Projects
Can we afford to invest in healthier learning environments for our students, teachers, and other staff?
The real question: Can we afford not to?
Air is as essential to health as food and water. Building and maintaining healthy learning environments takes awareness, attention, ongoing accountability, and yes, funding.
As a small startup nonprofit, Clean Air Allies has focused on cost-effective, strategic ways to make clean school air more salient as an issue and develop an ecosystem to support it.
You can learn more about some of our projects below.
CalSHAPE Outreach and Advocacy
Since our start, Clean Air Allies has been involved in outreach and advocacy around the school healthy air grant program CalSHAPE. It funds MERV 13 filters, classroom CO2 monitors, and independent HVAC assessments, repairs, and upgrades in California TK-12 schools.
To date, we’ve helped protect more than $100 million in grant funding.
We’re currently working with a large and diverse coalition trying to save an additional $194 million in existing program funds.
Youth IAQ Video Contest
It’s hard for people to prioritize something they don’t notice. Today, for most people, school indoor air is invisible.
To help make school indoor air quality (IAQ) more visible, and thus more salient as an issue, and to amplify youth voices, Clean Air Allies launched a Youth IAQ video contest. We challenged high school students to create short videos around the topic, “It’s Time to Care about School Indoor Air.”
An outstanding panel of guest judges selected our award winners.
School Facilities Accountability Outreach and Advocacy
Ensuring healthy school facilities requires not only IAQ technologies and health-based standards, but also robust accountability mechanisms. For example, research shows that significant numbers of schools aren’t even meeting relatively minimal building code ventilation rates, let alone more stringent public health IAQ recommendations.
Clean Air Allies has been promoting greater awareness of California’s existing school facilities accountability tools, notably those established by the landmark Williams settlement, while also advocating for stronger accountability measures.
