Community engagement has been named a research priority by the National Institutes of Health, and scholars are calling for community engagement as an approach to address racism and equity in science. Robust community-engaged research can improve research quality, increase inclusion of traditionally marginalized populations, broaden the impact of findings on real-life situations, and is particularly valuable for underexplored research topics. The goal of this paper is to describe lessons learned and best practices that emerged from community engagement in a multi-institution population health research consortium. We describe how a foundation was laid to enable community-engaged research activities in the consortium, using a staged and stepped process to build and embed multi-level community-engaged research approaches.. We staged our development to facilitate (a) awareness of community engagement among consortium members, (b) the building of solidarity and alliances, and (c) the initiation of long-term engagement to allow for meaningful research translation. Our stepped process involved strategic planning; building momentum; institutionalizing engagement into the consortium infrastructure; and developing, implementing, and evaluating a plan. We moved from informal, one-time community interactions to systematic, formalized, capacity-building reciprocal engagement. We share our speed bumps and troubleshooting that inform our recommendations for other large research consortia-including investing the time it takes to build up community engagement capacity, acknowledging and drawing on strengths of the communities of interest, assuring a strong infrastructure of accountability for community engagement, and grounding the work in anti-racist principles.
Keywords: antiracism; bladder health; reciprocity; research consortia; strategic planning; transdisciplinary.