A Message from the Executive Director
As I celebrate one year with the organization, here are some highlights of CleanAIRE NC’s initiatives and efforts thus far in what has been an extremely eventful and busy 12 months. Our commitment centers on three key organizational pillars: (1) leading with a fact-based approach, (2) leveraging our engagement in health, advocacy, and education, and (3) facilitating partnerships with higher education and community/convening organizations.
Fact-based Approach
CleanAIRE NC AirKeeper Dashboard
- Through a Windward Foundation grant, a dashboard is being built to provide our AirKeeper network with information about air quality across North Carolina and their individual low-cost sensors.
- The data will be aligned with geographic information systems (GIS) for users to correlate high pollution with environmental areas of concern.
- This work aims to educate and inform communities across North Carolina with critical information about the environment and health impacts associated with poor air quality to enable advocacy and policy change.
Health, Advocacy, and Education Engagement
Our efforts to continue to provide environmental health education training have included:
- Engaging one of the largest school districts in the state, Charlotte Mecklenburg Schools (CMS), to install air monitors and work jointly on climate curriculum, as well as an indoor air quality pilot.
- We provided training to over 140 CMS school nurses and will continue to support them annually with climate health education.
- We are working with Atrium Health to provide health, climate change, and environmental impact training to rotating resident students and helping them engage with impacted communities.
- We will be relaunching our K-12 CleanAIRE For Kids program in early 2024.
Partnerships and Collaboration
We continue to deepen our working relationships with the Southern Environmental Law Center (SELC) and the North Carolina Conservation Network (NCCN).
- SELC will be part of our Sampson County grant, where we will embark on a three-year air quality monitoring project. SELC will advise where we place PM, H2S, methane, and volatile organic compound monitoring in locations critical to establishing legal footholds for near-future actions.
- As the permitting process for hog CAFOs’ public listening period opens, we will partner with NCCN on additional screenings of the Smell of Money at college campuses across the state.
- We will initiate a new partnership with Wake Forest University School of Law to address poultry CAFOs and raise awareness on the public retail side to force change through financial exposure to hazardous poultry production practices.
- Through our Charlotte-Mecklenburg Climate Leader coalition, we led the Duke Rate Increase efforts to provide content creation, support, and organizing efforts for the multiple statewide hearings and comments during the Charlotte NCUC hearing, where we held a press conference and rally.
- CANC will also lead the effort to respond to the current Duke Carbon plan; we will organize multiple information sessions to provide access to plan details and petition signature opportunities and take a strong position for what is in the plan.
Our community partnerships and engagement with higher education institutions will continue with new and existing partnerships.
- We are in negotiation with Duke University to host NC BREATHE 2024, where we hope to offer continuing education units (CEU) to increase participation and establish a greater focus on student engagement.
- We will also partner with Appalachian State in a guest lecture series with the sustainability and environmental studies programs.
- NC State University has engaged us to collaborate on a pilot project to understand air pollution health impacts on different NC communities.
- Exploration of a partnership with Duke University’s Nicholas Institute for Energy, Environment, and Sustainability to facilitate solar for all programs and Justice40 initiatives.
Your support and belief in our mission is greatly appreciated and vital to our functioning and success. Thank you for your commitment to our work.
If there are areas or questions that you would like me to address or elaborate on, please feel free to let me know. I would welcome the opportunity to meet in person or virtually to discuss our 2024 plan and strategy.
Respectfully,
Jeffrey Robbins
