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The Cool Block Program

The Cool Block is the program which implements the Cool City Challenge. It has grown out of my work designing and implementing community-based empowerment programs over the past 25 years, serving millions of people around the world.

This program integrates the content, knowledge and best practices gleaned from these years of experience. It is the definition of synergy, where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

My firm belief, based on my work in cities over these many decades and my sense of the social zeitgeist at this unique moment in time, is that The Cool Block speaks deeply to the needs and yearnings in our cities and our world.

What is a Cool Block?

At the core of “what’s cool” for the 21st century is the cooling of our climate-changing planet. But in addition, “what’s cool” is an ethos of collaboration, caring, and sharing. You and your household are invited to embark on a journey of discovering and making cool choices in collaboration with other households on your block.

“My block?” The Cool Block is all about your block. Moreover, it’s about place-making, community-building, local ecosystems, sharing economies, and developing collaboration muscle with your neighbors who live next door, across the street, or in your apartment building.

“But I don’t even know my neighbors.”  Yes. And it’s about that, too. You will learn how to meet and collaborate with your neighbors to create a cooler household, cooler block, and cooler planet. We need one another to create cool choices. Doing it together is twenty-first century cool!

The Cool Block offers a vision of what is possible for our cities and planet and the tools to achieve it. The program puts this information into action to increase the quality of life for residents of a block, while also contributing to the viability of our planet’s life-support system.

Thank you for caring enough to want to make the world better on the block where you live! A win for you, your neighbors, your city, and our planet!

David Gershon
Author, The Cool Block
CEO, Empowerment Institute

Shannon Wells
San Francisco Cool Block Participant
"I learned through The Cool Block program that my neighbors are more like me than I thought. We share a lot of the same goals for our community, and these goals cross cultural and ethnic lines. What I saw was that people are hungry for community and that’s what the Cool Block offers."