'It doesn't happen any other way': relationship-building and reflexivity for equity-focused intersectoral practice (EquIP).

Intersectoral processes that bring together public institutions, civil society organizations and affected community members are essential to tackling complex health equity challenges. While conventional wisdom points to the importance of human relationships in fostering collaboration, there is a lack of practical guidance on how to do intersectoral work in ways that support authentic relationship-building and mitigate power differentials among people with diverse experiences and roles. This article presents the results of RentSafe EquIP, a community-based participatory research initiative conducted in Owen Sound, Canada, in the midst of a housing crisis. The research explored the potential utility of equity-focused intersectoral practice (EquIP), a novel approach that invests in human relationships and knowledge co-creation among professionals and affected members of the community. The three-phase EquIP methodology centred the grounded expertise of community members with lived/living experience of housing inadequacy to catalyze reflexive thinking by people in professional roles about the institutional gaps and barriers that prevent effective intersectoral response to housing-related inequities. The research demonstrated that EquIP can support agency professionals and community members to (i) engage in (re)problematization to redefine the problem statement to better include upstream drivers of inequity, (ii) support reflexivity among those in professional roles to identify institutional practices, policies and norms that perpetuate stigma and impede effective intersectoral response and (iii) spark individual and collective agency and commitment towards a more equity-focused intersectoral system. We conclude that the EquIP methodology is a promising approach for communities seeking to address persistent health equity and social justice challenges.

Lessons from a rural housing crisis: grounded insights for intersectoral action on health inequities.

Local communities are struggling with persistent health inequities driven by income disparity, housing inadequacy, and other intersecting factors that constrain individual and community well-being. Increasingly, intersectoral approaches are recognized as essential to tackle such challenges, given their intersecting nature. This paper describes Equity-focused Intersectoral Practice (EquIP), a novel methodology that merges participatory research principles with the purposeful positioning of grounded expertise (lived experience) to shift the gaze of intersectoral actors towards the contextual factors that contribute to health inequities. The EquIP methodology creates uncommon spaces for intersectoral encounter that support critical reflexivity and relationship-building among institutional and community-based intersectoral actors. A case example of the EquIP methodology, implemented in a small, rural Canadian city in the context of a regional housing crisis, illustrates how investment in reflexivity and relational praxis among diverse intersectoral actors supports the identification of existing structures, beliefs, and practices within institutional settings that constrain effective intersectoral response to health inequities.