Environmental justice communities across Boston may soon be breathing cleaner air thanks to six community efforts that received new city support.

The city’s Environment Department and Air Pollution Control Commission announced six community project awardees as recipients of the 2025 Community Clean Air Grants program. Together, the city awarded the projects a total of $1.12 million.

The awards mark the second round of funding, which was launched as a pilot program in 2021 and relaunched this year.

Brian Swett, the city’s chief climate officer, said the grants serve as one way the city is looking to bring new solutions and cleaner air to Boston residents by supporting community members in having a say about how the problem is tackled, even as it tackles larger municipal-led efforts.

“While we take on these larger projects, it is also critical that we support community-driven work that makes an immediate difference,” he said. “That’s what we’re here to celebrate today. The Community Clean Air grant program invests directly in residents, researchers, and community-based organizations to reduce air pollution where people live, work, and play.”

Some projects will tackle air pollution in the neighborhoods of Allston-Brighton, East Boston, and Chinatown. One will focus efforts along the Fairmount Line Commuter Rail corridor. Another will look to improve air quality in Boston Public Schools.

The city plays a key role in expanding clean air efforts through efforts like this grant, said Oliver Sellers-Garcia, Boston’s environment commissioner and Green New Deal director. The grant program is funded through fees paid to the city through its parking freeze program, part of a statewide effort that limits commercial, off-street parking as part of a measure to decrease air pollution.

“It’s our job to put the pieces together so that we can use the tools of government to enable our partners, such as the grantees today, to make a positive impact,” Sellers-Garcia said.

That kind of community support also allows for the awardees to build new connections and expand what they can do, said Andrealis Martinez Padilla, community engagement director for the Fairmount Indigo CDC Collaborative.

The CDC Collaborative received $179,340 for its partnership with Olin College of Engineering on a series of community workshops focused on air quality — teaching residents how to build at-home air purifiers and monitor pollution along the transit corridor with mobile sensors.

For the CDC Collaborative, the funding may also incentivize new support from individuals and organizations in the community.

“This will help us create partnership with different local businesses or local schools or local neighborhoods or coalitions,” Martinez Padilla said. “I think this grant not only helps the community understand the impacts that air pollution has in their neighborhood, but also it helps us build that collaboration together as a city overall.”

Poor air quality can have significant health impacts for residents.

According to the American Lung Association, increased air pollution can increase wheezing and coughing and shortness of breath, as well as cause asthma attacks, worsening Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease and lung cancer.

It can also have other impacts, like heart attacks and strokes, impaired cognitive functioning and low birth weight.

At the heart of the grant-funded efforts is a push to get more air quality information into the hands of residents. All six of the awardee projects include a public education component through materials the teams plan to produce, or new data dashboards that will report out the air quality data from the expanded tracking efforts.

Martinez Padilla said that she views the education component as a way of helping community members understand what they can do and why, as Boston residents work to make sure they can pay rent and put food on the table, issues like air pollution or climate change are important to address.

“Education is power,” Martinez Padilla said. “If you know what you can do better to improve anything, I think that’s key to continuing the work that we are doing, and also to uplift our community’s knowledge and efforts.”

It can also close gaps in understanding, said Martinez Padilla, who said that oftentimes she’ll be talking with residents who feel they have other priorities they have to focus on. Having data can help illustrate what the real-life impacts might be.

More local data can also provide a baseline so, as solutions are implemented, there’s a yardstick with which to compare them, and it can prompt new action to develop investments or policies.

“Just measuring doesn’t do it,” said Patricia Fabian, a professor of environmental health at Boston University and associate director of the university’s Institute for Global Sustainability. “You have to pair it with action, resources, et cetera, but I do think that it’s very valuable to measure what are the values. Are they higher than standards?”

Fabian is one member of a team, along with staff from Boston Public Schools, that will use air quality sensors installed in BPS schools during the COVID-19 pandemic to track air pollution data and develop and pilot an action plan to improve air quality using $194,691 from the city funding.

For the city, the grants are an opportunity to direct those new actions in parts of Boston that can address the unequal impacts that poor air quality has historically had. All the awardees are working in environmental justice communities that have a legacy of greater burdens from polluted air.

Tori Hass-Mitchell, an air quality project manager with the city, called air pollution an “environmental justice issue,” and said local solutions can often bring the greatest impacts.

According to a 2022 study from researchers at Boston College, while air-pollution-related diseases, deaths and IQ loss occur in every city and town across Massachusetts, the highest rates were found in the most economically disadvantaged and socially underserved cities and towns.

Those protections are increasingly important as things like wildfire smoke events become more frequent, Fabian said.

According to the American Lung Association’s 2025 State of the Air report, the Boston area is seeing increased ozone smog and particle pollution, largely due to widespread wildfire smoke.

Fabian’s work with Boston Public Schools will help protect students, who she said are especially vulnerable populations when it comes to poor air quality.

City officials said they hope the grant funding will be one step in improving air quality, especially for more vulnerable communities, across the city.

“Together, we’re laying the groundwork for a healthier, more equitable Boston, and that’s one in which every resident has a right to clean air,” Hass-Mitchell said.