Healthier Churches Project: Translating Research to Practice Through Community-Classroom Partnerships

The Healthier Churches Project is a multi-phase process to promote congregational health through a collaboration between the Asheville Buncombe Institute for Parity of Achievement (ABIPA) and faculty and students at the University of North Carolina Asheville (UNC Asheville).  This process began in Spring 2012 with a community-based health survey of 196 African Americans living the metropolitan area.  The next phase involved analysis of the data to inform ABIPA’s health programming and the last phase involves engagement of health and wellness students in collaboration with representatives of local African American churches to share the survey findings, collect additional site-specific information, and plan health promotion activities and policies.  The presenter will share information on the planning and procedures undertaken during each phase of the ongoing collaboration, including: details about the process for developing the survey and the findings from the research; the ways the data are informing ABIPA’s activities; the process of engaging students and church representatives; the pedagogy for building community health promotion and communication skills among students; and the creation of plans for sustainable health promotion in communities.  The presentation also will include benefits and challenges of this work from community and university perspectives and will invite session participants to share their perceptions of strategies to employ and improve.  Participants will leave this session with knowledge of the phases of this collaborative model, recommendations for building similar models, and a list of tools that were helpful to the authors as they proceeded through this innovative project.