Press Release: Grassroots Petaluma Effort Wins Million-Dollar Grant to Fund Climate Action through Community Building
Hundreds of Petalumans come together to build a better future.
PETALUMA, Calif. (Cool Petaluma) October 25, 2021 — Today, the Cool City Challenge awarded Petaluma a million-dollar grant to fund a community-based effort that focuses on building up our social networks to help neighborhoods become more planet friendly, disaster resilient, and community rich. Along with Petaluma, Los Angeles and Irvine also won million-dollar grants with all three cities proving they have ample community involvement to achieve major collective action in the race to carbon neutrality by 2030. To achieve this ambitious goal, these cities will take a bold bottom-up and top-down approach by having community members, businesses, nonprofits, and governments all working together.
The outpouring of support in Petaluma has been overwhelming. A volunteer Moonshot Team of seven residents with the support of 25 Community Partners representing the private, civic, and public sectors, were able to recruit 300 Cool Block Leaders - far surpassing the 200 required by the application. Simultaneously, dozens of local experts helped craft the Moonshot Strategy Framework portion of the application, based on Petaluma’s Climate Emergency Framework Plan.
“I am in awe of this entire community and so very grateful for their enthusiasm and participation,” says Councilmember D’Lynda Fischer, who initiated and co-lead the effort. With this Cool City Challenge, Petaluma will be one of three pilot cities in 2022 that will create a template for the 50 cities that will participate in 2023, after which the program will be rolled out internationally. Literally, Petaluma will help set the example for the world.
“What I love about this program is that it provides a clear framework for bringing people together so that our small individual efforts have a larger collective impact and result in immediate improvements to our quality of life,” says Natasha Juliana, who co-lead the application process with Fischer and will take on the role of Campaign Director. “We are excited to make this a fun, welcoming, and worthwhile adventure.”
The next two months will be spent creating the infrastructure for what will be called Cool Petaluma. The official launch of the program will take place in January of 2022. Look for the new website coolpetaluma.org, which will be coming soon, and email info@coolpetaluma.org with any questions you have or ideas you’d like to share. John Crowley of Aqus Community has been a major supporter and hosts the temporary webpage at https://aqus.com/coolcity/.
About the Cool Petaluma Moonshot Team: D’Lynda Fischer (Councilmember) and Natasha Juliana (owner of WORK Petaluma) co-lead the application effort with the help of steering committee members Patrick Carter (City of Petaluma), Dr. Dennis Pocekay (Councilmember), Naomi Crawford (owner of Lunchette), Ann Baker (Climate Action Commissioner and landscape architect), and Raja Abastado (youth Climate Action Commissioner).