The Sierra Club’s Cool Cities campaign provides our members, volunteers and staff with concrete ways to work together on climate change solutions locally. Hundreds of Cool Cities Teams started organizing nationally in 2005 to get the U.S. Mayors Climate Protection Agreement (MCPA) adopted by cities. Today, the Loma Prieta Chapter is actively building and supporting Cool Cities Teams and other environmental community groups in San Mateo, Santa Clara, and San Benito County. Many teams have achieved the initial goals of Cool Cities Teams and we are now encouraging Cities to promote better land use planning in our urban centers, energy upgrades, and other environmental goals.
Cool Cities Teams
The Loma Prieta chapter has either lead the effort in creating Cool Cities Teams (local Climate Action Teams) or has developed relationships with existing activists. Cool Cities Teams are part of the Sierra Club and follow Sierra Club rules and policies. Others are organizations or groups of volunteers without any formal organization--we work with them to further shared goals.
There is real power in combining the actions of a number of different entities into a collective whole. For example, getting a few people to take an action (write a letter to the editor perhaps) in each of 20 different Cool Cities Teams, when coordinated, can combine into a much larger whole. A concrete example of this is taking action up and down the peninsula to empower cities to pass plastic bag bans (which our Cool Cities Teams did), which ultimately resulted in California passing a ban.