For the first 3 months of the project, we (Air Partners) engaged in an iterative process of listening and building trust. This took the form of facilitating both formal and informal meetings with coordinators and executors (see Community of Practice diagram) to understand ACE’s priorities as an organization, their activities in support of those priorities, the extent to which those priorities related to air quality, and challenges that they were facing that might be supported by Air Partners. After each meeting we synthesized learnings and brought them back to ACE for feedback and iteration. By the end of this process, we had learned that:

• ACE has a high priority of working for the health of children and the elderly.
  

• ACE’s advocacy work related to air quality is primarily related to the impact of transportation and Nubian Station on Roxbury’s air quality.
  

• ACE and Air Partners have complementary strengths (deep knowledge of and connection to groups and organizations in Roxbury, and data collection and analysis, respectively).
  

• ACE has little personnel bandwidth to take on additional work, and thus the “community-led” aspect of the project had to be downsized.
  

• ACE has no in-house capacity to manage or analyze data, and rely on external partners for that work. Our hope of sharing data analysis responsibilities with ACE needed to be reevaluated to include a larger role for Air Partners.
  

• The community of Roxbury is undergoing rapid transformation with significant construction projects throughout the community, with major drivers being gentrification and the expansion and development of Northeastern University.
  

• ACE had successfully advocated for the Massachusetts DEP to place an air monitoring site in Roxbury, but that they have found it to be insufficient due to that site:
  

  • Being only one isolated site that offered no spatial resolution in identifying and quantifying pollutant sources,
    

  • Generated data that were not easy to access or understand without expertise,
    

  • Publicly displayed only air quality index (AQI), which obscures many temporal and pollutant-by-pollutant signatures in air quality.
    

• The ideal air monitoring network would be designed to answer ACE’s questions with monitors near 1) Nubian station, 2) vulnerable populations, and 3) pollution sources (with buses and trains as the priority)

The result of these learnings was a project proposal that centered on three pillars: 1) Establishing an air monitoring network designed to answer ACE’s key air quality questions, 2) Executing a pilot program for deploying HEPA air purifiers in daycares and residences, and quantifying their ability to reduce pollutant exposure, and 3) Generating and packaging insights from data into form factors that ACE can effectively use for their advocacy work.

Over the course of 3 months, we worked with partners at ACE to conduct sensor installation trainings and install sensors. While we aimed to have ACE staff and youth organizers participate in all sensor installations, scheduling constraints and availability necessitated the Air Partners team installing many on their own. Once sensors were installed, we monitored their performance through QuantAQ’s online portal and made site visits to address unexpected instrument downtime. Despite the reliability of our chosen instrumentation, sensor maintenance was a task requiring regular attention throughout the project. The two most common issues we encountered were: 1) shading limiting solar radiation at some sites, preventing the battery from charging sufficiently, and 2) a firmware problem requiring a hot-swap of SD cards. Scheduling constraints and sometimes infrequent checks on fleet health resulted in some sensors being down for a week or more at a time, but overall datasets comprised a year or more of complete data.