Celebrating YPS-Supported Impact! Projects

In partnership with Yale College and the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, YPS launched Impact! to provide support for small, dynamic teams of students, faculty, and staff to pursue small-scale projects focused on planetary solutions challenges.

In 2024, three Impact! projects were selected for funding. These projects proposed efforts to explore variation in local air quality, sustainable fashion consumption, and documentation of New Haven’s environmental history. Through new publications, curated exhibits, strategic solutions for community needs, and more, these projects are providing students with hands-on experience in linking academic expertise with a broader context.

Project teams consisting of undergraduates, graduate students, faculty, and/or staff had the opportunity to apply for up to $10,000 in research or project funding, with support for student stipends as well. 

Read about the selected projects below!

Localized Air Pollutant Inequity: An Analysis of Air Quality Disparities Between New Haven’s Dwight and East Rock Neighborhoods

Project Leads: 

Daniel Carrión and Andrei Harwell

Project Overview:

Poor air quality is a planetary challenge that affects low-socioeconomic neighborhoods disproportionately. This interdisciplinary project team (with architecture, urban studies, public health, and environmental studies backgrounds) is comparing air pollution levels between two New Haven neighborhoods: Dwight, a predominantly low-income, minority race community and East Rock, a wealthier, predominantly White community. The disparities between Dwight and East Rock in New Haven serve as an example for much larger socioeconomic inequities and environmental health risks faced on a global scale. Understanding these connections within New Haven is key to tackling major global problems locally.

 

The project team is deploying PurpleAir sensors – low-cost air quality monitors that are part of a global, open-access network – to generate hyper-local, real-time air quality data. Previously, Professor Andrei Harwell installed seven PurpleAir sensors in Dwight in collaboration with the Greater Dwight Development Corporation. For the Impact! project, the team is installing seven PurpleAir sensors throughout East Rock to compare the two neighborhoods’ air quality. The data generated over six months for both neighborhoods will be publicly available. This data complements other Yale studies on heat disparities in New Haven and can inform interdisciplinary environmental health policy solutions used by local leaders, policymakers, and funders to improve community health, green space investment, and urban design in the City of New Haven and beyond.

 

A Revolution Through Research: Building a Community of Scholars in Sustainable Fashion

 

Project Leads: 

Meital Peleg Mizrachi, Heather Fitzgerald, and Mary E. Davis

 

Project Overview:

This project is making Yale the home of The Sustainable Fashion Consumption Research Network, a growing network of 120+ international academic researchers and practitioners working on issues of fashion consumption in the context of sustainability. This makes it possible to achieve two key goals for the “Moving the Needle” initiative: connecting and supporting scholars researching this important area and connecting interested students with scholars actively conducting research in the field. 

Since receiving funding from YPS, the project team has begun rebuilding and redesigning the Sustainable Fashion Consumption Research Network website to increase its functionality for the existing network and for external stakeholders who want to learn more about this area of research.  In addition, the team is organizing outreach to the network to share insights and opportunities to present and collaborate, host remote monthly meetings for members, and plan the Second Symposium of the International Sustainable Fashion Consumption Research Network which will be held at Yale October 27-29, 2025.

New Haven Environmental History Project: Imagining a City’s Future by Studying Its Past

Image Citation: Feeding Pigeons on New Haven Green, New Haven, Conn. Photograph.

Project Lead:

Paul Sabin

Project Overview:

Historical understanding of environmental and social change is vital to understanding current planetary challenges and imagining future possibilities and solutions. At a time of increased urbanization and focus on urban climate solutions, the New Haven Environmental History Project is addressing the need for an informed civil society cognizant of the deep roots of environmental challenges and inequalities, and the opportunities for place-based solutions. 

The New Haven Environmental History Project is developing educational resources to help New Haven students, teachers, and residents better understand the city as a dynamic urban ecological system evolving over hundreds of years of social, political, and cultural change. The project focuses on illuminating the component parts of the urban system, such as energy, water, transportation, and health and how they have developed over time. In addition to resource development, the project team is creating collaborative engagement between New Haven Public School instructors and Yale faculty. This initiative aims to serve as a replicable model of a university-city partnership for studying urban environmental history based on free, curated, and engaging historical primary sources and curricular materials.