The communities and neighbourhoods where we grow up have a lifelong influence on the illnesses we get and how long we live. Health is about avoiding disease and having a long life, but is also about feeling well in mind and body, feeling safe, being part of a community and having things to look forward to. Many aspects of the world around us influence our health directly or influence health related behaviours. These so called "broader" determinants of health include the houses and flats we live in, the design of our roads and high streets, the availability and quality of parks, green spaces, libraries, galleries, museums, sports and recreational facilities, entertainment opportunities, places and events to connect with others, the shops and businesses around us, pollution levels, learning opportunities, the jobs available to us and whether we have enough money to make ends meet and to participate in social activities. Attempts to change health related behaviours such as unhealthy eating, drinking, smoking and lack of exercise, have met with important but limited success. For example, increased awareness of links between childhood obesity and ill health and the importance of exercise and healthy diet will have limited success if broader determinants are not also tackled. These broader determinants include, but are not limited to, the many fast food outlets that children may walk past, lack of access to high quality play and recreational facilities, sell off of school playing fields, streets that are not safe for children to walk or cycle to school, lack of high quality green spaces for exercise, shops with poor choice of healthy foods, increased screen time replacing physical activity, poor quality of school food, and, for some, insufficient income to buy healthy food. Our ActEarly approach focuses on improving the health of children in two contrasting areas with high levels of child poverty, Bradford in Yorkshire and Tower Hamlets in London. In preparation for this work we have worked with local communities, local authorities and other local organisations and have established shared priority areas for research: Healthy Places, Healthy Learning and Healthy Livelihoods. We have brought together experts in these themes with local community and local authority representatives to begin to develop a range of approaches to improving child health across these areas. For example, within our Healthy Places theme we will work together to: map local community assets and to understand how they can be improved and used by more people; develop a Healthy Streets approach and improve green space quality. In our Healthy Learning theme we will work together to develop local "Evidence Active Networks" of pre-school, school and community learning venues. These networks will help develop and evaluate a wide range of approaches to improve child health. In our Healthy Livelihoods theme we will work together on approaches such as relocation of welfare advice services to improve access, enabling parental leave, ensuring a minimum basic income in school leavers, providing life skills training and involving local communities in decisions on how to spend local authority budgets. To understand the effect of these approaches on child health we will develop strong data resources that bring together existing information from across our localities to measure changes in the local environment, health related behaviours and health outcomes. Teams of researchers will use this data and work with local communities to understand how successful our initiatives have been. We describe our emphasis on early life interventions, our highly collaborative approach and development of local data sources to enable evaluation of multiple initiatives, as the "ActEarly Collaboratory". We hope the approach will promote a fairer and healthier future for children and a global example of how to work with communities to improve health.

The Collaborative Centre for Housing Evidence (CaCHE) will be an independent, multi-disciplinary and multi-sector consortium of academic and non-academic stakeholders. CaCHE will be UK-wide in coverage (across all four nations and at different spatial scales within), as well as UK-level in focus. It will advance knowledge and improve the evidence base for both housing policy and practice in all parts of the U.K. CaCHE will be organised as a "hub and spoke" network with its administrative core in Glasgow and a physical presence in all 5 sub-national knowledge exchange hubs in Scotland, Northern Ireland, Wales & the South West, the North & Midlands, and London, East & South East. Additionally, our six research themes will cross cut the different geographies depending on relevancy and appropriateness. The management team will be responsible for overall strategy, operational delivery, co-ordination, data navigation, research and KE. The management team of three academics (Gibb, Watkins and Orford) will be supplemented by a senior non-academic lead on knowledge exchange and communications (Smart), plus a full time programme manager, KE and communications, administrative and technical support staff. The evidence centre and its management team will be accountable to a funders group and an international advisory board. The main consortium members are the Universities of Glasgow, Sheffield, Bristol, Cardiff, Ulster, Reading, Sheffield Hallam, St. Andrews and Heriot-Watt, along with the National Institute of Social and Economic Research, CIH, RICS and the RTPI. The consortium has a lengthy list of institutional and individual collaborators at regional and national level and our activity will be supported 'in kind' and direct contributions from additional partners including Crisis, the Wheatley Group, NatCen, Shelter, Rightmove and several more. Our consortium also has specific project plans with four complementary ESRC investments: Urban Big Data Centre, What Works Scotland, Public Policy Institute for Wales, and the ADRC-Scotland, and will seek to collaborate with others including the What Works Centre for Wellbeing. Initially, a five year programme, CaCHE will seek to become self-financing sustained beyond this period. It will do so by regular scanning of opportunities with partners, and by also being impactful and influential through a combination of rigorous evidencing, prioritised across six research themes, which in turn will generate a new primary research agenda to be prosecuted by the evidence centre. A key way in which relevance and credibility will be sustained is through the comprehensive nature and persistence of our knowledge exchange and collaborative working with non-academic stakeholders. We will repeatedly utilise an innovative collaborative working practice - the Tobin Project Process - in order to build a consensus through rigorous and intensive examination of the key questions and priorities exercising non-academic partners and our stakeholders nationally and in each region. In this way, we will co-produce our evidence review and research strategy priorities and will fully engage, mobilise and disseminate findings with academic and particularly non-academic groups through our network of networks (i.e. drawing on existing networks of contacts via our non-academic and academic partners). CaCHE will promote and support interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary work and invest in knowledge exchange training for staff to maximise the impact of our multiple dissemination channels: non-technical briefing, summaries, academic and trade publications, targeted technical reports, high standard non technical international evidence review, blog posts, tweets, audio and visual pod casts, roadshows, seminars, conferences, workshops and media contributions. The evidence centre will support an extensive programme of staff secondments, promoting mobility between the academy and the policy and practice communi