Cool Petaluma is a program built around gathering people. It is a grassroot community organization that supports the city’s vision to make Petaluma a climate leader to ensure a stable climate for ourselves and future generations by 2030. To date, Cool Petaluma has connected with over 700 households to actions they can do in their homes, neighborhood and greater community through our newsletter reach, info sessions, trainings for block leaders, households on teams and various community events.
Our Team Leader program is designed to train an individual to build a team of their neighbors to do climate resiliency actions on their homes together. The Team, led by their Team Leader, works through five action areas with the intention of building community (also known as social capital)l and therefore a more engaged and connected community while preparing for emergencies, rethinking consumption, transforming transportation, improving buildings, and restoring nature. These connections and actions result in reducing carbon emissions, saving water, and building vibrant communities, block-by-block, neighborhood-by-neighborhood. These actions are connected to local resources from the city, county and local community partners.
Up to this point, the program has had Team Leaders sign up to be trained to lead their block by self-selection. They either heard of it from an environmental organization or business they were connected to during the initial rollout of the program or more recently from a friend through our internal marketing to Team Leaders. This has resulted in the majority of our current block leaders living on the west side.
So the important problem is enrolling more block leaders on the East Side into this process. With the $5,000 we would do an Eastside specific outreach blitz through the rotary, schools and churches to enroll individuals to be new block leaders (attend our leadership training). Conduct one block-scale action community demonstration project to demonstrate the power of community action. This would include working with a block to create a vision of what they want their block to look like in 2030 using our 5 topics and partner resources and co-creating a block party style demonstration. We would also ask the Rotary to volunteer their time and skills to support the block scale project.
Cool Petaluma would be grateful for the opportunity to work with Rotary to help meet the City’s goals. A quick story: After being invited to the Petaluma 7-11 Lions Club for their 7:11 a.m. breakfast meeting to give an overview of Cool Petaluma, club president Ron Hammer told our Campaign Director, “I believe we cannot get to a better place with the carbon and climate problems without people getting involved from the ground up.” And that is why the Cool Block program is so appealing to such a wide swath of Petalumans. This is our opportunity to step up to the challenges of the time and show the world how powerful an organized and dedicated group of ordinary people can be.