Call for EOIs: Wearable Air Quality Sensors for Storytelling, Community Engagement & Campaigning

Clean Air Fund wants to work with a partner who would like to pilot the use of wearable air quality sensors – small, portable devices that measure a person’s individual exposure to air pollution – to tell human-led, data-informed stories and/or use citizen science to advance their existing campaigning and advocacy goals.

This open call invites interested international organisations or networks to share expressions of interest, including how they would use wearables in their work and how wearables could ultimately support them to drive change including and beyond clean air.

Air quality monitoring is often highly technical, poorly communicated and limited to academic or specialist audiences. However, wearables can bring the problem of air quality to life by telling human-led stories of personal exposure. They are smaller and more portable than other sensors and can enable communities, campaigners, and others to tell the stories that are most relevant to them – and help legitimise their perspective on the issue of air quality. It has been shown that the use of wearables is an impactful campaigning tool, supporting:

• Media and community engagement for healthier public spaces and cleaner air
• Behaviour change to reduce driving
• Storytelling to highlight economic inequality
• Local policy change for more equitable waste management

Project Objectives and Outcomes

• They would like to support an international organisation or network working on an air quality-related issue (e.g., climate change, health, waste burning, active travel) to use wearables to leverage the clean air argument in existing work and advance towards the organisations existing advocacy goals.
• Clear Air Fund encourages innovative and novel approaches in this proposal. They are therefore interested in developing/shaping the specific objectives and activities alongside the chosen partner. The selected project should aim to achieve the following outcomes:
  • Innovative use cases of wearables (personal-exposure data) are piloted, leading to greater awareness and uptake of wearables for campaigning and advocacy purposes.
  • The “clean air argument” drives equitable local policy change, aligned with the chosen international organisation or network’s theory of change.
  • Achieve one or more of the following:
    • Increase air quality co-benefits of the international organisation or networks.
    • Contribute to increased community participation.
    • Contribute to increased community capacity for impactful advocacy.
    • Support storytelling and campaigning.
• Wearables are a cutting-edge tactic, but not a campaign in their own right. Therefore, they anticipate this funding being used to provide the technical, communications and other support needed for an international organisation or network to pilot the use of personal exposure stories and/or citizen science towards their existing campaigning and advocacy goals.

What is the Clean Air Fund looking for?

• The following criteria will be used to assess the proposals submitted.
  • The scale of the international organisation or networks and their ability to effectively pilot wearables tool with partners in multiple countries.
  • The creativity of the international organisation or networks approach to using wearables.
  • How the international organisation or network plans to effectively integrate wearables to support/drive forward their existing theory of change.
  • The capacity of the international organisation or networks to successfully use wearables or the understanding of the support needed to successfully use wearables in their work.
  • The ways in which the international organisation or network will ensure a participatory and equitable approach to data generation, campaigning, storytelling etc.
• The below list explains the motivation for each of the criteria, if for whatever reason this does not make sense, or your international organisation or network has a different approach to this, please clearly outline this in your submission. Achieving the why is the priority, CAF is flexible in the how.
  • It is the aim of CAF to pilot this project in multiple contexts. By partnering with international organisation or networks it is the intention that, if successful, the project can be replicated and scaled.
  • As stated, wearables are a relatively new technology and there have still been relatively few use cases. The intention of this project is to explore creative use cases of wearables, and better understand how sectors/individuals from beyond the air quality field see and generate the value from this tool.
  • It is the intention of CAF to demonstrate the intersection of clean air with other issues. The intention of this project is to drive increased momentum and engagement within an existing campaign/project by integrating the use of wearables.
  • Based on learnings from previous projects, it is important that the international organisation or network has the capacity or the necessary support to effectively use the wearables technology. Typical challenges include data quality, data processing, storage and analysis, sensor maintenance etc.

For more information, visit Clean Air Fund.