ABSTRACT The overarching goal of the ACHIEVE GREATER Community Engagement Core (CEC) is to provide training and infrastructure to establish community-academic partnerships and ensure meaningful community engagement across the continuum of cardiovascular health equity CEnR conducted through the primary and pilot projects. The specific aims are to 1) establish community-academic partnerships to ensure community engagement in all aspects of cardiovascular health equity community engaged research (CEnR), 2) increase community stakeholder and researcher capacity for cardiovascular health equity CEnR, and 3) provide infrastructure to facilitate community stakeholder engagement in development, implementation, and dissemination of cardiovascular health equity CEnR. The CEC will provide implicit bias training to all study investigators, community stakeholders, and community health workers. We will establish a Community Review Board to ensure community informed consent for all primary and pilot projects. We will collaborate with the Implementation Science Team to engage community stakeholders in refinement of the PAL2 intervention and provide assistance with recruitment and retention should projects fall below projections. The CEC will conduct focus groups in Detroit and Cleveland to identify community cardiovascular health equity priority areas that will shape funding themes for the pilot projects and ensure they are locally relevant and meaningful. We will establish Cardiovascular Health Equity Action Councils (CHEAC) in Detroit and Cleveland and engage community members in a formal research capacity building curriculum so they can effectively partner with academic researchers on cardiovascular health equity community engaged research. The CEC will partner with the Investigator Development core to support community-academic partnership on all pilot projects. We will provide early-stage investigators(ESI) with formal CEnR training to build their capacity for partnering with community members on research to address cardiovascular health equity. Each cohort of ESIs and CHEAC members will complete our Community-Academic Partnership Study Design, Implementation, and Dissemination toolkit to guide community engagement in pilot projects. The CEC will assist with dissemination efforts by hosting annual research symposia and providing additional support for engaging community members in writing abstracts, preparing and delivering presentations on study outcomes. The CEC Core will be co-directed by Dr. Elizabeth Towner and Dr. Rhonda Dailey (both WSU); Parada Jordan (WSU) will be lead community partner engagement and Dr. Khendi White-Solaru will be the site lead at UH/CWRU. We will track and monitor all CEC and dissemination activities, measure knowledge and skills developed from our CEnR capacity building efforts, and evaluate community-academic partnership formation. Collectively, CEC activities and resources will provide a sustainable model for and a new genera...