The ultimate goal of the Community Engagement Core (CEC) is to facilitate prevention and intervention strategies that result in community-level reductions in exposure to targeted contaminants, either through changes in behavior that reduce or eliminate pathways to exposure or through community-driven actions to remediate the sites of contamination. The CEC will accomplish these goals by connecting communities impacted by environmental contaminants to the research conducted by the Duke University Superfund Research Center (DUSRC). Given the focus of the DUSRC on the ways in which exposure to hazardous substances during pregnancy or early childhood can lead to serious health consequences in later life, the CEC will focus on preventing early life exposures. To achieve this goal, the CEC will partner with the communities of Cradock, in Virginia, and Badin, Castle Hayne and others in North Carolina. We will work with these communities to collaboratively devise optimal strategies for reducing and preventing exposures in pregnant women and children to: mercury and PCBs from subsistence consumption of fresh water fish from contaminated waterways; from air, soil and water borne PCBs, PAHs, TCE, heavy metals, etc. from former metal processing industrial sites; and from pesticides and soil contaminants, particularly heavy metals and PAHs, in community and school gardens built on brownfield and other contaminated sites. The CEC will take an innovative approach to community engagement, one that will be highly participatory and bidirectional, involving communities in conjunction with DUSRC Investigators and Trainees in determining the questions we ask, the methods we use to answer them, and the ways in which the results we generate will be applied. The DUSRC CEC’s model for community engagement will inform our approach to accomplishing each of our specific aims and will follow a similar set of iterative steps, tailored to each project and community: 1) identify and form partnerships with at-risk communities; 2) work collaboratively with the community to understand current sources of exposure; 3) work collaboratively with the community to analyze pathways to exposure; 4) apply results to develop and implement community-led action plans and materials to disseminate more broadly; 5) analyze and report on outcomes and disseminate models broadly.