Project: Breathe Out

After my holiday to Fuerteventura with cosmolinguist, I've been feeling a bit more energised about some activist projects so I thought I'd talk about them here.

A long time ago I had the idea to build some Corsi-Rosenthal air filter boxes, which I could loan out to LGBT+ groups for their meetings to make them less risky and more accessible. I did a lot of prep work for this, including coming up with a brand name ("Breathe Out"), some talking points (us queers should be used to the Government ignoring epidemics) and so on. But as I started reaching out to groups I found that nobody was interested and got disheartened.

This weekend I went to the Onion Social Centre, a squat in a former Sure Start centre in Longsight. A couple of friends of mine are helping out there and they'd asked me and cosmolinguist for advice on Covid risk reduction. I ended up writing a reasonably long case study / briefing for them, suggesting that the best starting point is providing free masks (possibly courtesy of the local Mask Bloc) and education. Ideally they'd have C-R boxes in each room but that's a big ask as they have a lot of rooms. Natural ventilation is a bit of a non-starter - they're already struggling to keep the place warm in January, and to make sure the ventilation is effective you need moderately expensive CO2 monitors and the time to take readings.

Anyway, when I got home I took the plunge and bought a bunch of parts to make two 100W 20-inch C-R boxes. They work out at about £60 each. They should be able to filter pretty big rooms, so I'm thinking of providing one for the "main room" at the squat, and maybe another for the reception. In future I can look at smaller boxes (maybe using 8" or 12" fans instead of 20") which might be cheaper, for the smaller rooms. And hopefully I'll get them back if / when the squat folds, which means I'll have them on hand to provide to other spaces.

It's not exactly world changing, but it seems that making small corners safer for my fellow queers might be something I can actually contribute, and I'm pretty excited about that.