Dany Sigwalt

I help movements build power, move resources, and create systems that can hold the weight of the work.

I’m a strategist, organizer, and network builder. Right now I’m Managing Director at Green Leadership Trust and, with a group of comrades, building Circle, a movement-owned infrastructure project for relationship stewardship, governance, fundraising, and collaboration.

Portrait of Dany Sigwalt
Building Circle

Movement-owned relationship infrastructure for the work that holds movements together.

After more than a decade supporting climate and racial justice organizations, I’m building Circle alongside comrades: movement-owned relationship infrastructure for organizations that need better ways to organize, fundraise, govern, collaborate, and steward trust.

Circle comes from a simple belief: movements should not have to depend on extractive tools to manage the relationships, knowledge, and decisions that make their work possible.

Explore Circle
What I think about

I spend a lot of time thinking about:

Most of my work lives somewhere in that overlap.

What I’m working on
Where my focus is now

Circle

I’m building Circle with comrades to help movement organizations take more control over their data, relationships, and ways of working.

The goal is practical: help people organize better, fundraise better, govern better, collaborate better, and steward the trust their work depends on.

It comes out of years of supporting organizations as they navigate growth, governance, fundraising, leadership transitions, and all the infrastructure that sits underneath movement work — and it’s being built collectively, by people who know that work from the inside.

Circle is for people who:

  • feel like existing tools don’t reflect how relationships actually work
  • want to move away from feeding the extractive tech landscape
  • are navigating philanthropy while trying to stay accountable to community
  • need systems that support the work instead of creating more work
Learn about Circle

Everything below is the experience that led to Circle — more than a decade inside the systems it’s being built to support.

Governance and board work

I work with organizations that want boards to be more than a compliance structure.

That can mean helping them:

  • build boards that reflect their values and communities
  • make decisions with more clarity and shared understanding
  • move from performative accountability toward actual accountability
  • name what power the board holds, and how it should be used

I’ve supported board development and governance strategy for early-stage groups, national networks, and organizations in moments of growth, transition, or reset.

Network building

Through Green Leadership Trust and other work, I spend a lot of time building connective tissue.

That looks like:

  • connecting leaders of the global majority to positions of influence
  • building trust across organizations, sectors, and movements
  • creating spaces where people can move from relationship to strategy
  • helping networks make decisions, move resources, and act with more clarity

Green Leadership Trust includes more than 200 members working across climate, philanthropy, governance, and racial justice.

Writing and thought

I write about climate, racial justice, and power.

My work has appeared in outlets including The New York Times, and I’m the author of This Book Will Save the Planet, part of the Empower the Future series.

The through line is simple: climate change is not separate from inequality. It is one of its outcomes.

Tech, climate, and power

I pay close attention to who builds the tools movements rely on, who controls them, and who they ultimately serve.

That focus runs underneath all of this work, and it’s a large part of why I’m building Circle:

  • the physical, environmental, and colonial costs of the systems we depend on
  • what it would mean for movements to own more of their own infrastructure
  • how resources can move in ways that build power rather than dependency
  • technology designed around power building instead of extraction
A note on tech, climate, and power

Most conversations about climate and technology are happening at the wrong level.

People talk about better tools. Better data. Better models. Better dashboards.

But the climate crisis did not happen because we lacked technology. It came out of systems designed to concentrate power and extract from people and land.

If those systems stay intact, better tools just help them move faster.

The questions I care about are more basic:

Where I come from

I grew up in Washington, DC, watching gentrification, displacement, and the racial wealth gap reshape the city in real time.

I came into this work through organizing: anti-war work, housing justice, and community-based support systems.

That grounding still shapes how I think about power, responsibility, and what people owe each other.

Dany Sigwalt speaking
What I’m thinking about right now
Outside of work

Outside of work, I like to make things.

I’m usually somewhere in the middle of:

figuring out home repair, slowly and sometimes incorrectly
woodworking projects that get more complicated than they need to be
gardening, especially food connected to memory and place
fiber arts, because slow repetitive work gives my brain somewhere to land

I like understanding how things are built, whether that’s a house, a system, a board, or an organization.

Work with me

I take on a small number of projects, usually focused on:

I usually work with organizations at key transition points: growth, leadership change, strategic reset, or the moment when the old systems stop working and people need to build something stronger.

Most of that work is with organizations working toward climate and racial justice.

Selected Impact
Contact