 Buenos días, mi gente. It's a pleasure to be here. It's an honor. I really want to thank you for inviting me. I especially want to recognize and thank Sima Finn, who I think is a fierce advocate for community engagement and is always an inspiration to me and makes me hopeful that scientists are walking behind us and along our side to do some really transformational things together. I'm the executive director of UPROS in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. I'm an attorney by training. And my mom says I'm an activist by birth that I literally came out of the womb with my fists first. That's quite possible. In UPROS, which is Brooklyn's oldest Latino community-based organization, is a multiracial, multi-ethnic, intergenerational community organization dedicated to environmental and social justice. You may have seen us at the People's Climate March. We were at the front with all the sunflowers. If you missed that, you missed the largest climate march in the history of the world. And I would urge you to go look at it. Our organization has been responsible for doubling the amount of open space in Sunset Park, stopping the siding of power plant, expanding medians, sending four young people to Antarctica and one to the North Pole on scientific expeditions, just young people from the neighborhood, sending them all to first-year colleges, providing them with air monitors where they measure levels of PM 2.5 NOx socks and carbon monoxide. We have been doing GIS mapping. Anything that has to do with health disparities in our community, we put those skills in the hands of people in our community and watch them engage in transformation. So this conversation for us is extremely important to us. Sunset Park is a low-income community. It's an underserved community of color. It's in New York City's largest significant maritime industrial area. And it's surrounded by numerous environmental burdens. The most vulnerable population, which is closest to the environmental burdens, and the way that we look at vulnerable populations, the way that we define that, at least from an environmental justice perspective, is we look at folks who are the descendants of colonization and slavery. And for us, that means that generation after generation after generation, these are the people who have had the worst health care, the worst living conditions, the most stresses generation after generation, and that that cumulative effect combined with a cumulative impact of all the environmental burdens within which they're living is going to have a health disparity for them. And so those things are important in terms of how we collect data, how we collect information, how we respect and honor local knowledge. In Sunset Park, because it's located in that part of Brooklyn, it was affected by Sandy. And so the project that I'm going to talk about is how we put together a grassroots approach to collect data and get the community involved in exposure to toxic harm. When tons of water came in through Sunset Park, it came across brownfields. It came across chemicals that were not containerized. The significant maritime industrial area was created long before there was an EPA who was not regulated. So there's no regulation that tells you how you have to containerize those chemicals. And we know that the first responders in our community, UPROS, has Climate Justice and Community Resilience Center. We know that the first responders in an extreme weather event are always people in the community. What we're doing today, by the way, is extremely important because the demographics are changing all over the country. The country is going to look more like me and you guys. I said before that in the future, everybody's going to look Filipino when everybody mixes. That's a cute thing. So but what that means is that you've got a huge demographic that has been exposed to a lot of toxic harm over generations now running the country. So community partnerships become tremendously important. We created a diverse community stakeholder group. What that means for us is bringing not only the people impacted together, but the agencies, the scientists, all of these people together to become part of a stakeholder group that advises and guides the community through this process. What that does is it gives the community an opportunity to have an interdisciplinary approach. It raises the level of understanding among all of the different members of the stakeholder group. We do training for each of those different groups. So for example, for the community, we train them on how to work with all of these different agencies and how to work with all of these different participants in the stakeholder group, how to ask questions so that they're not asking how to fix a pothole from an agency that is federal. And that kind of information is important. I'm using that example because that's what happens when you put people who have not had power in a room with people who have a higher level of education and feel their privilege. So that level of education is important for our community. We also do a training for those agencies and these other people who are coming because the assumption is that folks have the cultural competency to work in a way that's respectful and work in partnerships with people in the community when they in fact don't. And so we provide that training. So all that training is happening, then we bring people together to work in a way that's respectful and that levels the playing field so that they could build consensus and move community priorities. So that's what we consider a meaningful engagement requiring training. The CSG, which is what we call the community stakeholder group, guides research methods, questions, reviews, materials, provides feedback, corrects researchers, produces and conducts strategies for interviewing recovery workers. How we approach recovery workers may be different. You might go to a recovery worker, a person in the community, who because of an extreme weather event and they're going to be increasing, thinks that they were safety material and they went out into the water with sneakers on and maybe put on some gloves and they weren't protected from the chemicals. And you can't approach them with a clipboard because that freaks them out. It scares them. It makes them think someone official is approaching them if they're undocumented or if they're not the person who runs the business, they are going to be fearful and they're not going to respond. So an organizing approach, the kind that we use as organizers, you know, where we have a conversation with neighbors and people we know and speak to them in their language makes a big difference and our community speaks four different languages. It speaks Spanish, English, Chinese and Arabic. And so we have to have people out there from the community that can reach out to these recovery workers that speak the language of the community and that they can recognize. And can talk to them in a way that's accessible, that breaks information down so that they don't feel like they're being talked at and they can feel like they can, it generates trust. We also have a lot of events that are not around toxic exposure and issues that are around food and family so that people can come in and get to know each other in a place that's less intimidating than talking about these kinds of things. We provide local data to better prepare for risk reduction. I feel like I'm going all over the place. It's just that she said three minutes, two minutes ago. And we try to build synergy between local and outside expertise, a direct partnership across disciplines with at risk communities, deep engagement and local knowledge and need and build community resilience. In terms of the challenges and opportunities, the challenges we think is that scientists, researchers and local communities speak very different languages and that doesn't just mean language, it's how you present information and how you make it accessible and how you break it down. Local perceptions and needs may not meet outside expectations. Sometimes people come to these communities with deficit based expectations assuming that just because someone doesn't have a higher level of education that they don't understand. The fact is that people come with the knowledge from their countries and from their experience even if it's struggle and it changes the whole conversation and that they know where the cancer clusters are. They know where the corridor of people with asthma is they know they have information that you have to respect and approach with a lot of humility. The opportunities, collaboration builds resilience and deep understanding of local risks. It provides investigators with insight not achievable through top down methods. It empowers communities to realize the risks and opportunities they face and research is truly relevant to the community. So given all of the challenges that we know are happening in every sector of this country and that we know that they're going to be more extreme weather events, having communities that have been excluded from this conversation engaged in a way that is meaningful is not only important to them in terms of addressing the issues that are a priority, it's going to be important to you in terms of your relevance and in terms of your ability to address root causes that are only going to get worse. And so the good news is that this room is full of visionaries of people who want to get out of the silos and get out of their comfort zones and work with people in respectful ways. And part of that is also going to involve sort of checking your privilege. And that's a hard conversation but there's something about the way we come into a space that really changes what conversation takes place. So it really doesn't matter how much you learn, how much you know about science and whether or not you are an amazing scientist, if your way of communicating and the way of showing up in a space is one that excludes, minimizes and diminishes in any way. And sometimes that happens without you meaning it to happen. And so that's why building those competencies and doing that inner work is really important because we need you and you need us. And I think that together we're going to be able to do transformational work as we move forward. Thank you.