About the Cool Campaign

The Cool Campaign was developed by a local environmentalist, Ellen M. Wilkinson, to help guide her children’s school community through as many changes as they could make to their home energy use, to help fight global warming. As Coordinator for Acterra’s Environmental Library & Resource Center at the time, she had access to terrific resources and put together and ran the first campaign at Peninsula School in Menlo Park in January 2007, to great success.

The program utilizes a number of behavior change techniques to help members within a community try out new energy habits, reinforcing the value of taking small and easy steps, the power of overcoming despair through action, and the importance of building community around a mutual goal that serves the greater good. Acterra has adopted the program and is helping to bring it to more communities in the Bay Area.

How the Community Cool Campaign Came to First Pres

The Cool Planet Working Group at First Pres has many ties with Acterra. Michael Closson and Laura Stec each spoke at one of our Adult Study Sessions, and Michael led some of us in a 4-week Global Warming Diet Workshop last winter.  We decided that the next step in involving our First Pres Community in climate change issues was to partner with Ellen and Acterra in a six-month Cool Campaign, which ran from World Communion Sunday, Oct 5, 2008, through Earth Day Sunday, April 26, 2009.

Click here for some highlights from highlights from the Campaign.