Developing an Academic-Community Research Partnership with Faith Communities of Color: Challenges, Rewards, and Recommendations

African Americans are disproportionately exposed to key risk factors (e.g., poverty, neighborhood disadvantage, racial discrimination) for adverse mental health outcomes. However, they are only half as likely as their White counterparts to seek professional mental health services due to issues of access, stigma, mistrust, and lack of culturally competent providers. For many African Americans, clergy are often the first, preferred, and only source of mental health support. Despite the importance of faith communities to African American, little research and few mental health interventions explicitly incorporate clergy or faith. To address this limitation, mental health clinicians, researchers, community-engaged scholars, social work students, and African American clergy formed a research partnership called the CHURCH (Congregations as Healers United to Restore Community Health) project. The project sought to develop, implement, and evaluate an evidence-based and spiritually informed mental health training curriculum (Renew Your Mind) for African American faith leaders. RYM explicitly combines spirituality, sacred music, and traditional contexts within Black Churches (e.g., Bible studies) to promote the positive mental health of African American communities in culturally acceptable and sustainable manners.

Since the inception of the project in 2019, the CHURCH project team developed Renew Your Mind, built an online continuing education course targeting clinicians seeking to incorporate spirituality into mental health care, presented a workshop and a pre-conference institute at two national conferences, and published a scholarly manuscript. Graduate students and junior faculty of color with limited exposure to community-engaged research were exposed to a deep community immersion. Additionally, through this partnership, an African American pastor with an MSW degree started teaching as an adjunct professor and serving as a guest speaker in MSW classes discussing social work in faith communities, thus filling the critical gaps in social work education regarding spiritual competence. Most importantly, the project generated a support system for faculty and African American faith leaders navigating the unprecedented effects of the COVID-19 pandemic when communities of color experienced increased mental health challenges stemming from various structural issues, social isolation, trauma, and grief and loss. In 2024. the project's impact on academia and communities of color was recognized through an award for Partnerships of Distinction at the annual Community Engaged Scholarship Forum hosted by the Office of Engagement and Community Affairs at the University of Pittsburgh.

This roundtable will be co-led by researchers, clinicians, students, and African American faith leaders who participated in the CHURCH project. Panelists will discuss 1) the process and context of developing the CHURCH partnership; 2) challenges and rewards experienced along the course of partnership development and maintenance; 3) lessons learned by academic and community partners representing various identities, and 4) recommendations for researchers seeking to develop successful academic-community partnerships for impactful research, particularly in collaboration with faith communities of color for positive mental health promotion. Participants will be encouraged to share relevant experiences and engage in a dialogue about the challenges and benefits of establishing partnerships with faith communities of color as well as strategies to form successful partnerships.