Plan Your Event for Penn Climate Week in October
Save the date: Climate Week at Penn will be held October 5-9, 2026. Our theme will be Empowerment and Action. We invite you to begin planning to be part of seventh annual campus-wide program.
Momentum around climate action has been building steadily on campus for many years, and last year’s Climate Week saw engagement flourish. We had our biggest draw ever with more than 1,000 community members turning out for our keynote event with Bill Nye the Science Guy, and hundreds more attended the 50-plus additional events held in the Climate Week Tent on College Green, on Locust Walk, and in many other locations on campus and online. Climate action happens year-round at Penn, and Climate Week offers the community a chance to highlight the many ways Penn faculty, staff, and students are doing this important work—and to bring even more people into the fold.
As the spring semester winds down and summer begins, we encourage you to think about how to engage and involve your communities in Climate Week this fall. Past Climate Week events have run the gamut from in-person, hands-on activities, to Zoom panel discussions, to tabling events, to community tours, and more.
If you are interested in hosting an event, please review our Event Guide updated for 2026.
Faculty: We’d love to have you build Climate Week into your fall courses. Consider offering extra credit to students who attend events or plan to bring your class to a panel discussion, lecture, or film screening.
Students: We’d love for you to take initiative in your clubs or on your own to develop event offerings in October! Contact us if you need support.
Climate Week at Penn is supported by the staff of the Office of the Vice Provost for Climate Science, Policy, and Action, or Penn Climate, and we’re pleased to have added new members from around campus to the core organization committee (listed below). Penn Climate, along with the Kleinman Center for Energy Policy and the Vagelos Institute for Energy Science and Technology, are this year’s Climate Week sponsors.
We will be in touch over the summer with information on how to submit your event so that it will appear on the Climate Week at Penn website. We will also tell you about the timing of major events so that we can avoid unnecessary time conflicts.
Please reach out if we can help brainstorm events or forge connections to broaden your reach. We look forward to working with you on the next Climate Week at Penn!
All best,
The Climate Week Core Organizing Team:
Katie Baillie, Director of University and Community Engagement, Penn Climate
Patrick Bransfield, Executive Assistant, Penn Climate
Melissa Charenko, Assistant Professor, Department of History and Sociology of Science
Bill Cohen, Associate Director, Kleinman Center for Energy Policy
Nadine Gruhn, Managing Director, Vagelos Institute for Energy Science and Technology
Lorena Grundy, Practice Assistant Professor, Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering
Jon Hawkings, Assistant Professor, Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences
Kate La Spina, Program Manager, Penn Climate
Nina Morris, Sustainability Director, Penn Sustainability Office
Heidi Wunder-Riegel, Associate Director of Communications and Marketing, Penn Climate