Date: Friday, December 26, 2025
Hi, I’m Laura Pinsoneault and Kristen Gardner-Volle from Evaluation Plus. We served as the evaluator on a PCORI award that brought community leaders, clinicians, and researchers together to understand and reduce cancer disparities among transgender, nonbinary, and gender-diverse (TGD) people. We worked with the Community and Cancer Science Network (CCSN), which starts with a simple belief: how we connect drives change.
When we began exploring why TGD people experience worse cancer outcomes, we quickly realized the issue wasn’t just missing data or bias, it was also how knowledge itself is produced. The CCSN model treats relationship-building as research infrastructure. We brought together TGD community leaders, clinicians, and scientists as equals to map root causes of cancer disparities from systemic discrimination to hormone access.
To make that collaboration real, we started with team design. We used a MoSCoW matrix (“must have, should have, could have, wish for”) to identify whose perspectives were essential—community advocates, researchers, clinicians, and people with lived expertise. This structure balanced expertise, experience, and identity before the project began. For evaluators, this means that partnership design is part of an equity practice: it shapes what knowledge emerges and whose wellbeing is centered.
We mixed community members, clinicians, and researchers into small groups to design an Album Cover—titling it to show what the world would like if it was free from disparities and three “title tracks” that described how to get there.
It was playful and energizing—but also deeper. As people built their albums, they began to see their expertise in new ways. Scientists talked about belonging. Community partners talked about systems change. The exercise didn’t just give everyone a voice; it reshaped how we understood our knowledge and its limits. It moved us from parallel expertise to shared insight and bonded the team in ways no formal meeting could.
Once our shared vision took shape, we used a Consensus Workshop to turn ideas into action. The process blends the Focused Conversation method with five stages of collective synthesis. It balanced dialogue, surfaced wisdom and turned inspiration into action.
Here’s what emerged:
Health equity grows in the spaces where science and community meet, listen, and learn together. Relationship-building is equity work. Creative structure simply gives it the shape it needs to thrive.
This work was developed by a transdisciplinary team including Chandler Cortina, MD; Tobi Cawthra, MPH; michael munson; Caleb Weinhardt, Andrew Petroll, MD; and Melinda Stolley, PhD, in partnership with FORGE and the Medical College of Wisconsin Cancer Center.
This project was funded through a Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI) Eugene Washington PCORI Engagement Award (EA #25591). The views presented in this article are solely the responsibility of the author(s) and do not necessarily represent the views of the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute® (PCORI®), its Board of Governors or Methodology Committee.
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