Practical
Affordable, deployable, maintainable, and useful in real settings such as homes, schools, clinics, workplaces, public spaces, and emergency-response locations.
Open Air Foundation
Practical Public Infrastructurefor Airborne Environmental Health
Every person breathes roughly 10,000 liters of air each day, but the infrastructure to detect and reduce airborne risks is unevenly distributed. The Open Air Foundation builds the shared public-interest layer communities and partners can use in real places: low-cost open tools, trusted data, small grants, training, and practical protection support.
For OAF, practical public infrastructure is the shared layer that helps communities, schools, clinics, researchers, and public-interest partners detect airborne risks, understand local evidence, and act on it.
Public
Built for public benefit through open tools, transparent data practices, reusable guidance, responsible governance, and local ownership.
Infrastructure
Durable systems others can build on, not one-off donations: hardware, software, data, documentation, grants, training, and feedback loops.
Community Air Quality in Practice: Lagos, Nigeria
Local evidence helped make smoke exposure visible.
In a Lagos fish-smoking community, local monitoring helped make invisible exposure visible. The data supported a clearer case for changing how smoke exposure was being managed. The Lagos Environmental Protection Agency later installed smokeless eco-kilns, showing how local evidence can help connect community concern with practical intervention.
Detect
Low-cost open monitoring tools make outdoor and indoor airborne risks visible where public data is missing.
Understand
Open data systems, dashboards, interpretation support, and training turn measurements into trusted local evidence.
Protect
Evidence supports cleaner indoor air, filtration, ventilation, smoke and dust response, public communication, advocacy, and reduced exposure.
Why This Matters
Airborne risks to health are local. Too often, the infrastructure is missing.
Communities cannot protect health, improve indoor and outdoor environments, or advocate for cleaner air without trusted local evidence, practical tools, and support to use them.
The missing layer
Air pollution, indoor air quality, ventilation, wildfire smoke, mold risk, environmental monitoring, and airborne biosafety are often treated as separate fields. In many places, the basics are also missing entirely: reliable local air quality data, practical guidance, affordable tools, and support to act. Communities experience these gaps through the same shared reality: the air they breathe at home, school, work, and in public spaces.
Under-monitored communities often face the highest airborne risks to health with the least access to trusted local data, so they are OAF's priority focus.
Without practical tools, pollution, poor ventilation, smoke, dust, mold risk, and airborne biological hazards remain harder to detect and address.
The infrastructure itself is broader: open tools, data systems, guidance, training, grants, and protection methods that public-interest partners can reuse.
The path forward
Measurement is the beginning. Protection is the goal. OAF helps communities use evidence to make practical decisions: when to run filtration, how to improve ventilation, where to focus advocacy, and how to respond when smoke, dust, pollution, or infection risk becomes urgent.
- Low-cost open tools make airborne risks visible.
- Small grants and local partners turn tools into real deployments.
- Trusted local evidence supports communication, advocacy, and protection.
- Every project feeds learning back into shared infrastructure for others.
Airborne Environmental Health
Airborne environmental health is the shared frame.
Air quality is the foundation, but it is not the boundary. The same infrastructure that helps communities understand everyday air pollution can also support healthier buildings, ventilation assessment, environmental monitoring, smoke-event response, and preparedness for future airborne threats.
For example, a school can use monitors and CO2 readings to decide when classrooms need more ventilation or filtration. A clinic can identify spaces where cleaner-air rooms are most needed. A community facing wildfire smoke, dust, or an industrial incident can deploy simple tools quickly and communicate risk with local evidence.
OAF builds practical public infrastructure for the air people actually breathe: outdoors, indoors, in schools, clinics, workplaces, homes, and public spaces.
Air Quality Map
Explore public air quality monitor data.
The launch map shows all public AirGradient monitors, making real-time air quality data visible across many communities and regions.
Good Moderate Unhealthy Hazardous
Projects
Practical Infrastructure in Action
OAF-backed projects show how low-cost open tools, small grants, training, and local partnerships can generate trusted evidence, build local capacity, and make practical protection possible.
How to Work With OAF
Build practical infrastructure for airborne environmental health with us.
OAF supports local partners and funders who want to make airborne environmental health solutions practical, affordable, and available where they are needed most.
What We Build
Understand how OAF builds and stewards practical public infrastructure for airborne environmental health.
Work with OAFSmall Grants
Learn how small grants, training, technical support, and open monitoring tools help local partners deploy practical airborne environmental health solutions.
Apply nowOur Origins and Partnership
OAF builds on the open-source infrastructure developed by AirGradient, including open hardware designs, software, firmware, and the Open Source Air Quality Monitoring Toolkit developed with the UNDP Global Centre.
AirGradient's open-source monitors are already used by 50,000+ people in 90 countries, giving OAF a proven global base to build from. AirGradient has committed 5,000 air quality monitors to OAF and will support the foundation long term as a public-interest steward of this infrastructure.
OAF is separate from AirGradient. Its role is to make this infrastructure useful for public benefit: improving tools, supporting local implementation, funding community deployments, and helping under-monitored communities turn evidence into protection.