Bay Area Air District
Project: Grantmaking Strategy
About the Bay Area Air District:
Founded in 1955, the Bay Area Air District was the first regional air pollution control agency in the United States. The Air District is responsible for regulating air pollution across the nine counties that surround the San Francisco Bay (Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, Napa, San Francisco, San Mateo, Santa Clara, southwestern Solano, and southern Sonoma counties), and works to improve air quality to protect public health, reduce historical and current environmental inequities, and mitigate climate change and its impacts.
The Air District is governed by a Board of Directors composed of locally elected officials. The Board is advised by the Community Advisory Council (CAC), which is a body of community leaders who bring deep expertise, lived experience, and a commitment to air quality, public health, and environmental justice issues across the Bay Area. The CAC advises the Board and executive officer on technical and policy matters and plays an important role in elevating community perspectives and helping to shape equitable environmental solutions.
Why the Bay Area Air District partnered with Lyons-Newman Consulting:
The Air District Board of Directors established the Community Benefit Fund, a one-time allocation of $3 million intended to be community-directed and to benefit communities overburdened by air pollution. The CAC was tasked with creating a proposal to the Air District Board for distributing funding from the Community Benefit Fund, and explored community-centered participatory approaches to distributing these funds. Given our expertise and experience facilitating participatory grantmaking and community benefit fund initiatives with public agencies and nonprofit organizations throughout the Bay Area, the Air District engaged our team to support the CAC’s Community Benefit Fund (CBF) Ad Hoc Committee. We helped them explore the potential for a participatory grantmaking process and develop a proposal for this process to present to the Air District Board. The Air District and CAC also sought an equity-centered facilitation approach and an inclusive process that centered the expertise, priorities, and lived experiences of community stakeholders.
The process:
Working closely with the CAC’s CBF Committee, Air District staff, and the CAC, we facilitated a series of CBF Committee meetings to support CAC members with reviewing participatory grantmaking best practices, identifying priorities, exploring options for distributing the funding, and refining proposal recommendations. We also conducted one-on-one conversations with CAC members, designed and analyzed a feedback survey on the draft proposal, and continuously incorporated stakeholder feedback into each iteration of crafting the proposal. By supporting the Ad Hoc Committee and Air District staff in synthesizing the CAC’s input and aligning across diverse perspectives, we helped ensure that the final proposal reflected the priorities and values of the CAC and the highest public health and environmental justice priorities of the communities it represents.
The results:
Following completion of the grant program proposal by the CAC, the Air District Board approved the People’s Air Grant Program to distribute funding from the $3 million Community Benefit Fund. The People’s Air Grant Program supports projects in communities within the Air District’s jurisdiction that are most affected by air pollution and environmental injustices.
Applications for the People’s Air Grant Program are currently open through May 29, 2026. Each grant award will be up to $400,000. Grants are available for community-based organizations, nonprofit organizations, public agencies, and California Native American Tribes serving environmental justice communities across the Bay Area.
What the Bay Area Air District says:“The Air District Board tasked the Community Advisory Council (CAC) with designing a proposal to distribute $3 million in community benefits. Belinda and Erica were instrumental in this effort, bringing deep expertise in participatory budgeting. They helped guide the CAC through a collaborative process that deliberately shaped the vision and framework for a new program. The resulting People’s Air Grant Program, created by the CAC with support from Lyons‑Newman Consulting, is now approved and accepting applications for funding.” — Miriam Torres, Senior Advanced Projects Advisor