PROJECT SUMMARY/ABSTRACT Reducing the amount and toxicity of hazardous substances is a complicated, long-term goal of the Superfund Research Program that requires effective relationships among scientific, governmental, and community stakeholders. The current proposal seeks funding to innovate on our previous general efforts to create, foster, and improve these relationships through a specific focus on building trust by addressing vulnerability. We propose to work closely with the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services, and especially its Division of Environmental Health (DEH), in a series of community engagements in Saginaw, St. Clair Shores, and Otsego. All three communities are impacted by dioxins and dioxin-like compounds and are important foci of the DEH’s health education interventions. These community engagements traditionally take an information dissemination approach, seeking to provide community members with the information necessary to make informed prevention decisions. We propose to leverage the substantive and methodological expertise of our Core and Center to iteratively listen (SA1), empower (SA2), and evaluate (SA3) with a primary focus on using our engagement efforts to optimally build trust. Despite their common environmental health challenges, all three communities vary considerably in terms of their social context: They include a community facing significant environmental injustice issues (Saginaw); an affluent community that is likely to have the resources to self-protect without the help of the state (St. Clair Shores); and a politically conservative, rural community (Otsego). Addressing each community’s unique concerns is critical to both effective engagement and trust building. To this end, our SA1 activities will collect community perspectives that will be interpreted with the help of a Local Advisory Group to ensure that local knowledge and experience play a central role throughout the sense-making process. In SA2, we will collaboratively engage these communities through a series of health education interventions. We will leverage our Core’s expertise to improve these engagements by integrating community perspectives and develop strategies to explicitly address the salient vulnerabilities identified in SA1. In SA3, we will conduct rigorous evaluations of the immediate and cumulative impact of our engagements and adapt for the next year. All of our activities will be conducted in close collaboration with our RTC and Project Leads to ensure the integration of Center expertise, but we will also create opportunities for our Center investigators to learn from these communities and from the DEH. To ensure the impact of these experiences on our Center, we will engage in capacity-building activities to better position investigators and trainees in our MSU Center and across the Superfund Research Program to build trust with the individuals and groups impacted by their work.