Graduate Student Project. Firefighters protect and serve our communities, and they carry a heavy mental health burden due to high amounts of critical incident exposure and associated mental and physical trauma. My research will use quantitative and qualitative methods to improve understanding of key theoretical constructs that are anticipated to inform the development of community research partnerships. While developing that partnership, the project results will identify mental health burden in a Northern Ontario career fire service and a Southern Ontario volunteer fire service. We have been collaborating with Sault Ste. Marie Fire Service (SSMFS) and Niagara West Fire and Emergency Services (NWFES), which are new research partnerships created over the past 6-months. We have been using principles of integrated knowledge translation (iKT) to guide the development of the research partnership and to identify research objectives. The research team has previously used and demonstrated its efficacy of using iKT principles to guide the development of productive research partnerships. To identify firefighters’ mental health burden, we will implement various measures including the risk of developing post-traumatic stress injury, alcohol use patterns, other non-work-related trauma that may impact mental health and critical incidents that have been identified as frequently experienced and associated with adverse mental health among firefighters. Descriptive analysis will determine the mental health burden in these fire services. A qualitative component will improve the understanding of resources used by firefighters to manage their mental health and associated perceived barriers and facilitators.