Detect
OAF makes airborne hazards visible through open, affordable monitoring tools for outdoor and indoor air, including particulate pollution, smoke, dust, CO2, and other environmental indicators.
Open Air Foundation
Practical Public Infrastructurefor Airborne Environmental Health
Every person breathes roughly 10,000 liters of air each day. The Open Air Foundation helps under-monitored communities, especially in the Global South, detect, understand, and protect themselves from airborne risks to health through low-cost open tools, trusted data, small grants, and practical implementation support.
What We Do
Detect, understand, protect.
OAF builds and stewards practical public infrastructure that helps communities move from invisible airborne risks to trusted evidence and practical protection.
Understand
OAF helps communities turn measurements into trusted local evidence through open data tools, dashboards, interpretation guidance, communication support, and training.
Protect
OAF helps communities reduce exposure through practical, low-cost, open approaches for cleaner indoor air, filtration, ventilation, building protection, and emergency-ready deployment.
Infrastructure in Action: Lagos, NigeriaSee What We Do
Local evidence helped make smoke exposure visible.
In a Lagos fish-smoking community, one open air quality monitor helped make invisible exposure visible. The data gave local researchers and public partners clearer evidence of the risks residents were already experiencing.
That evidence helped support practical intervention. The Lagos Environmental Protection Agency later installed smokeless eco-kilns, showing how trusted local data can connect community concern with protection measures.
For us to be able to inform governments, we need data, and luckily we got the data from AirGradient, which we used in piloting the study.
Okwong Walter
Low-cost open tools
Affordable monitoring helps communities document airborne risks where public data is missing.
Trusted local evidence
Open data and interpretation support help partners turn measurements into something communities and decision-makers can use.
Practical protection
The goal is not measurement for its own sake. The goal is cleaner air, safer buildings, better response, 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 and practical tools.
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.
- Without practical tools, pollution, poor ventilation, smoke, dust, mold risk, and airborne biological hazards remain harder to detect and address.
- OAF connects open monitoring, public-interest data, small grants, and implementation support so communities can move from risk to evidence to action.
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.
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.
Read the modelSmall Grants
Learn how small grants, training, technical support, and open monitoring tools help local partners deploy practical airborne environmental health solutions.
Get supportAirGradient Infrastructure
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.
Help build the missing public infrastructure for airborne environmental health.
By funding OAF, philanthropy can help build the missing public infrastructure layer between airborne environmental health science and practical community protection. OAF exists to make airborne environmental health solutions practical, affordable, and available where they are needed most.