Our Vision

Air Partners exists to support environmental justice communities in their work to breathe cleaner air.

We work by developing partnerships with change agents in environmental justice communities who are already working to eliminate racial and socioeconomic disparities in air health. Our goal is to build community power to advocate for change by: 1. Establishing community-owned air quality monitoring networks, 2. Improving access to HEPA air purifiers, and 3. Collecting data and generating insights that support advocacy goals.

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Air Partners is motivated by the environmental and racial injustice aspects of air pollution, seeking not only to understand the dynamics of air pollution in at-risk areas, but also to leverage that understanding with engineering and design to make tangible steps toward greater air justice with our community partners. Degraded air quality is a leading cause of death globally, and the World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that air pollution is responsible for 6.5 million premature deaths per year, or 1 in 8 deaths overall. Low-income populations and communities of color are disproportionately exposed. 

Our partner communities in East Boston, Roxbury, and Chinatown bear the burden of Boston’s transportation emissions, with major freeways and highways transecting residential areas, a major East Coast port, and an international airport responsible for substantial ultrafine particle (UFP), volatile organic compound (VOC), and gas-phase pollutant emissions. These are predominately communities of color who have been intentionally and historically marginalized in order to support municipal economic, transportation and development goals.

Safeguarding individual and community health against environmental pollutants requires evidence-based legislation and regulation. The diagram below outlines the traditional process that begins when a government agency (the EPA, NIH, NIEHS, or NSF) sets research priorities regarding pollutant formation, control, and health impacts. Researchers at academic or research institutions perform studies, whose primary academic deliverables are peer-reviewed journal articles, adding to a well-curated and expanding body of knowledge about pollutants and their health impacts. Eventually, when a strong-enough consensus is reached in the peer-reviewed literature, and when the political climate favors stricter regulation, the EPA proposes new regulations and pollution concentration standards to Congress as legislation, with input from constituents and lobbyists. A law is created, but typically only after delayed implementation has been negotiated.

This process produced the Clean Air Act. Research during the 1950s and 1960s linked automobile and industrial emissions of particulate matter, nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide, and lead with adverse health impacts, reduced visibility, and the formation of other health-damaging pollutants like ozone. The EPA responded with the first national ambient air quality standards (NAAQS) in 1971. However, these standards fell short of ensuring air health and were broadly revised in 1995 -- some 30-40 years after the academic literature began to identify the need for regulatory change. Subsequent updates to NAAQS in 1997, 2006, and 2012 tightened standards further in response to growing evidence of the threats to health of air pollutants. 

While this system does result in broad, systemic impacts that are legally binding and generally safe from the tides of politics, it is fraught with substantial time lags, inefficiencies, and perverse motivations. Further, the traditional paradigm provides little opportunity for communities to safeguard their own air health through other avenues. Air Partners has developed strong partnerships with elected and appointed officials at the city, state, and federal levels to directly influence and co-author air quality legislation aiming to shorten the turnaround time for the system described above. But while we are committed to effecting systemic change via traditional pathways, we also recognize that localized, impact-driven actions are essential to reducing the burden of air pollution in EJ communities while systemic change is being enacted.

To that end, Air Partners has developed a paradigm focused on short-term, localized impact based on direct action, which aims to complement our work on systemic change through policy. Through this paradigm, we develop community partnerships in EJ communities and together identify the most pressing air quality needs. We enable work through grant funding and collaboratively engage in research that drives direct action in the community. Our paradigm is both community-driven and closely aligned with Olin's mission of practicing people-centered engineering while developing students. This paradigm incorporates community-based development, social entrepreneurship, environmental policy, and evidence-driven air quality science and engineering to improve air quality in at-risk communities. And while not our primary goal, academic journal publications are pursued when appropriate to ensure the credibility and integrity of our research results, and to share our model with a broader academic audience.