HealthiAir Community Action Pack

In the fall of 2016, a group of both graduate and undergraduate students at the Center for Social Design at Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) partnered with the Baltimore City Health Department (BCHD) to address the significance of smoking in Baltimore. The students created a pop-up event, called HealthiAir, which creates dialogue around shared experiences of smoking addiction, as well as the benefits and challenges of creating a smoke-free comfort zone in one’s home.

Building on the principles of the original HealthiAir, in the fall of 2017, our class refocused the project to address Public Housing. Starting July 2018, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) mandated that all U.S. Public Housing must be smoke-free. While they provided a guidebook for the transition, it is mostly up to each city’s housing authority to decide how this change will be enacted and monitored.