Help Yourself: How Sacramento Neighbors Turned Their Front Yards Into Cooling Stations

When the heat climbs in Sacramento, Joe Robustelli fills a cooler with ice and bottled water, carries it to the front of his house on a busy downtown street, and tapes up a laminated sign telling anyone who passes to help themselves. That is the whole operation. On the worst days, he has watched more than 200 bottles disappear from that one cooler before nightfall.

Robustelli is not the only one. He is part of a loose network of dozens of Sacramentans who have turned their front yards into pop-up cooling stations, a cooler and a sign at a time, so that a walk through a triple-digit afternoon does not have to be something you survive alone.

It started in a community garden

The idea took root in the hard summer of 2020, when the city was living through the pandemic, the smoke of nearby wildfires, and a brutal stretch of heat all at once. Alchemist Community Development Corporation, a local food-system nonprofit where Robustelli works, set up the first station in a community garden, offering shade, a few chairs, and water. Other neighbors and businesses saw it and started their own. By the peak of the summer of 2024, there were 42 of them scattered across Sacramento.

Most look like Robustelli’s now: a cooler or a bin, ice, bottled water, and not much else. “Don’t overthink it,” he says. His spot downtown catches all kinds of foot traffic through the day, commuters and joggers and neighbors walking their dogs and people with nowhere cooler to be. More than once he has come out to find a handwritten note of thanks left on the lid.

Meeting people where they are

What makes the coolers work is that they ask nothing of anyone. No sign-up sheet, no proof of need, no one watching to see how much you take.

“There are no barriers to people using it, so it truly is meeting people where they’re at,” Robustelli told Reasons to be Cheerful. “It’s a non-judgmental way to build community with everyone.”

It matters in a city where the heat does not land evenly. Plenty of Sacramento neighborhoods have little tree cover and few corner stores to duck into, and not everyone can spare the money for a cold bottle of water. Summers in California’s capital have been running hot for years now, with seven of the last ten ranking among the hottest on record, and the season arriving earlier each time.

An easy thing to copy

The model spread because almost anyone can run one. Organizers suggest picking a busy, exposed spot rather than a shady side street, since the point is to reach people, and using a container you would not mind losing. Coolers do occasionally walk off. Robustelli has lost an ice chest exactly once, and these days he loops his to a tree with a chain so it stays put and can be refilled.

If your own yard is in the wrong place, you can still keep someone else’s station stocked with ice or a case of water. As Alchemist CDC steps back to a few key sites, a mutual-aid group called Tortuguita Community Pantry now helps coordinate the citywide web of coolers, most of them tended by ordinary residents who simply decided their block should have one.

“This is very grassroots. It’s people in the community who are really managing them,” Robustelli says. “It’s such an easy lift to provide some relief to those in your community that need it.”