In our new series, Portraits of Public Health, we meet Khanh, an educator with Public Health’s “Fun to Catch, Toxic to Eat” program in Environmental Health Services.

Hi Khanh! What work do you do in King County?

I raise awareness about the toxic contamination in our local Duwamish River by supporting community members to do health outreach into their communities.

How do you and community members educate others about the contamination?

It’s important to begin with the context of how this river used to be and the people who used to live along the river, the Duwamish Tribe. With colonial settlement and then years and years of industrial runoffs, storm water, and other human activity, the mud in the Duwamish River became polluted.

You can’t really see chemical contamination in a crab or a fish just by looking at it, and it takes a long time for exposure to contamination to become an illness. Even though there’s a lot of clean-up happening—including ongoing work at the Lower Duwamish Waterway Superfund site—decontamination also takes a long time. It’s a complex message and it needs a conversation with somebody that is a community member, possibly a fisher, who they trust.

Why do you work with fishers?

Fishing is a big part of the identity of the people we work with. A lot of them are immigrants or refugees who come from a fishing culture. So when they came here, they found that Seattle’s only river is the Duwamish. But the mud in the Duwamish River is highly contaminated with toxic chemicals and they are exposed to it from the fish and seafood that they catch for their families. They’re at risk for a lot of bad health effects if they eat the fish year after year.

How do you recruit fishers for outreach work?

You need to speak in their language as much as possible—know the challenges that community members face. Not everyone trusts you and yet you’re there every day to continue to build and harness that trust. In the early days, I was going out to piers, going to different popular fishing sites. I’d get to know the fishers and ask them, “Who do you talk to for information? Who does your wife talk to?” We tried to find trusted members just through word-of-mouth.

What makes fishers good outreach workers?

Fishers have this innate patience. On the piers, there’s an atmosphere that is relaxed. It might take the whole afternoon to converse over some food to get folks to open up. I learned that you need to talk to fishers about what they like to catch and what they’re going to make with the catch—it’s more focused on the activity at hand than the health message. And then possibly, after one whole afternoon of conversing, you can get into the health message. So it’s very different than two minutes that you get with somebody tabling at a health fair.

You’ve been doing this work for ten years. What changes have you seen?

I see how the conversation has shifted. Back in the day, when I went up to a fisher, there was a lot of fear, like, “Who are you? Why are you asking me these questions?”

Over the years, we’ve learned how to approach fishers in a more friendly way and we’ve absorbed more fishing culture. And there’s a whole team alongside me. The people who are fishing recognize us and the conversations about health behavior change are a bit more fluid than before. I see the change in how people approach the topic and react to us as messengers.

What’s been meaningful to you in this work?

Our different community health advocate teams have become like family. We focus on really bringing out the fun and the joy in all of our trainings and activities. I’ve heard feedback that going to the piers and doing outreach is a highlight of their week.

The skills that we’ve built in this program have been intentionally created and co-designed with community partners so that they are transferable. It’s about investing in the partner. Community capacity building is the highlight of my work. It’s not just teaching. It’s sharing knowledge, being able to come along for the ride together and finding creative ways to make that happen.

More information

For more information about safe fishing in the Duwamish: Fishing for safe seafood to eat

For more information about Duwamish River clean-up efforts: Lower Duwamish Waterway Group | Home Page

Originally published on February 25, 2026.