In 2021, the Santa Barbara County Association of Governments completed the Cool Blocks Try Transit project, a neighborhood outreach and capacity building campaign supported by a $25,000 grant from the Low Carbon Transit Operations Program and in partnership with the Empowerment Institute’s Cool Blocks program. This project brought the participating 25-block neighborhood of Isla Vista together over a series of workshops to learn about and consider climate change mitigation and resilience measures they could adopt as individuals and as a community, which included using public transit. The project inspired the community to act, which in part led to their successful application to the Sustainable Transportation Equity Project, another California Climate Investments program.
The Cool Blocks project took place over multiple workshops focused on five broad approaches residents could use to improve their community: carbon reduction, disaster resilience, water stewardship, livability, and empowerment. In total, 433 residents of the Isla Vista community participated, including students and faculty of the University of California Santa Barbara . Once the workshops were completed, participants committed to individual actions that would reduce their household carbon footprint. Originally, free public transit passes were going to be provided to all individuals who complete the pilot project, but in response to COVID-19 the county’s regional planning agency, the Santa Barbara County Association of Governments, distributed passes to employees and employers within the regional service area instead.
The Cool Block project profoundly motivated residents of Santa Barbara County, as participants leveraged their experience to help create a successful grant application to the Sustainable Transportation Equity Project and pledged to create a vision for Isla Vista to be carbon neutral by 2025 as part of the Cool City Challenge — a program challenging and supporting cities to achieve carbon neutrality by 2030.
Robin Elander, the Santa Barbara program manager for the Cool Blocks program, was impressed by what the Isla Vista community achieved: “The seeds of possibility are endless especially when students are involved. What they accomplished even during the pandemic is quite amazing.”