Anna Menke
Senior Hubs Manager
About
Anna Menke is CATF’s Senior Hubs Manager. Anna leads CATF’s engagement on hydrogen hubs development in the U.S., ensuring cohesion in our strategy across all regions of the U.S. and CATF’s programs.
Anna comes to CATF from Elemental Excelerator, a climate tech incubator that supports at portfolio of 150+ startups building climate solutions in the energy, mobility, water, agriculture, and circular economy sectors. At Elemental, Anna launched and led Elemental’s Policy Lab, a new initiative within the organization focused on accelerating policy to support equitable climate tech innovation. Joining as the first hire, Anna built the foundation for Elemental’s policy work. She designed, managed, and scaled support offerings to help Elemental’s portfolio of 150+ startups build strategies to engage with government and navigate opportunities created by the Inflation Reduction Act , Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, and other emerging policies. Anna also launched and managed a Policy Fellowship program, recruiting expert career public policy strategists from city government, state agencies, and nonprofits to spend a year working closely with the Elemental team and portfolio designing innovative policy ideas and toolkits to help climate technologies scale equitably.
Prior to Elemental, Anna worked in impact investing at the Draper Richards Kaplan Foundation (DRK) where she lead sourcing and due diligence for deals spanning education, racial justice, gender equity, income inequality, and global and mental health, and climate. She started her career at the Environmental Defense Fund where she helped launch and organize a coalition of Fortune 500 CEOs to advocate for federal climate policies. She also worked with EDF’s Political Affairs teams at the state level to design and run state-level campaigns, activating local business leaders to advocate for clean energy policies in their states. The common thread across Anna’s career is her energy for launching first-time programs and working with communities, businesses, entrepreneurs, and innovators to scale new solutions to tackle climate change. She holds a B.A. in Anthropology and Environmental Studies from Princeton University where she played varsity lacrosse and spent her summers studying sustainable development in Costa Rica and conducting thesis research on indigenous land rights in Nicaragua while interning for a local community development nonprofit. Anna lives in San Diego, California.
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