Everyone deserves to have access to clean air. And yet, 99 percent of the world’s population still breathe air that is harmful and dirty. In the UK alone, it causes approximately 40,000 early deaths each year. Air pollution also contributes to a range of medical conditions, including strokes, dementia, heart disease, asthma and lung cancer.

Research shows that deprived communities in England typically live in places with the highest emissions of air pollution. Yet tackling it is not just important for our health and social equity. Air pollution also impacts businesses through reduced workforce productivity. In the UK, it costs the economy £1.6 billion annually due to employees taking sick days or time off to care for sick children.

By combating air pollution, we are taking action on climate change, as both air pollution and climate change have the same source and solutions – reducing our dependence on fossil fuels. By cleaning the air, we can reap the rewards of improved health, climate action, tackling inequalities, and better economic outputs.

For our health and our planet, it’s imperative that we find innovative ways to fund air quality initiatives. This doesn’t always need to take the form of big donations. Smaller grants for local air quality projects are essential to encourage communities to engage in tackling air pollution and campaign for clean air.

We know that engaging local communities is important as they can harness their expertise to drive effective local action. For example, the main cause of air pollution is burning fossil fuels, but what that looks like varies from region to region. While the main source of air pollution in urban areas may be from cars, rural areas may experience air pollution from wood burning. Tackling air pollution needs a targeted rather than a one-size-fits all approach and, for this, local, grassroots collaboration is essential.

No one knows a local area as well as the people who live there. They possess an intimate understanding of their environment and have a vested interest in improving the air quality around where they live. Because of this, local campaigning can be more effective in holding local politicians and policymakers to account.

Communities deserve to have their voices heard in shaping new initiatives and policies that impact them. Empowering community organisations and individuals to take action is fundamentally democratic and encourages personalised investment in their local area, enabling citizens to have a say over their health and their environment.

Localised messages can be extremely effective in mobilising citizens on a national level to act on air pollution. In the UK, we’ve seen this with the success of individual clean air campaigners such as Rosamund Adoo-Kissi-Debrah from the Ella Roberta Foundation and Jemima Hartshorn from Mums for Lungs.

Local projects also serve as prototypes for larger-scale projects. If a campaign is successful at a local level, funders can consequently extract learnings and use these as a basis for funding and planning national or international projects.

For these reasons, the Clean Air Fund and UK Community Foundations have launched the Breathe Better Air Community Fund in the UK. The learning-focused programme has provided smaller grant funding to grassroots organisations selected by community foundations across Manchester, Liverpool and Birmingham. The goal of the Fund is to increase local awareness, empower communities, and co-create local air quality solutions in these regions.

We’ve already seen some impressive results. In Manchester, we funded Forever Manchester, which channelled funding towards 15 activities. These included creating informative materials and running awareness workshops for local Jewish and deaf communities. Further funding went towards creating new signs around Manchester that guide pedestrians and cyclists towards safer, healthier paths away from traffic-heavy areas.

In Liverpool, Community Foundation for Merseyside funded 12 groups to run initiatives ranging from collaborating with researchers to monitor air pollution at main junctions and green spaces, to running air pollution activism workshops and holding community consultations with local policymakers.

In Birmingham, Heart of England Community Foundation funded 10 local groups, including one which organised a 100km group bicycle ride to raise awareness around how air pollution harms our health. Another organisation installed air quality monitors in local areas around Birmingham to gather data during commuter hours and create air quality awareness campaigns.

Learning from these small grant-led projects will help both the Clean Air Fund and UK Community Foundations to identify successful types of local action against air pollution, which other funders and decision makers can replicate elsewhere.

Local initiatives, whether to combat air pollution or for other causes, should become mainstream funding targets for philanthropists. Though larger initiatives are often better known, nothing mobilises people to act more than having a role to play in their own area, thus securing a better future for themselves, their families and their local communities.

Imogen Martineau, Head of UK Portfolio, Clean Air Fund

Ben Robinson, Deputy CEO and Director of Strategy, UK Community Foundations