1. COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT CORE (CEC): ABSTRACT The Mission of the Community Engagement Core (CEC) of the ChicAgo Center for Health and EnvironmenT (CACHET) is to engage local Chicago communities (community residents and key stakeholders) in neighborhoods with known and potential environmental sources, pollutants, exposures or health risk in an iterative process to identify priority environmental hazards of concern within their neighborhoods and align these concerns with CACHET research activities and promote long-term partnership. Engagement at the neighborhood level in Chicago is particularly important given the known relationship between environmental hazard exposure and the history of racial/ethnic segregation in the City which results in environmental injustice experienced by residents on the South and West sides of the city. Identification of the environmental hazards of concern that may drive these health injustices, as well as development of research, advocacy, and implementation strategies to address these matters, involves building and maintaining collaborations with local community groups that are best positioned to know these hazards. To accomplish this, the CACHET’s CEC builds on solid relationships established during the initial round of funding, with community groups in Southeast (SE) Chicago (community of Hegewisch, East Side, South Deering, South Chicago, and Bush and Jeffrey Manor neighborhoods) historically one of the largest steel manufacturing areas of the world; and, community organizations serving Little Village, the home of the former Crawford and Fisk coal-powered power plant. These areas are two of the most polluted areas in the country with strong histories of community organizing and advocacy. We will also build on newer relationships in Altgeld Gardens (the home of Hazel Johnson, the Mother of the environmental justice movement and founder of People for Community Recovery in 1982); and the 19th Ward, areas with various environmental challenges, social and economic hardship, and racially/ethnically mixed populations. To enhance the impact of the CEC moving into the next round of funding, the CEC will (1) pivot and reorganize CEC co-leadership to maximize engagement; (2) invest in additional engagement mechanisms; (3) prioritize the production of community-engaged research (CEnR) outcomes; and (4) enhance bi-directional communication across CACHET research cores and institutions. The CACHET CEC will reside in the Collaboratory for Health Justice in the School of Public Health at University of Illinois Chicago (UIC). This integration will allow us to benefit from the engagement expertise of the Collaboratory while continuing to leverage the scientific expertise and strong community partnerships of our two large institutions—the University of Chicago (UofC) and UIC—with a long history of collaboration and commitment to decreasing environmental exposures and improving health equity in communities predominately populated by Bl...