AFTER SCHOOL, CAMDEN LeBlanc runs around the corner from his apartment building to his favorite neighborhood playground: the Palmer Fire Department. He knocks on the garage door and the firefighters welcome him. They know him well as the high-energy six-year-old with a mischievous smile.
“I have a paper plane!” Camden shouts, as he dashes to climb the fire truck. Some days the firefighters put him to work, teaching him to roll up hoses and change the station laundry. But mostly he’s there to be around the people he wants to be like when he grows up.
Camden has always been an active kid. He does karate and spends as much time as he can outside. “Whether it’s raining or snowing or whatever, he doesn’t care,” said his dad, Jonathan LeBlanc.
But three years ago, Camden got sick and Jonathan noticed his son was having significant trouble breathing. They went to the emergency room, and Camden was eventually diagnosed with asthma.
In the months after that visit, Jonathan found himself trying to learn a system he didn’t yet understand — balancing inhalers and nebulizer treatments, watching for flare-ups, and worrying about what might trigger them.
At a follow-up appointment, someone handed him a form and asked if he wanted help making his home safer for Camden’s asthma. Jonathan filled it out.
“I don’t know a lot of stuff,” he said. “I’m a dad with two kids. When it comes to dealing with certain stuff like at the doctor’s office, sometimes I get intimidated.”
Not long after, a team showed up at their apartment in Palmer, a town 20 minutes east of Springfield — a city with one of the highest asthma rates in the United States.
“They did the rugs, they gave us air purifiers, and they gave us a floor AC unit. And they gave us a new vacuum,” Jonathan said. “They really helped us out.”
Revitalize Community Development Corporation, the Springfield-based organization that helped the LeBlancs, has been doing home remediations for nearly a decade — sending trained staff into homes to help families manage asthma triggers like mold, dust, old carpeting, and poor ventilation. Through their Healthy Homes initiative, the organization provides education, HEPA vacuums, air purifiers, mattress protectors, and home repairs like pest control and flooring replacement.
In 2024, Revitalize CDC received $1 million through the US Environmental Protection Agency’s Environmental Justice Government to Government grant program, allowing the organization to reach families that didn’t qualify for insurance-based programs but still needed assistance.
Six months into the grant, it was terminated.
“To have that stopped midway, it really is devastating,” said Colleen Shanley-Loveless, president and CEO of Revitalize CDC. “People are in dire need of these services. A lot of them are unfamiliar with things that can be asthma triggers — things that would send them to the emergency department. It’s something we can help them manage on their own.”
In April 2025, the EPA abruptly canceled nearly $26 million in Government to Government, Community Change, and Collaborative Cooperative Agreement grants intended to address air pollution, asthma, and extreme heat in some of Massachusetts’ most vulnerable communities.
The cuts targeted environmental justice programs — initiatives designed to reduce longstanding health disparities in low-income neighborhoods and communities of color — halting both projects that were already having an impact and those that didn’t yet have a chance to get off the ground. Across Massachusetts, school districts, public health agencies, and local nonprofits were left scrambling to replace funding that had promised not just cleaner air, but a coordinated response to a growing public health crisis.
“To have that stopped midway — it really is devastating. People are in dire need of these services. A lot of them are unfamiliar with things that can be asthma triggers — things that would send them to the emergency department. It’s something we can help them manage on their own.”
Colleen Shanley-Loveless, president and CEO of Revitalize CDC
Springfield was awarded a nearly $20 million EPA Community Change Grant in August of 2024. It was rescinded last year.
The Western Mass. city, which was deemed the “Asthma Capital of the United States” in 2018, has long struggled to improve air quality and manage the impacts it has on the city’s population. At the time, Springfield was setting the record for the highest number of asthma-related emergency room visits in the US, and one in six school-aged children carried an asthma diagnosis.
CommonWealth Beacon reached out to the EPA several times for comment but did not receive a response.
Asthma hospitalization rate
Age-adjusted rate per 10,000 population
As recently as the end of 2024, Springfield’s rate of asthma was still 30 percent higher than the national average. The grant aimed to tackle the city’s asthma crisis from a variety of angles, ranging from expanding the urban tree canopy, to restoring dilapidated housing stock, to workforce training for green jobs at Springfield Technical Community College.
Springfield’s asthma crisis is the result of overlapping environmental pressures that have compounded over time. Interstate 91 cuts directly through the city, funneling emissions from constant traffic into nearby neighborhoods. Much of the city’s housing is decades old, often with poor ventilation, lingering mold and dust, and deteriorating lead paint. (Eighty-eight percent of it predates the 1978 federal ban on lead paint.)
Even the region’s geography contributes to the problem.
“We live in a valley,” said Samantha Hamilton, the Public Health Institute of Western Massachusetts’s director of Coalition Building and Community Engagement. “The pollution just sits in this lower level.”
The institute was a subcontractor on the city’s grant, with a contract worth close to $2 million over five years.
“It would have been like a lightning bolt of funding that would put us light years in the future to advance climate change and health for the City of Springfield,” said Hamilton. “That is gone.” PHIWM’s work is built around what it calls resident advisors — community members who receive leadership training and then carry information back into their neighborhoods, families, and workplaces.
“It would have been like a lightning bolt of funding that would put us light years in the future to advance climate change and health for the City of Springfield. That is gone.”
Samantha Hamilton, director of Coalition Building and Community Engagement at PHI
Gri Saex, who has lived in Springfield for 15 years, is a resident advisor with PHIWM on both their Healthy Air Network and Climate Change Health and Equity initiatives. She spends her days as a community health worker, making home visits to patients across the western half of the state.
“I don’t see the job separate from my life,” she said. “This is our community, and everything affects us.”
Saex has worked closely with Revitalize CDC and the Healthy Homes program, where she has seen the positive impacts of home remediation programs for residents with asthma.
“I see the connections between chronic illnesses, stress management, and living in these situations,” she said. “It’s all related. You can’t just give a prescription and think that’s going to solve everything.”
At the same time, Saex knows that the program needs more capacity. The program could replace one rug, provide one air filter, and hand out mattress covers. But in a home with three kids who all have asthma, she said, that math doesn’t work.
“How are you going to divide that? If they all have asthma, they all need one in their room,” Saex said, referring to air filters. She called the interventions “band-aid programs” — necessary, but scaled to the grant, not the need.
Beginning in February 2025, the EPA canceled hundreds of environmental justice and DEI grants nationwide. The agency described the programs as “wasteful DEI and environmental justice programs being funded by taxpayers.”
Lee Zeldin, the agency’s administrator, shuttered all ten of the agency’s regional environmental justice offices. The agency did not respond to multiple requests for information from CommonWealth Beacon.
Across Massachusetts, Black and Latino residents — who together make up less than a third of the state’s population — are hospitalized or visit the emergency room for asthma at two to three times the rate of white residents, according to state data.
Springfield’s worst housing is in environmental justice neighborhoods
Homes with structural deficiencies — plumbing issues, mold exposure, and poor insulation — are concentrated in Springfield neighborhoods with high concentrations of low-income residents and people of color. Living in poor housing stock can worsen respiratory illness. In addition, I-91 cuts directly through the city, funneling vehicle exhaust into nearby neighborhoods.
Click the map for details.
Source: U.S. Census Bureau ACS 5-year estimates (2019–2023), tables B03002, B19013, B25034; Johns Hopkins University | Visualization by Keval Dave
“Disadvantage and advantage don’t come out of nowhere,” said Ben Wood, senior director of Policy and Practice at Healthy Resources in Action, a nonprofit that targets the root causes of health and racial inequities. “They are the result of active decisions made by the government, by large institutions that have the ability to control where resources go and how decisions are made at the local and state level.”
Beyond Springfield, similar efforts were taking shape across the state to deal with asthma. In the Pioneer Valley, a partnership between the Public Health Institute of Western Massachusetts and the Hitchcock Center, an Amherst-based environmental education nonprofit, had been building the Healthy Air Network — a regional system of low-cost air quality sensors to detect air pollution linked to asthma, including particulate matter and ozone.
School districts in the Commonwealth were also part of this broader push.
A program called Healthy Environments, Advanced Learning, or HEAL, run by Health Resources in Action, had spent two years training school nurses to lead environmental health assessments in their buildings, identifying asthma triggers like uncovered radiators, water-damaged ceiling tiles, and poor ventilation, while funding targeted fixes such as air conditioning units and custom radiator covers.
The project received a $500,000 Environmental Justice Collaborative Cooperative Agreement grant from the EPA to continue this work. That grant was also canceled.
With the grant cuts, these organizations have had to rely on a patchwork of other funding sources to keep going. In Springfield, Deputy Development Officer Tina Quagliato said the city’s strategy has been to pull in supplemental money and still fund as many programs as possible. “We’re working on that,” she said. “Hopefully we’ll see some success over the next six months to a year.”
Even after the improvements made through Revitalize CDC’s Healthy Homes program, Jonathan fears he can’t keep his family in their Palmer apartment without continued support. He found an apartment in Worcester — a side-by-side duplex with a big backyard.
For families like the LeBlancs, programs like Healthy Homes could not eliminate every asthma trigger. But they offered equipment, home repairs, and guidance that made it easier to manage a disease shaped as much by housing and environment as by medicine. With federal environmental justice funding disappearing, organizations across Massachusetts worry they will reach fewer families at a moment when the need remains urgent.
Camden doesn’t want to go. He loves his karate studio, his school, and the firefighters he spends time with.
“I don’t want to move!” he shouted when his father explained the plan.
The tradeoff weighs on Jonathan, who said he would drive his son back from Worcester so he could continue his karate lessons in the same place.
Jonathan looked across the room and gestured towards Camden, methodically folding paper planes, “that’s my life right there.”
This was a multimedia reporting project of the Media Innovation Studio at Northeastern University’s School of Journalism. The reporting team for this story was Emily Glick, Sana Tahir, Amber Luo, and Keval Amol Dave, working with journalism professor Dan Zedek.
