California Department of Transportation

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.