charities and ethical organisations to improve their communications and basically translate what they’re doing and what they want into something that can be understood by policymakers or by the public or whoever they’re targeting, so this might involve drafting content for websites, blogs, press releases, articles for the papers. Social media is a big part of it, but it’s also pretty broad. Communications is very broad field and lately I’ve been doing a lot of facilitating and moderating. So what that means is that I lead workshops on how to talk more effectively about the climate in a way that gets people to listen. And I also facilitate panel events in Brussels about different climate issues and most of my work is focused on climate action at the European political levels. So I work with NGOs that are in based in Belgium’s mainly and that are trying to create better policies for sustainability and for human rights in the EU. 

Kate 

So that’s interesting, because often when we think of communications, we think of marketing. It’s outward facing stuff. It’s about a brand and a message that an organisation wants to give about a service or a product. But you’re saying what you’re doing is actually also internal communications, and that’s a really interesting element. You’ve got the facilitation side of it there. So it is, it sounds like it is a really broad role. 

Cass 

Yeah, communications is such a large word that you can really do so many different things within that, and most people tend to develop one particular niche. So. I’ve never done marketing or sales or any of that side of external communications because I’ve never worked for private companies. I’ve always worked for, yeah, nonprofits and the European Commission and the UN, where their communication is much more around political demands. It’s about creating press briefings on key issues, for example, if the European Commission is going to propose a piece of legislation that’s going to affect human rights around the world, then an NGO will be on the ready with a reaction, but also an analysis of what they think and be reaching out to various different audiences. So my particular interest is making things translatable to interested public and to get rid of the political jargon around policy making and advocacy. But you can also do so many different things. You can do internal communications, which is like making sure that organisations know what’s happening within their own organisation and being a bit more streamlined and effective. Because sometimes you know two departments can be not communicating at all, and then you don’t realise that you’re duplicating work. And it can be external things like yeah, like workshops, like actually going out there and putting on events, that’s all communication. Anything that’s trying to tell people more clearly about what you’re doing is communications. 

Kate 

How do you get the work then? How do you pitch for it? Or do people approach you? How does that side of it work? 

Cass 

Well, I have been doing this for about a full time freelancing for about two years and before that I was working full time for an NGO, first for Oxfam EU and then for friends of the Earth Europe. Through that I built up quite a lot of connections, and people knew that I was wanting to go into freelancing, so I sort of built up a portfolio, was working for them, and then some of them reach out to me. Some of the people in, in those NGOs and their partners, because they knew already that that was what I was doing. So that was really helpful to have that prior work experience and sort of already have those connections, but I know that’s also really unhelpful when people say ohh, just use your connections, because if you don’t have those connections then you need to start. So the other thing I did was just go to loads of events, events that are relevant to my interest because my niche is climate justice and corporate accountability as well. So I go to events around those topics and just talk to everyone and tell them what I’m doing. I’ve been quite fortunate in that I do have a good network here in Brussels and they often reach out to me, but I also sign up to quite a few people that share job and consultancy opportunities. LinkedIn is a really good place, not the LinkedIn job ads. Those are nightmare, but there are particular people that round up consultancy opportunities and job opportunities in the sector. So through those, I also identified a few opportunities, but the main way that I get work is through the newsletter that I run because I run this newsletter about making climate action accessible to everyone because people see that, they see that I can write and that I can edit so that I know what I’m talking about, and then they’re interested in hiring me for their organisation. 

Kate 

So just demonstrating that I know what I’m doing without waiting to be hired to prove it has been a massive help. So is that kind of what prompted you to create the Green Fix newsletter? Is it a way to showcase your work or did you have other motivations for doing that cause it must be quite a lot of work to kind of create it and maintain it alongside your paid work. 

Cass 

Yeah, it is. I think I started it not as a portfolio, I actually started it in lockdown 2 years ago because I was quite frustrated. But to be honest, it was pretty impulsive because I was working in the media team at Oxfam UK and we were getting sent internally all these emails with really cool resources like interesting articles and some courses and a scholarship opportunities and fellowships. All these different things within the climate movement that were available and at the same time I was working on these European political topics like I was working on The European Green Deal quite a lot. Meanwhile, my friends and family were really concerned about sustainability. They were reading all the headlines about the climate crisis, about the Amazon rainforest and feeling really powerless. And I was thinking we need to bridge this gap. I shouldn’t just know this information. Everybody should know what’s happening at the European level and what they can actually meaningfully do about this, rather than just recycling and then feeling guilty that you’re not recycling properly and then wondering if it even makes a difference. I wanted people to know this is exactly how you contact a politician. This is exactly how you influence a law. And this is what all these different words mean that keep cropping up in in the climate movement. So I was sort of born out of a frustration at this gap, the fact that there’s so many interested and motivated people that want to make the world a bit better and all these resources on how to do it but you aren’t reaching each other and that’s why I started The Green Fix and then it just sort of kept growing and now I am very lucky to have six volunteers helping me. Otherwise, I don’t think I would manage.  

Kate 

That’s amazing though. And just another form of communication really. Again similar to your normal work where you’re translating those kind of in-depth political policies as well as all these things that are just coming across your desk as someone on a as an insider in the industry. That’s really amazing idea to bring it all together and help people to find out about it. But yeah, as a byproduct. So I guess it is a really good way to showcase what you can do and you’re putting your money where your mouth is really aren’t you by doing something like that. 

Cass 

Well, I’m, I’m trying to. I didn’t expect it to be so well received, but I think the fact that it has grown and that we do have a good audience now, particularly within Belgium, but also the UK, is a testament partially to the fact that The Green Fix team do work very hard at it and I’m not going to sell them short, but also that there are so many interested people and people that are just waiting for the opportunity to do something better for the planet. There’s so many students and graduates and interns that reach out saying that they want to make a difference and the fact that they read The Green Fix, it’s a really good sign that more people want to make the world better than not. And yeah, as a byproduct, that means that I have made some really interesting and cool connections through the activists and the NGOs that we interview and the different opportunities I come across. So it’s been really good. In building a network, although that was never my initial aim. 

Kate 

You have a very clear mission to focus your work on environmental and social causes. How do you balance this with the inevitable freelancer’s fear of turning down work? 

Cass 

Yeah, this is a really good question because most of us are not in a privileged position to be super picky about the work that we take, particularly when you’re just a fresh out of uni or you’re hunting for a job for the first time and you’re told I remember as a student constantly getting the message from everywhere that jobs were so competitive that I’d be lucky to get anything at all, but, and you know my goal to work on client issues was was very nice, but you know, first I needed to focus on getting anything and at the same time a lot of us do have to pay rent to pay bills and focus on just actually making a living before we can say, oh, I would never work for that organisation because I don’t agree with their morals or this or that. And not everyone has the luxury of choosing, particularly early on, and I remember being very stressed out when I first said, OK, I’m gonna only work for NGOs and organisations I believe in cause I thought, who am I to say something like that when bills come in? Am I really going to die on that hill and say no, I’m still not going to take a job with an organisation that I don’t believe in? However, I have found that in my experience, which might not be the same for all, that’s just saying clearly and repeatedly, like constantly to everyone that what I wanted to do was freelance on climate action for NGOs actually helped make it happen because people had that connection in their brain already. And when they saw job opportunities, they were sending them to me. And it also creates a sort of feedback loop that when you start work for an ethical organisation or an NGO or you know something that aligns with your values, you start carving out that niche already. And then you have the one piece of experience in that which makes it easier to find more experience in that and so on and so forth. And to get the first one, perhaps you can’t work straight away for an organisation that matches your values. That that might happen. I’m not gonna go out and tell everyone like or, if you really want it, then it will happen because that’s some like toxic positivity like myth. Like the reality is that it’s a difficult economy, particularly in the UK, but you don’t have to completely compromise on your morals. There’s more than one way to get involved in causes you care about. Before you land a career in it, for example, if you need to pay the rent and you can only find jobs that that really match your values. That’s still OK like you should still, you can still volunteer, or you can still develop your own experience in that area that you wanna work in on the side and just focus on getting, you know, a roof over your head in the meantime. Also, I think that sometimes we view climate jobs or sustainability or social justice jobs as like their own niche, that if you’re not working for an NGO, then you’re not really making a difference. But thinking more broadly, pretty much every sector has a way to make a difference. So you can think more broadly about how you can make an impact like perhaps you don’t work for an NGO, but NGOs need people that are graphic designers, they need people that are IT people, they  need people working in every other sector. I always say, like every climate activist needs a plumber and every plumber can be a climate activist. So if you want to work for an NGO, but what you get is a job in plumbing, that’s great because you’re actually still helping things run smoothly. Some of the most important jobs are not the most directly connected to the issues we care about. Like teaching like care work, these things all help keep society running, but we might not think of them when we are looking for it, specifically jobs that ohh, I wanna work in climate, so I should work for a climate organisation. You can think more broadly and you can create change from inside by focusing on sustainability within the existing organisation working, even if it’s a completely different sector. So that’s a very long answer to say, there are ways. 

Kate 

No, I think it’s a great answer and I think it’s really good advice to think broadly and not just the obvious. It has to necessarily be for an NGO or a sort of a climate, you know, climate in the actual job title. It can be about making a difference in anything that you’re doing, and also that’s so kind of about the tasks of a job as well as the context of that job. Just go back to, you mentioned university there. So your degree in language and linguistics, but were also very involved in activities outside of your studies. How did your university experience impact your career? 

Cass 

It made a big difference actually, because when I was at York when I started, I sort of wanted to go vaguely into journalism or communications. I wasn’t really sure I was doing what everyone else was doing, and just imagining that life after graduation didn’t really exist because it was scary and panicking when everyone else had landed their internships and things. But then I also got interested in sustainability at the same time, and I ended up deciding to launch the student magazine on sustainability called Wild, which is still going today by existing students, which is really cool. And that was all about sustainability on a budget, but also that’s when it really clicked for me because I was doing that partially out of interest and also I thought ohh this is a good way to get experience in journalism for when I get my first random job in whatever random thing I can manage after graduation. And then the longer that I did Wild, the more I realised, ohh I could actually do this as a career. I can. I don’t have to, you know, have sustainability as a hobby whilst I accept any job in comms, I can write about sustainability and I’ve accidentally created a portfolio to show that I know how to do it. So it’s sort of shaped my whole career choice. In terms of my degree, linguistics is one of those, I feel like I’m being so honest, I don’t care, Linguistics is one of those degrees where they tell you, oh, you’re gonna get so many transferable skills, which is like code for there is nothing directly useful in a lot of the modules. Because I’m sorry Old English was amazing, but no job has ever asked me for my Anglo-Saxon English knowledge, and so people internalised like ohh God, this degree is not gonna lead to a job. But then I don’t know. I just randomly moved to Brussels, but I didn’t expect to. I got one job in Brussels and I ended up, Yeah, and I still thought ohh, Linguistics was super interesting, but how’s it gonna be relevant? Ohh, it was so relevant everyone I work with has like a different first language. I’m the usually the only English native speaker and a lot of the things that I’m editing and translating are for non-native audiences and having that knowledge of different language structures and being able to communicate interculturally has been so useful also, just in general has made me a more effective writer, editor, communicator. And I have actually ended up using a lot of linguistic theories, even if nobody knows what I’m using them. And then I’m like. Huh. OK, those transferable skills were actually more directly relevant than I thought, but nobody has asked for my Old English yet. 

Kate 

Well, you know, there’s still time. I remember when we were first chatting when you kindly agreed to be on the podcast when you were a student and you had just done an internship and I remember that actually you kind of started freelancing from that point because the internship had gone so well. So I wonder if that gave you the taste for, look, you can build a job for yourself. It doesn’t have to be an employer. I can pick a mix and build this for myself with. Is that fair to say or did that kind of did you go down more the freelancing route at a later stage, regardless of those earlier experiences? 

Cass 

I think I knew I wanted to be a freelancer even at uni, but I think I thought it was too unrealistic. It was like my 10 year plan or something. And yeah, I did start at freelancing after that internship with the York City Council with Make It York, and that was really helpful in realising that this is something that I can actually do. And then over time, because it hadn’t really clicked then that was just like, oh, this is really cool. You can do this part time and try some freelancing and then I kept up freelancing always part time and whilst I was working full time and then eventually it kind of clicked that I can invent my own job like nobody can actually stop me doing that that you spend a lot of time looking for an organisation that is providing the exact job that you want to do and getting frustrated when it’s not there. But I could just start saying ohh I’m a freelance writer on climate issues and I said it even before I was getting hired for that. But then it became true, because that’s what people thought I was there for, and therefore what they hired me for. And since then I’ve been very much like, wow, you actually can invent your own job. Like, OK, there’s limits or somethings. You need qualifications, but you have more ownership over your career than we’re told that we do. We can just work towards doing what actually energises us, because when we follow the things that we’re really interested in, we have the energy to put in the extra work. And that motivated me a lot as well at. 

Kate 

On that then what kind of personal strengths or qualities would you say you need to have to have in order be both successful but also happy working in freelance communications? 

Cass 

Oh my God. Successful, but also happy. You need to have really thick skin and also like almost an insane level of confidence that things will work out because one of the hardest parts of freelancing is the instability. There’s financial instability, there’s work instability, you lose projects, they go for someone else. You’re not sure where your next month income will come from. So it can be really hard and it’s very easy and understandable to crack and say no, this isn’t for me. And a lot of people do. And that’s absolutely fine, because you do need to be a little bit unhinged to keep at it, particularly in the first year, which is usually the hardest to get off the ground. So you need to have a very strong internal motivation for why you want to freelance, not just because you think it will be cool to work from different places cause in my experience, I had that in my head but all it ended up being was me on loads of trains staring at loading pages on my screenthinking ohh God, why did I try and work and travel at the same time? So don’t do it for the idealised reasons of freelancing, but have a real strong reason for why you want to pursue that and a lot of internal faith that it will work out. The other thing that I had to learn the hard way is imposing really strict work life boundaries because freelancers tend not to work the usual 9 to 5 and I worked with clients in other time zones, so it’s very easy for your work day to suddenly stretch across all hours of the day because you want to be reachable all the time in case you lose out on work or a key client. But this is a good way to overwork yourself so I think imposing those boundaries from the start and maintaining them is really key. 

Kate 

So it sounds like you’ve gotta be comfortable with risk. You’ve gotta be naturally optimistic. And yeah, having that self-discipline to, to structure your time a bit or impose a structure to your time. What do you really love about the work then? What’s the sort of best and worst aspects of being a freelancer in in climate communications? 

Cass 

I would say. Well, I’ll start with the worst thing so that then I can sort of transition to the positive. The worst thing is, again the instability on the freelancing part is the instability of constantly having to think about where your next project will come from and your next month of income and doing all the budgeting and all the things that are usually handled by an employer. You have to think about like how you’re going to afford time off and sick leave and things like that. That’s there’s so much more budgeting and planning. Half of my life is just me budgeting and planning, which is also really boring and on the climate side, particularly in mine, there’s a big problem with sort of economic anxiety, but also activist burnout because you work on these very overwhelming issues that people are working on. Human rights violations on corporate exploitation or the climate disasters biodiverse has collapsed, that’s really difficult. Like emotionally and to think about that all the time does take a toll that you need to take breaks from. And those breaks can be hard to come by when you’re a freelancer, so I’m not gonna, like, sort of sugar coat it. It’s a really hard combination at the same time, there are reasons that I do what I do. And I think the best thing about my job is that I have so many amazing connections with the people that I work with that are because I’ve worked with so many different organisations and on different projects that while it’s easy to focus on how many things are going wrong around the world and how stressful it is, I now also see one a huge number of solutions and amazing activists out there and motivated people. And every new organisation that I work with, I’m meeting more really inspiring people that keep going and then that motivates me to keep going and also with the instability comes a lot of spontaneity and things that I could never expect. I never expected that a branch of the UN would ask me to make a podcast for them. I could never have predicted that, but then I ended up doing that and it was, Right, well, OK, it was my first podcast. It’s not great, but like, it was a great experience. So I kind of love that. I don’t know what my next months are going to look like and that’s scary, but also really a much more exciting way to live then thinking, OK, I all my work days are gonna look the same for the next, however many months I stay at this organisation so that really appeals to me as quite a impulsive, active high energy person. 

Kate 

So for students or recent grads who are thinking about kind of following your footsteps kind of thing. What do you think will be the key challenges for the climate communications sector over the next few years? What should people be anticipating and perhaps researching or thinking about? 

Cass 

I think when it comes to climate communications, there’s like two sides to it. There’s climate communications geared towards the general public, so people that aren’t actively involved in in political lobbying and policy making. And then there is that political side of climate comms. And they sometimes operate as too slightly disconnected bubbles. I think some of the major challenges are coming up around the best way to frame climate issues in a way that actually creates meaningful action. I mean, this is the big question of climate change. But whereas the first few years, like the last 10 years, where it really picked up in the public consciousness that the climate crisis is real, one of the issues was just making people aware of it and making people care, and now everybody cares and everybody is aware, generally speaking, so that’s not really the main goal anymore. Now what we need to do is make it clear that all these different social and environmental issues are actually connected, that you can’t disconnect talking about human rights issues and economic inequality and the rise of authoritarianism and biodiversity loss. These are not separate. These are all connected because they’re all symptoms of the same issue, which is a system that fundamentally doesn’t work economically and politically. But drawing those connections is really complicated but so necessary to make sure we are not accidentally greenwashing by making people think ohh, there’s a climate crisis so if you just go zero waste, then you’re doing like the most effective thing. Like zero waste is cool, it’s good but there are so many more meaningful things we can do that have a much more effective impact on fixing both social issues and climate issues. Another big issue is going to be stamping out greenwashing and harmful narratives around the climate crisis, particularly the rise of eco fascism, which is like myths that we see going around the Internet like overpopulation being the cause of the climate crisis, or the only way to actually lower emissions is to impose order more than totalitarian governments on people to make sure that we are staying out of the climate crisis. These kind of myths are being promoted by far right groups. And they easy to prey on, like, scared and motivated young people. And you know, all age groups that want to make a difference. So it’s making sure you’re fighting that. Also, if you’re just starting out in climate communications, it’s learning which organisations are actually making a difference and which ones are greenwashing. Because that’s such a big problem these days as companies making their net zero pledges or you know H&M with their circular chain as if like that fixes the fact that all of their othe clothes are not circular at all, and even their circular chain is not circular anyway, it’s not accidentally promoting solutions that aren’t real and making sure that your climate comms is actually highlighting real solutions. Solutions that help people and the planets that connect all of these different issues, as well as general challenges facing communications, like fake news, misinformation, chat gpt and there is a lot going on in communications and future in digital technology is going to be like one of the greatest tools, but also one of the greatest challenges. And people are gonna be bombarded by information. So we just need to make sure that we stay true to transparency, to actual solution sharing and to not accidentally promoting things that we don’t want for society. 

Kate 

So it sounds like using those skills that we would, that one develops in university to have those really strong critical thinking skills and the research skills to be able to actually fact check things and question different narratives. Yeah, that sounds really interesting. Is there anything else in terms of advice for students thinking about working in the sort of sector generally perhaps? Or being a freelancer or shaping your career in line with your values and you’ve touched on that quite a bit already, but is there any? It sounds like work experience was a key thing for you and getting a job where you were employed sort of at the start of your career to build up those contacts is, is there anything else that you would advise people who want to get a taster for this and find out if it is for them that they have a go at? 

Cass 

Yeah, I think what I would say is that if I had to do things differently, I’m very happy with how my career is panning out. I’m very lucky that I have landed in, in the job that I set out to do. And that I’ve managed to go to an NGO straight after uni, that the chances of all of that was pretty astronomical. But I also think that I was so concerned with having done it all and trying everything as soon as possible, and the idea that if I didn’t land a job that matched my values straight away that I would sign off any chance of doing that in the future. And I felt so much pressure both at uni but also in the first two years after graduation that I had to work super hard or otherwise I wasn’t gonna land the next thing, and that the more I did, the more the greater the chances were of my career success. But in doing so, I did sacrifice a lot of my actual other values. I was focusing entirely on my value on my, yeah, passion for climate justice and neglecting other values, but then I try to promote one of my key messages is that in the system that we’re living in promotes things like overwork and burnouts, and accepting low pay when we’re worth more much more than that, and hustle culture and things like this, being really toxic. And actually part of the problem, but at the same time I was buying into that, I was overworking, I was accepting low pay for jobs that I really cared about but that sends out the message that these ways of living are acceptable, and that it’s the best that we can do. So what I would do would be to slow down. This feels impossible, particularly in the last year of uni where everybody seems to have their plans except for you. But if I had slowed down a lot more I could still have got to the job that I’m in today, but with a lot more time to actually reflect on what I wanted, what I felt about, help me to evaluate whether taking a job for low pay was actually going to serve me, or whether it was just going to drain my energy whilst making me work overtime and then taking away time from pursuing opportunities that might have suited me better. So it was making my lifestyle match my values and not just the job I work in that I wish I had started a lot sooner and what I’m trying to do now, so that would be my advice to students like we have loads of time, loads of time. Everyone says the opposite like ohh the planet’s got seven years and you have to find your graduate job straight away. No, you don’t. You’ve literally got, like, 50 years of your career. It’s OK if you haven’t figured it out in the first one or two. Like try different things. It’s all good. It’s all fine. 

Kate 

That’s such amazing advice. I see so many worried final year students and recent grads who feel exactly as you’ve described that real sense of panic and almost a sense of failure that they’ve not figured it out or sorted it out. And it’s like, actually, you know, just take things one step at a time and a decision you make now doesn’t necessarily determine the rest of your life. You can you know, there’s still a way back. If you’ve made a wrong turn, you can, you know, it’s a stepping stone to other things. And you learn more about yourself, the more things you try out and refine what it is that you want. But I really like your point around living your values and placing yourself and your health at the heart of that as well as those moral values and caring about the external world. You’ve gotta care about that internal world as well. Thanks so much for taking time to do this today, Cass, for more info about the careers you’ve mentioned today, I’m gonna add some relevant links to the episode description. I’ve got a link to The Green Fix newsletter and a link to the full transcript of today’s show. But yeah, thank you. It’s been really lovely talking to you and I really appreciate you taking the time to do this. 

Cass 

Well, thank you for inviting me. It’s been a real pleasure. And yeah, if anyone has any questions about freelancing or climate action, then they can reach out. I also created an article on The Green Fix which is a giant compilation of career resources for finding a job in sustainability and social justice. So check that out if that’s interesting too. 

Kate 

Brilliant. Well, we’ll put a link to that on the show notes as well, but yeah. Thank you very much.