Building collaboration and partnerships

No organisation, however small, has to do everything alone. That was the starting point for “Building collaboration and partnerships,” a workshop on Advocates Day of the World Bladder Cancer Patient Forum 2026 in Hong Kong, led by Adam Lynch, CEO of BEAT Bladder Cancer Australia, and Mădălina Iamandei, Executive Director of All.Can International, the multi-stakeholder cancer care coalition that WBCPC itself belongs to.

Why partnerships matter more than ever

Mădălina opened with a fact worth remembering: All.Can now spans 18 national coalitions and around 50 member organisations, and that scale is precisely why it works. One organisation’s voice carries only so far. Fifty organisations speaking together carry a different kind of weight, and in the EU, she noted, funders increasingly expect it: a joint application from a multi-stakeholder coalition now scores measurably higher than one from a single organisation.

She backed this up with a concrete example. When the European Commission updated its cancer screening guidelines in 2022 across all 27 member states, awareness of the change varied enormously by country. All.Can partnered with an industry-side oncology coalition and, over three years, ran 10 events in 6 countries reaching more than 600 attendees, producing country reports that turned a policy change on paper into something patients and health systems actually acted on. In Spain, that conversation, now running three years, has since expanded from national to regional level.

Six principles for collaborating well

Adam followed with what he called six principles, none of them complicated, all of them easy to forget:

• Map your stakeholders. Start with who you already work with, then build outward by asking who else cares about the same goals as your organisation.
• Be clear on purpose. Every partnership needs a two-way answer to “what’s in it for us both?” If there’s nothing in it for the other side, it won’t last.
• Get over your ego. Trying to do everything yourself, rather than partnering with organisations that already do it well, doesn’t serve patients. They don’t care who provides the support, only that it’s good.
• Don’t overthink it. Most of BEAT Bladder Cancer Australia’s partnerships have no formal contract at all, just a shared purpose. Contracts are usually only needed where funding is involved.
• Don’t be afraid to reach out. As Adam put it, nobody can argue against better health outcomes, which makes this one of the easier sectors to build goodwill in.
• Customise your message. The core story stays the same, but how you tell it to a community group, an industry partner or a clinician should look different each time.

Who to actually partner with

Adam and Mădălina then walked through the stakeholder groups worth building relationships with, and what each side gets out of it:

• Industry, for funding and early insight into treatments in the pipeline, and increasingly beyond pharmaceutical companies to medtech and data or wearables companies too. Adam’s tip: target companies with a bladder cancer product that’s approaching or just past launch, since that’s when their support budgets are actually open.
• Other not-for-profits, so patients get the best of everything rather than one organisation trying to cover it all. BEAT Bladder Cancer Australia focuses on bladder cancer information and support, and partners with Cancer Council Australia and Rare Cancers Australia for emotional, financial and practical support.
• Nurse and medical professional associations, the people already on the front line with patients every day, often overstretched and glad to have a trusted resource to point patients toward.
• Community organisations, from Rotary to sports clubs to community Facebook groups, like CanRevive, which BEAT Bladder Cancer Australia partners with to reach Chinese-Australian communities who might not otherwise hear about bladder cancer support.
• Research organisations, who increasingly need patient representation to strengthen their own grant applications.
• Government and policymakers, for funding and policy change, sometimes simply because a grant is sitting unclaimed, waiting for the right applicant.
• Public affairs and communications agencies, raised by a participant during the session, valuable for amplifying evidence and messaging, and often a lighter, contract-based commitment while an organisation is still growing.

One question from the floor captured the spirit of the session. A participant who had registered her own patient organisation in West Africa just two days earlier asked how to begin. Mădălina’s answer: build a small multi-stakeholder base first, at least one patient group, one medical association and, ideally, more than one industry partner so no single funder can be seen to set the agenda. Individual membership of All.Can International is also open to advocates working alone, giving early-stage organisations a way into a much larger network from day one.

Putting it into practice

The workshop closed with two rounds of hands-on stakeholder mapping. One table, working through medical professional associations, landed on a simple truth: those associations need patient advocates to bring them the patient voice and lived experience they can’t generate themselves, while advocates need the credibility, patient access and platform that comes from working with them. Another table, thinking through the West African participant’s situation, reached the same conclusion by a different route: for a brand-new organisation with no visibility yet, a nurse association is often the fastest way to reach patients who don’t yet know help exists.

The takeaway Adam left the room with: pick up the phone to your national urology or oncology association this week. As he put it, the organisations most likely to say yes are the ones that already share your goal, and in health, that’s nearly everyone.