Cool Block

<p>David Gershon had spent decades studying how to change behavior at scale when he arrived at a deceptively simple insight: the block — the eight or so households that share a stretch of sidewalk — might be the most powerful unit of social change. He created Cool Block, a program that brings neighbors together over nine meetings across four and a half months to take action on carbon reduction, water stewardship, disaster resilience, and neighborhood livability. Participants work through a handbook with 112 action items, choosing which ones fit their households and which ones to tackle as a block.</p><p>The program was piloted on 125 blocks across five California cities — Los Angeles, San Francisco, Palo Alto, Mountain View, and Isla Vista. The results were striking: participating households achieved an average carbon reduction of 25 to 32 percent and took 25 actions, including seven to build resilience. When all neighbors on a block were invited, 55 percent of those who chose to learn more joined a team. Cool Block won a NASA competition as the most outstanding solution for addressing humanity's impact on planetary sustainability. In Los Angeles, Cool Blocks became a project of the Neighborhood Council Sustainability Alliance in partnership with the city's Climate Emergency Mobilization Office, working toward the city's goal of carbon neutrality.</p><p>But what Gershon found was that the climate outcomes, while real, were almost secondary to what happened between neighbors. The nine meetings created relationships where there had been none. People who had lived on the same block for years and never spoken were suddenly coordinating, planning, looking out for each other. The block — mundane, overlooked, the smallest unit of civic geography — turned out to be the right scale for both environmental action and human connection.</p>