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RACCE Inc was selected as one of the recipients of the 2024 Trustee Fund Awards at Connecticut Community Foundation, in recognition of its Air Quality Monitoring to Support Environmental Justice Organizing and Advocacy in Waterbury effort. The Trustee Fund Awards, selected by current and former trustees of Connecticut Community Foundation, recognize exceptional innovation and collaboration that benefit communities in Greater Waterbury and the Litchfield Hills.
"Our grassroots strategy to increase localized air quality monitoring is a valid scientific model that has gained traction all across the country and just now is being adopted here in Connecticut. Our community will continue to benefit from collecting, analyzing and advocating for more locally controlled air quality data and without the support of CCF to launch, sustain and grow this unique strategy we would be less certain of the quality of air our families breathe everyday,"
said our Executive Director, Robert Goodrich.
School neighborhoods in the South End are forced to breathe lower quality air on a more routine basis than Bunker Hill families. Highlighting this dilemma are a group of South End elementary schools (Washington, Hopeville, and Duggan) that we now know have highly volatile and at times elevated rates of air pollution from commercial vehicle emissions and stationary polluters. For instance, Hopeville School and its playground is located within feet of an industrial polluter of sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides located at 215 Piedmont Street. All the while major green space development and economic development planning in the South End has largely been done without the important data that citizen scientists can collect across the city with hyper local devices that our project has deployed. In total we have engaged, trained, and paid (6) youth and/or (8) adults/parents to monitor the air they breathe at school, work or outside playing with small portable devices and now with more additional grant dollars we are deploying stationery air quality monitors in their homes and in their yards.
The student and youth participants have highlighted these recommendations:
Schools and school playgrounds should have monitors that allow school staff and families to have access to real time air quality in classrooms and playgrounds
City parks and green spaces like the Green and Library Park should be sites for increased stationery monitors controlled by the department of health
Elected boards such as the Board of Alderman and Board of Education should create environmental justice sub-committees responsible for creating community driven plans to reduce the burden of air pollution on our community.
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