Cool Block / Cool City Challenge (Empowerment Institute)
Five-month, nine-meeting structured program where 5-8 households on a city block work together on carbon reduction, disaster resilience, water stewardship and neighbourhood livability. A city launches a campaign and recruits Cool Block Leaders, who invite neighbours onto a team. Block teams then aggregate into 'Cool Neighbourhoods' of ~10 blocks. Pilot achieved 32% average household carbon reduction and won NASA's outstanding sustainability solution.
Cities run city-wide campaigns explicitly to recruit blocks; Mountain View, Petaluma, LA each report block counts and recruitment percentages publicly (e.g. '45% block recruitment rate'). Cool City Challenge frames participating cities as racing to carbon-neutral by 2030 and compares them. Block-vs-block visibility happens through Cool Neighborhood aggregations and city dashboards.
Core unit is the 5-8 household block team that meets bi-weekly, with rotating meeting leaders among neighbors. Program designers explicitly value 'lasting relationships between neighbors who may have never otherwise met.' Pure intra-block teamwork drives the carbon math.
One of the few examples where 'the block' (not the neighborhood) is the unit of competition AND collaboration, with a verifiable carbon outcome. Layered nesting (block -> neighbourhood -> city) is exactly the kind of hierarchy BelongHub might map.
Others in the same family
Energy Sparks (UK schools energy league)
Open-data platform that ingests half-hourly electricity and gas meter readings for ~620+ schools and turns energy investigations and saving actions into points. Public national, regional (London, North-West England, etc.), Multi-Academy-Trust, and Local Authority scoreboards rank schools in real time across the academic year. Cash prizes for top schools are spent on a sustainability project the school chooses.
Wandrer.earth - 'every street' completion with area leaderboards
Gamified exploration platform that ingests Strava activities, compares against OpenStreetMap road/path data, and tells users which streets in their city/neighbourhood/county they haven't yet covered. Awards milestones at 25/50/75/90/99% completion of geographic areas. Includes public leaderboards by area showing top Wandrers for each city, neighbourhood, county.
Climathon (EIT Climate-KIC)
24-48 hour citizen hackathon run by EIT Climate-KIC. Each participating city sets its own local climate challenge; teams of citizens, students, and entrepreneurs develop solutions. Best team in each city receives Climate-KIC coaching post-event. Over 30,000 participants since 2015.
Cool Choices (Wisconsin team sustainability game)
Madison-based non-profit running a 4-6 week online sustainability game where employees of companies, school districts, and municipalities form teams. Players log daily 'cool choices' (carpool, line-dry laundry, unplug devices) which are translated into points on a public scoreboard. Originally a deck of physical cards at Miron Construction; now web/mobile. 9,471+ players, 334,201+ sustainable actions reported.
CitizenLab / Go Vocal Representativeness Dashboard
Belgian civic-engagement SaaS used by cities across Europe to run consultations, ideation, participatory budgeting. The Representativeness Dashboard compares each participating cohort's demographics (age, gender, neighbourhood, education) against the underlying ward/postcode-level population so cities can see which neighbourhoods are over- or under-represented in real time, and target outreach.
Cool Block / Cool City Challenge
Block leaders recruit 5-8 neighboring households into a 'Cool Block' that runs a 9-meeting, 5-month program across carbon, water, resilience, livability, and empowerment themes. 'Cool Neighborhood' = ~10 Cool Blocks in geographic proximity.