While the story of the Flint water crisis has frequently been told, even sympathetic analyses have largely worked to make invisible the significant actions of Flint residents to protect and advocate for their community. Leaving the voices of these stakeholders out of narratives about the crisis has served to deepen distrust in the community. Our project responds to these silences through a community-driven research study aimed explicitly at elevating the frame of Flint residents in and around the Flint water crisis. This paper describes the coming together of the research team, the overall project design for each of the three research efforts, and lessons learned. The three sub-projects include: (1) a qualitative analysis of community sentiment provided during 17 recorded legislative, media, and community events, (2) an analysis of trust in the Flint community through nine focus groups across demographic groups (African American, Hispanic, seniors, and youth) of residents in Flint, and (3) an analysis of the role of the faith-based community in response to public health crises through two focus groups with faith based leaders from Flint involved with response efforts to the water crisis. Our study offers insight for understanding trust in crisis, which could be valuable to other communities and researchers seeking to address similar situations. The project offers community science as a model for considering community engagement in research as part of the process of resilience.

Considering that community members continue to garden in and near environments impacted by pollutants known to negatively impact human health, this paper seeks to characterize the intrinsic and extrinsic motivations of a gardener and elucidate their perception of soil quality and environmental responsibility, awareness of past land use, and gardening behavior. Via semi-structured interviews with community gardeners in the Boston area (N = 17), multifactorial motivations associated with gardening as well as ongoing environmental health challenges were reported. Gardeners are knowledgeable about their garden’s historical past and are concerned with soil quality, theft, trash maintenance, animal waste, and loss of produce from foraging animals. Study findings directly inform the field of environmental health exposure assessments by reporting gardening duration, activities that can lead to incidental soil ingestion, and consumption patterns of locally grown produce. This information combined with an understanding of a gardener’s intrinsic and extrinsic motivations can be used to develop urban agricultural infrastructure and management strategies, educational programming, and place-based environmental public health interventions.

At the ten-year anniversary of the Flint water crisis, Flint residents continue to work to improve the well-being of their community and advance community leadership in science. While the water crisis is remembered by most as just an egregious example of government mismanagement, a lesser told story is that of the ongoing leadership and mobilization of Flint residents. Our paper reflects on a collaborative project as part of a larger, sustained partnership in co-producing knowledge about Flint residents' experiences with the water crisis, their expertise in responding to public health crises, and concerns and curiosities that may be explored as scientific research questions. We detail our investigative effort over five years focusing on understanding Flint residents' expertise in responding to the water crisis and our processes of working with residents to connect personal experiences to explorable questions. We align the activities of our engagement (focus groups, workshops, a technology co-development pilot study, and interviews) with an iterative process of listening, dialogue, and action consistent with Paulo Freire's processes for advancing collective consciousness. We position our work as an implementation of liberation sociology by working to explore scientific questions that are meaningful and impactful to disenfranchised populations.