Abstract A047: Beyond recruitment to research partnership: Advancing cancer health equity through equitable community-based organization engagement

Abstract

Community-based organizations (CBOs) are uniquely positioned to address cancer disparities through community trust, cultural expertise, and longstanding relationships with historically underserved populations. However, they are often engaged primarily as participant recruitment resources, limiting opportunities to leverage community expertise, improve research relevance, and accelerate translation of scientific discoveries into practice. Community-engaged research has been shown to strengthen intervention relevance, implementation, community trust, and research participation. Advance a framework that positions CBOs as equitable partners across the cancer research continuum to improve cancer health equity. Integrate CBOs into study design, implementation, dissemination, and evaluation. Strengthen community trust, knowledge exchange, and research capacity through sustained community-academic partnerships. Improve implementation and sustainability of evidence-based cancer research. This perspective synthesizes evidence from community-based participatory research (CBPR), dissemination and implementation (D&I) science, and the cancer disparities literature. Findings from national cancer research initiatives, systematic reviews, and implementation studies informed a conceptual framework for equitable CBO engagement across the research continuum. Evidence consistently demonstrates that community-engaged research increases community participation, culturally responsive intervention design, implementation effectiveness, community trust, research capacity, and sustainability of evidence-based programs. National CBPR initiatives reported measurable gains in partnership development, workforce training, community education, and scientific productivity. Systematic reviews further indicate that community-engaged interventions improve patient-centered outcomes and equitable delivery of cancer prevention, treatment, and survivorship services. The proposed framework is expected to increase CBO engagement as co-investigators and shared decision-makers, improve representation of historically underserved populations in cancer research and clinical trials, strengthen implementation and dissemination of evidence-based interventions, and enhance community trust and research capacity. Positioning CBOs as equitable research partners rather than recruitment resources represents a transformative approach to cancer disparities research. Sustained collaboration across the research continuum has the potential to improve scientific rigor, implementation, dissemination, and equitable public health impact. (Used with AI) Tiah Tomlin-Harris, Gabrielle S. Ford, Amirah Burton, Zakirah Abdul-Hameed, Desiree Rivers. Beyond recruitment to research partnership: Advancing cancer health equity through equitable community-based organization engagement [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the 19th AACR Conference on the Science of Cancer Health Disparities; 2026 Oct 18-21; Atlanta, GA. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Epidemiol Biomarkers Prev 2026;35(10 Suppl):Abstract nr A047.