Faith In You: A university-community-faith partnership to reduce the impact of HIV/AIDS in the black community

The Black church has traditionally played an important role in the African-American community. In addition to spiritual guidance, it often provides a broad array of services including health education/disease prevention programs. HIV/AIDS has disproportionately impacted the African-American community in Massachusetts with blacks accounting for only 6% of the state's population, yet comprising almost 25% of persons living with HIV/AIDS. Given the emergence of faith-based programs to address health and social issues, we sought to develop and conduct a culturally competent and sensitive faith-based HIV/AIDS education and outreach program in Boston's Black community. “Faith In You” was developed as a community partnership between Boston University Medical Center, the Multicultural AIDS Coalition, and the Boston TenPoint Coalition of Black churches. The overall goals of the program were 1) to build a collaborative partnership between an academic institution, a community-based AIDS service organization, and a faith-based community organization focused on HIV/AIDS prevention, 2) to build awareness of the collaborative project within the faith-community and within the general black community in Boston 3) to build capacity in churches to provide compassionate referral for persons living with HIV/AIDS and those who are at high-risk for infection, and 4) to increase community-based options for HIV voluntary counseling and testing to include church-based sites for testing and referral. We will describe program activities and present data on outcomes, successes and short-comings. This presentation will illustrate the potential for university, community, faith partnerships to build capacity and lead to community empowerment.