 California wildfires have reached record scale and frequency in recent years. Along with destroying forests and homes, the fires have also generated much higher levels of smoke, penetrating more communities for longer stretches of time. People who live here probably will never forget waking up to orange Martian skies. People were stuck in their homes, unable to breathe outside, and most people did not have air purifiers to filter out the air within their homes. It's particularly a pressing problem with people with low incomes who can't afford these expensive $100-plus air purifiers. Abidi and other Berkeley students came up with a plan to build and distribute air purifiers to alleviate the health hazards of smoke to people who can't afford commercial purifiers. Taking common box fans, volunteers retrofit them with filters to do the same job as air purifiers that typically cost three to five times more. So we begin by installing the feet and then attach weather stripping to the periphery of the box fan. Then at the next station, they take a Merv 13 filter and fasten it against the box fan. Another group of people takes a piece of cardboard that we slide onto the front of the box fan. And what this does is actually increase the efficiency of the air purifier by preventing a backwash effect. We've run tests and what we've discovered is that it can bring down the levels of contaminated air of a room to the levels purified by a commercial air purifier within just a few extra minutes. This isn't the first charitable project the new group has led. When COVID hit, many people didn't have access to hand sanitizer that health officials recommended using. Abidi got permission to use one of his Berkeley labs to make it. The operation soon attracted volunteers and bottles of sanitizer were distributed throughout the Bay Area. Then when mask wearing became essential, student volunteer Chris Gee came up with a highly effective do-it-yourself face mask design that volunteers were able to easily assemble in their own homes. The project expanded the group's volunteer base and its distribution system, and now it had a name, the Common Humanity Collective. Eventually we had over 300 volunteers join the effort. We mixed over 7,000 gallons of hand sanitizer and made over 60,000 submicron face masks. It's just been a really kind of remarkable thing to participate in and to see as many people as have shown up show up to make these things just for the process of trying to connect with each other on a political level and help where obviously help has not been easy to access in parts of the Bay Area. Organizers targeted the most vulnerable neighborhoods, those with low income, high air pollution, and high asthma rates. They also try to educate residents, encouraging them to get involved, building and delivering fans to their neighbors. I think all of us who participated in this project in any substantial way feel somehow transformed by it. This project gave us a way of having some agency over our circumstances, and that's extraordinarily powerful.