Love, Judgement and HIV: Congregants ’ Perspectives on an Intervention for Black Churches to Promote Critical Awareness of HIV Affecting Black Canadians

AbstractWe assess participants ’ experience of Black Pastors Raising Awareness and Insight of Stigma through Engagement (Black PRAISE), an intervention for Black churches to promote critical awareness of HIV affecting Black Canadian communities. We used a community-based participatory approach to implement Black PRAISE among s ix churches in the Greater Toronto Area and Ottawa, in October–November 2016. For the intervention, congregants received a booklet with validated HIV-related information, attended a sermon on compassion and justice, viewed a short film on HIV-related stigma, and completed baseline and follow-up su rveys to evaluate the effectiveness of the intervention. We then conducted in-depth interviews with 18 pastors and congregants from the six churches to explore how they experienced the intervention. Three major themes emerged from an iterative exploration of the thematic content of the interviews: t he beneficial impact of the intervention; reconciling the moral and theological issues of their faith with the social reality of HIV and stigma; and perspectives on future stigma reduction efforts. Participants spoke approvingly about Black PRAISE and supported stigma reduction but acknowledged unce rtainties about their capacity to actualise their commitment. The main overarching lessons from Black PRAISE are as follows: first, our results support a community-based participatory approach to productively engaging Black congregations in stigma reduction and hea...
Source: Journal of Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities - Category: International Medicine & Public Health Source Type: research