Short abstract:

This paper presents the authors' latest collaboration with black communities in the UK to combat the ‘Silent Crisis’, a persistent barrier to mobilise non-White communities into actively contributing to and, subsequently benefit from biobanks.

Long abstract:

The UK has been a global leader in the development and regulation of biobanks and bio-databases that facilitates clinical and laboratory access to tissue, blood samples, DNA and data. Yet the persistent barrier to mobilise non-White communities into actively contributing to and, subsequently benefit from structural and scientific advantages that the UK can offer constitutes a ‘Silent Crisis’.

Since 2023, we have conducted a number of engagement activities and focus group research in collaboration with black communities in Kent in England. We've experimented with innovative methods to enable and encourage conversations within and between communities about perceived skepticism, mistrust, hope and desire. This allow a more accurate understanding of the underlying hurdles for donation. We underline the centrality of the concept ‘relatedness’ in donor recruitment, and the tricky role it has played, both as a uniting and an alienating force within and between different ethnic communities. We argue that the building of a thick societal relatedness or what we term as ‘polyphonic relatedness’ offers a constructive guidance to overcome racial disparity in biomaterial donations.