# Community Engagement Core

> **NIH NIH P42** · MICHIGAN STATE UNIVERSITY · 2024 · $124,380

## Abstract

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.

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10877999
- **Project number:** 5P42ES004911-29
- **Recipient organization:** MICHIGAN STATE UNIVERSITY
- **Principal Investigator:** Joseph Hamm
- **Activity code:** P42 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2024
- **Award amount:** $124,380
- **Award type:** 5
- **Project period:** 1997-04-01 → 2027-06-30

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10877999

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10877999, Community Engagement Core (5P42ES004911-29). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-06-01 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10877999. Licensed CC0.

---

*[NIH grants dataset](/datasets/nih-grants) · CC0 1.0*