Community-academic partnerships to embrace and ensure diversity, equity, and inclusion in translational science: Evidence of successful community engagement

Joy P Nanda; Roger S Clark; Jennifer Ayana Harrison; Pamela Ouyang; Cyd Lacanienta; Cheryl Himmelfarb; CRAC Editorial Contributors

doi:10.1017/cts.2023.601

Community-academic partnerships to embrace and ensure diversity, equity, and inclusion in translational science: Evidence of successful community engagement

J Clin Transl Sci. 2023 Jul 28;7(1):e188. doi: 10.1017/cts.2023.601. eCollection 2023.

Authors

Joy P Nanda¹, Roger S Clark¹, Jennifer Ayana Harrison¹, Pamela Ouyang^{1

2}, Cyd Lacanienta^{1

2}, Cheryl Himmelfarb^{1

2}; CRAC Editorial Contributors

Affiliations

¹ Community Research Advisory Council, Johns Hopkins Institute of Clinical and Translational Research, Baltimore, MD, USA.
² Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA.

Abstract

Community-Research Advisory Councils (C-RAC) provide a unique mechanism for building sustainable community-academic partnership, fostering bidirectional understanding of complex research issues, disseminating timely research findings, and thereby improving public trust in science. Created in 2009, the Johns Hopkins C-RAC has a mission to achieve diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) of stakeholders across the entire research continuum. It has nurtured over a decade of partnership among community and academic stakeholders toward addressing health disparity, health equity, structural racism, and discrimination. Evidence of successful strategies to ensure DEI in partnership and lessons learned are illustrated in this special communication.

Keywords: Community-academic partnership (CAP); diversity; equity; inclusion (DEI).