In October 2006, local environmental organization Acterra made a presentation to a gathering of parents at Peninsula School's Fall Meeting in Menlo Park. A large group of parents and staff brainstormed what individuals and families could do to reduce carbon emissions and slow global climate change. From the discussion came a long list of "best ideas" and a clear sense that there was work to be done.

Not long afterwards, Ellen Wilkinson, a parent at the school, held a series of follow-up meetings with a team of concerned parents, alumni, and staff. She developed the idea for an experimental campaign to help families in the communty learn how to make changes in their everyday lives to reduce carbon emissions and help ease the burden on our planet.

The Peninsula Cool Campaign is the fruit of those efforts, as is this wiki, which we encourage you to use to explore and add information to that may help others. This campaign was created and is produced by Ellen Wilkinson. She hopes that this could serve as a model for other communies. As the Environmental Library & Resource Center Coordinator for Acterra, Ms. Wilkinson has access to important resources of information for the community about global warming and reducing carbon emissions.

The goal of this six-month campaign is to unite the community around a pledge to reduce their home carbon emissions. Each household participating in the campaign signaled their support of the pledge by placing a rock in the "Peninsula Cool Rock Jar", pictured above. 159 rocks were deposited in the jar, representing approximately 70% of the total households in the Peninsula Community.

Each month, a set of challenges are articulated to the community and members are encouraged to explore them and identify the ones that most resonate with their personal interests and abilities, and to work toward adopting them. At the end of each month, all participants are asked to answer a poll about which challenges they tried. This information is translated into the amount of CO2 saved and is used to further motivate the community.

This campaign is a social experiment in that it explores how approaching the same sub-set of challenges each month, simultaneously and as a community group, affects the willingness of participants to adopt new energy-saving habits. To gauge the success of this experiment, a comprehensive poll will be taken of the community to learn how much influence the campaign has had on their everyday lives.

If this campaign is successful, then this project model will be further modified and improved upon in the hope that it can be used with other community groups to help them fight global warming.

The Peninsula Cool Team consists of parents Ellen Wilkinson, Sarah Caplan (also an alumna), Casey Hartman, Jennifer De Castro, BJ Rock, Souroor Milani, and Chris Smith, staff members Gail Buschini, Jerry Hearn, and Tom Forrest, and alumnus David Coale.

Copyright Ellen M. Wilkinson 2006-2008. All rights reserved.