About Clear The Air
What We Do
Creating access to cleaner air for artists, musicians, and organizers in the Austin area.
Clear The Air
Our Story
Our Mission
What is Clear the Air?
Clear the Air (CTA) focuses on creating community equity by providing access to cleaner air and community education. Our volunteer-run, disability-led operation works to make spaces safer by reducing viral transmission through lending HEPA air purifiers and far-UVC devices, as well as distributing tests and KN95 masks, all free of charge.
Our Vision
Why are we motivated to do this?
Clear the Air is here to challenge pandemic apathy and offer solutions for COVID-safer events. Reducing the amount of viral particles in the air means we can decrease the risk of transmission, thus keeping our communities safer while maintaining vital social connections. Aside from masking, scientific data indicates that HEPA-filtration is one of the best tools for filtering out airborne viral particles, including COVID-19. This is why air purifiers are the main component of our library. We believe no one is “disposable”, and our communal spaces should reflect that in their safety and accessibility measures.
Along with preventing or slowing the spread of COVID, we are hoping to prevent, raise awareness of, and increase access to resources and education about Long COVID, which is estimated to impact 400 million people as of 2023, and this number continues to grow. Head to our resources page to learn more about Long COVID.
Our Community
Who’s behind it all?
We are a Disabled-led organization and are entirely run by volunteers for now, although we would like to compensate volunteers for their time in order to make the organization more sustainable. The people who keep Clear the Air running range across the identity spectrum from, neurodivergent, trans and nonbinary, queer, people of the global majority, and white COVID conscious organizers, performers, and artists in the Austin-area. We all have different lived experiences regarding the ongoing COVID pandemic, and are deeply committed to making our communities healthier.
Meet Our Friends!
We love seeing new clean air orgs form! This map is made and maintained by our friends at Clean Air Club.
Our Partners
If you’re interested in becoming one of our community partners, get in touch with us! We’re always excited to connect with more companies who share our values of increasing accessibility!
Smarter HEPA
The majority of the Clear the Air library consists of Smarter HEPA air purifiers. We are grateful for their support which helped us get Clear the Air started.
Austin Creative Alliance
We are a fiscally sponsored project through Austin Creative Alliance, a 501c3 nonprofit serving the music, arts, arts and culture sector. As such, donations to CTA are tax-deductible.