If you need masks, check out the organizations on our get masks tab that can still provide you with free masks.
Mask Oakland’s Status, 7/29/2026
ACTIVE: Part-time strategizing about how to document, preserve, and share the learnings of Mask Oakland for other communities affected by wildfire smoke and engaged in mutual aid. Light monitoring of email, Instagram, and BlueSky. Light monitoring of wildfire news.
RECENT ACTIVITIES (July 2026): released a statement during the July NorthEast US + Canada wildfire smoke sharing our lessons learned from many fire seasons.We also visited Altadena in Southern California and toured where thousands of structures burned down in fires in January 2025, and visited some allies in the area we had sent supplies.
In Oakland in 2025 we received a donation of 50,000 free N95s, covered shipping and storage, and distributed them across a dozen local organizations in collaboration with Common Humanity Collective.
WHAT’S NOT HAPPENING: we are not engaged in on the ground distribution of supplies. Our last field distribution campaign was our co-leading of Bay2LA, an initiative shared with Mask4MaskBayArea and Common Humanity Collective, Medicine for Nightmares, and others that had us send down tens of thousands of donated in items across a dozen roundtrips of volunteers driving full cars and box trucks. We are not recruiting new volunteers at this time, and encourage people to self-organize their own initiatives. If you need advice feel free to reach out and we’ll respond as soon as we can. As of March 2026, we stopped maintaining a physical footprint of at least one storage unit, for the first time since November 2018, to reduce costs and take some rest.
WHAT’S NEXT:
We’ve lived through 9 fire seasons, ranging from surprisingly smoke-free in the Bay Area, to weeks and weeks of toxic smoke and active distribution campaigns. That is valuable. We’ve been around since 2017, running very leanly and then growing during crisis response. Many overlapping orgs popped up, particularly in COVID, then closed down again. We’re interested in not just being something that happened, but a recorded resource and ongoing contribution. That might look like:
- more web content, articles and social media posts of lessons learned, how-to’s on responding to wildfire smoke, and other educational materials and movement resources
- Live online events with accessibility features like captions, ASL, recordings, and transcripts
- Trainings for other orgs
- Building up of more volunteers in the Bay Area and beyond who can help lead autonomous mutual aid initiatives
Your donations help us continue to build community power through shared understanding and relationship-building to overall grow the capacity of volunteers to respond in their own neighborhoods to wildfire smoke and other climate crises.
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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.
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. Before the fire smoke returned that year, we provided 15,000+ 3-ply surgical masks to houseless and related community organizations May-July. 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. The smoke-filtering masks we handed out also provided protection against COVID.
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!
