SVYCA Members and Staff attending a San Jose’s June 9th Budget Hearing

As the 2025-26 fiscal year and budget decisions approached, the San Jose team of Silicon Valley Youth Climate Action (SVYCA) was concerned to see that the City of San Jose once again planned to cut funding for Climate Smart, its initiative to reduce carbon emissions, save water, and make San Jose more climate-friendly through clean energy programs and community engagement.

San Jose has been a leader in climate action, ranked the sixth greenest city in the US and one of the largest cities in the US to pledge to carbon neutrality by 2030. In 2019, the City of San Jose had declared a state of climate emergency. However, in recent years, the City has made alarming cuts to Climate Smart funding. One-third of non-personnel funding was cut in the 2024-25 fiscal year from the previous year; and in 2025-26, the Climate Smart program will transfer to the clean energy department, which now covers staff funding. The non-personnel funding has been reduced from $300-400K to its base of $126K. In past years, this funding has supported the development of the Climate Smart Program, updating building reach codes, maintaining the Climate Smart Challenge platform, and educating the community about electrification and climate change; it’s integral for the City to engage with community-based organizations and educate and encourage people to lead climate-friendly lives. By cutting funding, the City is taking a step back in its goal to achieve Carbon Neutrality by 2030 and putting its future at risk.

SVYCA’s San Jose team stepped up to campaign to preserve 2025-26 Climate Smart funding. From March to June, we secured meetings with most council members or their staff as well as the Mayor’s office. We expressed our concerns about the City’s declining support for climate action. We collaborated with other organizations working towards climate action, such as 350 Silicon Valley, Green Foothills, Mother’s Out Front, CalDEC, Climate Action California, and Acterra, forming the SJ Climate Funding Campaign Coalition to share strategies and coordinate campaigning efforts. We drafted and shared a petition for preserving Climate Smart funding that gained 208 signatures, which we presented to the City Council. To increase community awareness on this issue, members wrote and submitted op-eds and letters to the editor to local newspapers emphasizing the urgent need for climate action and how San Jose needed to stay its course as a climate leader, including a call to action for San Jose residents.

SVYCA Members and Staff preparing to testify at a San Jose City Council Meeting

Aiming to directly address the Mayor and City Council, to urge them to preserve Climate Smart funding, we organized a team effort to publicly comment at the June 9th Budget Hearing session and the June 10th Mayor’s Budget decision meeting. Seven youth members Daphne Zhu, Mani Bekele, Jeffer Razai, Nora Carino, Kanika Rawat, Isabella Kim, and Cynthia Li, our advisor Dashiell Leeds, and Executive Director Ze-Kun Li gave public comments at the June 9th hearing, and another of our youth members commented at the June 10th meeting.

For some of us, it was our first public comment, and we all spoke out that we believe climate change should be a city priority because San Jose has, and will continue, to experience its negative impacts. These impact carry on to other issues, such as homelessness, public health and safety, and water and food availability. Team members who couldn’t make it in person shared their concerns through letters and public comments emails.

A few hours before the June 9th hearing, we had met with Councilmember Cohen from San Jose District 4; he gave us insight into how this would be a controversial budget hearing with many issues and that it would be difficult to get back Climate Smart funding with the City’s budget deficit. We also discussed how the City will fund its clean energy programs through the San Jose Clean Energy Department funding; however, it’s uncertain whether climate community education programs and projects previously funded by Climate Smart’s non-personnel budget and unrelated to clean energy will be able to receive this funding. In the future, we hope to gain more clarity and advocate for maintaining these programs because climate action and significant change needs a community effort.

Though funding was not restored, through our campaign we were successful in engaging our whole team in reaching out to San Jose City Council, drafting the petition, and writing public comments. We knew that our fight for funding was an uphill battle; but it’s important that we demonstrated to the City Council that people, especially youth, care about climate action and don’t want to see it compromised because of budget cuts.

We’re excited about the relationships we’ve built with other climate organizations and aim to continue working with the SJ Climate Funding Campaign Coalition to advocate for climate action in our city. We hope to meet further with council members’ offices to keep climate on the radar of city council. Now, we’re researching and hope to comment on this year’s updates to the Climate Smart plan.

Even as the fight for Climate Smart funding in the 2025-2026 fiscal year has ended, we hope to work with the community, other organizations, and City Council to keep San Jose a leader in climate action.

Written by SVYCA Member Kanika Rawat

Advocacy in Action: Fighting for Climate Smart San José