STATUS – 8/19/2024 We are on hiatus
If you need masks, check out the organizations on our get masks tab that can still provide you with free masks.
A small number of us have been doing this for a long time, and are in a low point of funding, health, and capacity, so we are currently focused on our individual survival and well-being. If the worst case smoke situations arise it may or may not rally enough support to take action this season. That’s okay. We encourage people to self-organize, and are doing our best to work towards personal sustainability outside this project, and contemplating how to best long-term preserve the community wisdom and lessons learned and keep an eye on the future of this type of work. Often in the history of this work we have been in a state of hiatus and then snapping into action driven by adrenaline and crisis. Hard to sustain. Welcome to contact us, sign up to volunteer, it just may be a while til you hear from us. Thanks for supporting the real rhythms and challenges of grassroots organizing!
Activities in hiatus
We are still maintaining a small storage of several thousand masks, we have reduced our storage footprint and costs, but your donations are still helping us keep that hold of preparation, keeping our site up, and helping us cover the rent of another grassroots air quality group’s storage, and build up a small reserve. We are considering either publishing articles or webinars/workshops on the history, context, and future of this type of work, but mostly resting and letting go of one form of organizing as we wait to see what organically emerges in the near future.
Donations still helpful
We only have a handful of monthly donors but we want to assure you that when crisis hits, expenses can go from a few hundred a month to tens of thousands of dollars quickly, all support helps us cover our monthly storage and preparedness costs, and build a reserve.
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Fire Season + COVID rising!
As COVID ticks up again, many West Coast cities also have a seasonal need for masks and air shelters due to wildfire smoke. Mask Oakland began and is still best known for our work during fire seasons 2017-2023 distributing smoke-filtering masks to unhoused communities stuck outside. The West Coast is seeing record-breaking fires season after season, so we are building long-term capacity for climate resilience and health justice.
Follow @MaskOakland
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As featured in KQED, Washington Post, SF Chronicle, New York Times, WBUR, New Yorker, Guardian… (link)
Our 2020 COVID 19 Response
In March and April 2020, we emptied our fire season storage to provide thousands of N95 masks to healthcare workers in the Bay Area and sent hundreds to Los Angeles nurses, all to help save lives at the start of the coronavirus pandemic.
COVID-19 has shocked and devastated vulnerable communities, and we don’t know how long it will last. We do know that everyone needs masks, especially those with no place to shelter-in-place, the unhoused. Using the insights and relationships from 3 fire seasons of mask distribution during toxic smoke, we are helped vulnerable communities get the PPE they need in the East Bay and beyond.
Before the fire smoke returned, we provided 15,000+ 3-ply surgical masks to houseless and related community organizations May-July. The smoke-filtering masks we handed out also provided protection against COVID.
We strongly support and believe Black Lives Matter, and so we also provided several thousand masks to Oaklanders protesting the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor in June.
Then in August, a series of unprecedented lightning storms led to the worst fires and accordingly the longest and most severe smoke conditions ever in the Bay Area. We gave out our remaining N95s, and with that supply chain devastated by the pandemic, switched to KN95s. We acquired and distributed 100,000 KN95 masks over the course of the fire season and the rest of 2020, and also connected organizers in Seattle and across Oregon to mask distribution partners of ours to provide tens of thousands of masks to wildfire smoke relief efforts locally.
Background: Direct community aid since 2017
Mask Oakland is a grassroots initiative that emerged in smoke and fire to provide the most vulnerable in our communities with the simplest recommended tool: N95 respirator masks.
In 2018, we used social media to raise funds for and deliver over 85,000 masks, more than all Bay Area governments. We focus on direct outreach to the homeless in Oakland and also reached provided thousands of masks to Berkeley, San Francisco, Sacramento and Modesto, working with dozens of community organizations to expand our reach.
In 2019 we mobilized again during the short but intense smoke from Kincade Fire, delivering thousands of masks, supporting others replicating our model in Sonoma and beyond, and using our social media presence to demand accountability for fires caused by undermaintained electrical equipment.
Next Steps
The work continues – Please give your support today.
As a project of Social Good Fund, a 501(c)3 organization, all donations to Mask Oakland are tax-deductible!
Thanks to all our volunteers and donors for your ongoing support!
