Gathered here are insights, inspirations and stories that come from One Day / One Action, a community-wide public art project in San José, California that engages this very question. If it is challenging to think about climate change on an individual level, how can we engage, inspire, and mobilize a whole city?
San José, California, located in the heart of Silicon Valley, is one of the first US cities to align with the Paris Agreement. This municipal-level achievement is significant. But the overwhelming information about climate change can lead to numbing paralysis. Eco-anxiety and chronic despair are very real according to a report from the United Nations.
In 2018 San José adopted Climate Smart San José, a plan that outlines the City’s pathway to electrification. The goal: to create a carbon neutral city by 2030. Climate Smart’s intention for the community is to create an inclusive and integrative initiative that invites the diverse people of San José to deepen their environmental awareness and build climate-friendly habits. But to have real impact, the City needed to find ways to bring their residents into the process.
In 2019, the City of San José’s Public Art Program and Environmental Services Department invited public practice artists Trena Noval and Sue Mark as creative thought partners. Trena and Sue have drawn on their combined decades of experience as public practice artists who create projects that weave and connect diverse groups of people.
Trena Noval, Jann Tuner (Advisory Council), and Sue Mark at One Day / One Action Climate Cafe, hosted by Veggielution, San Jose, 2023.
As community-engaged, creative practitioners, relationship-building is interwoven throughout their work:
This process empowers individuals and communities as experts in their own experiences, inviting people, especially those whose voices are not usually heard, to bring forward locally embedded knowledge.
Listen to an interview with Trena and Sue about One Day / One Action's project design and process from our community partner SJSU Office of Sustainability Podcast.
Listen to Podcast
The complex nature of the climate crisis has no quick and easy solutions; the accompanying emotions this crisis stirs up are complex. Still, we all know we must make changes in our own lives and communities to support the well-being of the Earth and the survival of all who live here.
Changing a habit takes an incredible amount of sustained intention – research tells us it can take up to 60 days to develop a new habit. Changing our everyday habits can be like moving a mountain. It takes willingness, time, patience and a shift in mindset. To start this process, we first need to develop a climate of care.
When we initially began to design One Day / One Action, we set a goal of supporting conversations that could inform a mindset shift away from consumer-based climate actions towards relational ones. Our project is rooted in this core understanding: to encourage people to change, we must reach their hearts. Initially One Day / One Action was conceived of as a series of community events that would make a space for in-person conversations about climate change. But once COVID-19 hit, the project pivoted to social media to engage with a wider demographic where people across the city could access information, hear local stories and remain safe–all from their phones.
One Day / One Action’s methods for developing the creative vision and content emerged through bringing together two overlapping relational hubs: a diverse group of organizations from across the City who would support us in disseminating One Day / One Action messages through social media, and a council of local experts who understood community needs to help us develop content. It was vital to present a multilingual project to reach the Vietnamese and Spanish speaking communities of the City. To do this, we invited local translators who were deeply embedded in the culture practices of each community to join our creative team.
One Day / One Action evolved by building wide-ranging partnerships with cultural organizations, City agencies and educational institutions, who all engaged in a collaborative conversational process. Once our relationships were in place, we set out to develop our project through a community-centered process involving university students, local knowledge-bearers, educators, scientists, City staff, artists, and community members from across San José. By leveraging the social media paradigm with our community partners as trusted messengers, One Day / One Action’s stories have reached tens of thousands of people across the City, reframing how everyone can contribute to shifting climate change through relational and meaningful actions one day at a time, now and into the future.
In 2022, once it was safer to gather in public places, we hosted in-person workshops and gatherings to support community resilience through story sharing. Throughout 2022-23 we held workshops for college students to share their stories and feelings about climate change. In October of 2023, we held a public Climate Café at Veggielution, a One Day / One Action Community Partner. In order to fully nourish our community during the Climate Café, we worked with Quelites Cooperative, a vegan San José women-owned catering business that was seeded through Veggielution’s Eastside Grown Fellowship program.
One Day / One Action is a model for community-centered sustainability. Our messages went live over six months in 2023, from Summer Solstice to Winter Solstice, creating a digital mural that offers a place to start to develop care – for our local environments and communities. On this site you will find tools and materials to continue to engage your own thinking and actions. We hope that you will learn how to grow and sustain your local relationships to build climate care. This is where our strength lies, moving all of us to take one step at a time, one action each day, to build collective resilience supporting ourselves, our communities and our planet.
See the artist full report on outcomes for One Day / One Action
View Report
We’d love to hear how One Day / One Action has inspired you. If you’ve shared our prompts, started a Climate Cafe or recorded a Youth Story, tell us about it!
Contact us
One Day / One Action is a community artwork supporting Climate Smart San José's environmental action plan. Supported by the City of San José's Public Art Program and Environmental Services Department. See more @1day1actionsj