Last year, Chicago resident Emily Dupree attended a concert with her partner, who caught COVID-19 at the show. While Dupree treated her sick partner and tried to avoid getting ill in their shared home, some thoughts began to form in her mind. Dupree and her partner still wore masks everywhere they went, and had adopted air purification in their home early in the pandemic to mitigate the risk of transmission. But she knew that wasn’t the case for most people.

Around this time, Dupree came across a question the father of prolific abolitionist organizer Mariame Kaba used to ask her when she was frustrated: “It sounds like this is something you are very upset about. What will you do about it?” That question helped Dupree “channel a lot of despair I was feeling during the pandemic into concrete action,” she told Teen Vogue. And Clean Air Club was born.