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Knowing how to control occupational and environmental health and safety hazards is only half the battle. For those controls to be effective, people must use them. But successful adoption of controls isn’t entirely within the power of the OEHS professional—the people these controls are intended to protect get a say as well.

Securing grassroots support is as important when implementing controls in workplaces as it is when researching programs that will be implemented in communities. Many of the same strategies apply. Trân Huỳnh, PhD, MPH, CIH, and Susan Arnold, PhD, CIH, FAIHA, spoke to SynergistNOW about their project promoting safer work practices among immigrant workers in beauty and nail salons. “I think some of the best practices could also be applied in multiple settings,” Huỳnh said. “Even by those who work in corporate settings.”

“There's a lot of crossover in some of the methods that we have to use for exposure assessment,” said Darrah Sleeth, PhD, MPH, CIH. Similar to Huỳnh and Arnold, Sleeth researches controls for hazards affecting rural Native American communities. Furthermore, Sleeth continued, “there's a lot of overlap in the way we have to outreach to people.”

Below, Huỳnh, Arnold, and Sleeth share what they learned when they reached out to local communities for assistance with OEHS research projects.

First Steps

Arnold and Huỳnh were motivated by their personal relationships to make OEHS knowledge accessible to workers in small businesses, such as beauty and nail salons. Arnold wished to make her knowledge of the chemical exposures occurring in salon environments available to the people she had met working in salons. Huỳnh became more aware of the lack of OEHS support available to small business owners when she was completing her PhD. Because Huỳnh’s mother is a salon worker, as are some of her other family members and friends, she knew that many workers in this population didn’t know about the hazards they were exposed to or how to protect themselves.

“I started to recognize that there’s a lot of need for small businesses to have these sort of high-quality technical assistance and information about work-related diseases and prevention techniques to protect themselves,” Huỳnh said. “For many first-generation immigrants who work in small businesses, such as salons, the owners and the employees have a hard time accessing linguistically and culturally specific occupational health information.”

But before they could start disseminating OEHS information, Arnold and Huỳnh had to build deeper relationships with the community. “That necessitates us, as academic researchers, to go to those communities to meet people and engage with them unconditionally,” Arnold said. “So you look for opportunities to give ourselves and our expertise without any strings attached.”

During an event at the Midwest Center for Occupational Health and Safety, Arnold helped organize a team-building activity in which students built Corsi-Rosenthal boxes, a type of air purifier that can be constructed by hand from basic materials. The ten boxes made during the event were donated to a local community organization. “We didn't ask for anything back. We didn't put any conditions on it,” Arnold continued. “It was really a matter of giving them to a community that we knew was in need, a community with whom we'd like to have a closer relationship, as a first step gesture to say, ‘we're here, and we have some expertise and some resources, and we'd like to get to know you more.’”

Sleeth began helping Native American communities control exposures through the involvement of one of her colleagues. In Utah, many Native American communities are in rural areas with histories of mining that put community members at risk of exposure to radon and other radioactive elements. Like Huỳnh and Arnold, Sleeth’s team had to build rapport with the communities before they began taking samples.

As of February 2025, her team was taking part in “listening sessions,” events in which community members were invited to meet and share concerns with researchers. “So we set one up at the local casino and had dinner for them and said, ‘This is what we’d like to do. We're interested in your feedback on this.’ And we got some great feedback on what they're worried about,” Sleeth explained. The team was also planning to attend an upcoming community basketball tournament.

Casual initial interactions like these lay the foundations for future relationships. They allow researchers to identify members of the community who are particularly passionate about given health and safety issues and may serve as community partners. Researchers may then perform qualitative analysis on community members’ feedback and follow up with focus groups and questionnaires before beginning to take samples.

But in the early stages of a project, establishing two-way communication between researchers and community members is critical. Sleeth has found that sometimes, the hazards community members are most concerned about are not those that the researchers are most concerned about. “You go in, and you think you know what the problems are, but then they say ‘No, this thing over here has been an issue,’” she said. “Stopping to listen, I think, is an important skill that we have to use with these community populations.”

Huỳnh and Arnold, in their work with salon workers, learned the same thing. Arnold noted that the reason why the project team had approached community members at all was because the researchers needed to hear what community members had to say. Rather than approaching the community as experts with an agenda, “we come in as people who want to be equal partners,” she said. “And then we stop talking and start listening.”

She invoked a phrase often used by groups underrepresented in policy, research, and other social efforts: nothing about us without us. “The people who are the focus of whatever kind of research it is, whether it's fundamental learning, understanding about some aspect of that community, or some sort of intervention study, they need to have a voice in what's being studied, how it's going to be studied, and what the outputs and the outcomes of the study will be,” Arnold said. “They need to have an active role in the research process. And what that role is or isn't will depend on a number of factors.”

For example, who will see the data generated by a study? Who has the right to share the data? How will that data be disseminated? When? And by whom? “All of those things need to be considered and decided and then followed through on according to the decisions that are jointly made,” Arnold continued.

Benefits of Community Outreach Efforts

Involving community members—or employees of your organization—in OEHS programs and research is time intensive. Building the authentic relationships that allow these efforts to succeed may take years, Huỳnh pointed out. “Sometimes, when we conduct research in an environment that requires us to produce results quickly, that could hinder our relationship-building process,” she said. “Building time to allow for the research team and the community partners and the community members to get to know each other and almost be friends with each other—it's a very critical step in that process.”

So, given the level of time and personal involvement required, why should OEHS professionals and researchers make outreach efforts to begin with?

Sleeth noted that OEHS professionals and researchers alike must secure grassroots support for initiatives to be effective. People will not maintain engineering controls, follow administrative controls, or wear personal protective equipment if they don’t feel health and safety experts share their concerns. For Sleeth and her team, the challenge was to earn the confidence of remote communities that often mistrust outside researchers. Similarly, OEHS professionals in industrial or corporate environments must win the trust of executives and workers. They must make efforts to understand people’s concerns and, if they can’t address these concerns directly, compile lists of resources that people can turn to for additional help.

These activities are important for “building that safety culture and getting buy-in on activities that are important for health and safety,” Sleeth said, “and also being good stewards of the community.”

“Maybe you are an industrial hygienist in a higher-polluting industry,” she continued. “Bridging that gap with the local community can be really valuable as well.”

Community outreach can also help OEHS experts support underserved workers. “I believe that community-based, participatory research is one of the ways that we can engage with those who are disproportionately impacted by inequities of access to occupational health resources,” Huỳnh said. “We can engage with these people and let them know that there are ways that we can work together to address these health inequities that we're seeing in our field.”

Listening to workers brings intangible benefits, such as building the “soft” or interpersonal skills increasingly being sought by employers. Doing community-participatory research “has helped me a lot for personal development,” Huỳnh said. “For example, when we work with folks with different viewpoints, different strengths, and lived experiences, it really allows us to think and reflect on ways we can work together with patience and understanding to achieve our common goal of protecting community health.”

Finally, engaging with workers helps you not think of them as data points but appreciate them as individuals. “We learned so much about ourselves and about how to be better humans in doing this work,” Arnold said. “There's a temptation to think about people who are in vulnerable communities as victims. But then, when you work with them and you get to know them, you really start to see their strengths. And you start to see a degree of creativity and a degree of determination and courage and resilience.”

“I think we gained more than we give. We learn more than we teach,” Arnold added. “It's really rewarding.”

Susan Arnold, Trân Huỳnh, and Darrah Sleeth will present the educational session, “Integrating Community-Based Research Approaches in OEHS,” on Wednesday, May 21, from 1 to 2 p.m. Central time at AIHA Connect 2025. AIHA’s annual conference will be held from May 19 to 21, 2025, in person at the Kansas City Convention Center in Kansas City, Missouri, and virtually. To view the conference agenda or register, visit the AIHA Connect website.