Engaging for equity: Lessons from a cross-sector partnership addressing prostate cancer risk in the black community

Black men are faced with a higher risk of developing prostate cancer worldwide, including earlier and more aggressive disease. While there are several known social and biological risk factors attributed to these trends, existing prostate cancer guidelines do not explicitly provide guidance for this group of men. A cross-sector partnership in Toronto, Canada has emerged to address the resulting health disparities through research, outreach, and education. The team benefits by having perspectives from clinicians, community partners, patient partners, and researchers and focuses on understanding predisposition to prostate cancer and the role of community screening. Importantly, working together for the purpose of addressing prostate cancer disparities has led to several important lessons that should be shared with others working in this space. These centre on strengthening community partnerships, confronting assumptions held by team members, and strategizing integration of patient partners as people with lived experience in research. This discussion also includes how the team has approached needs assessments for community-directed work as well as increasing representation in research using local cohorts. The lessons shared here are meant to encourage discourse for both cross-sector partnerships in research as well as health equity research and provide an opportunity to share experiences with others.