Beyond the Manuscript: Results of ALIVE: A Faith-Based Pilot Intervention to Improve Diet Among African American Church Members
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A Faith-Based Pilot Intervention to Improve Diet Among African American Church Members
Welcome to Progress in Community Health Partnerships’ latest episode of our Beyond the Manuscript podcast. In each volume of the Journal, the editors select one article for our Beyond the Manuscript post-study interview with the authors. Beyond the Manuscript provides the authors the opportunity to tell listeners what they would want to know about the project beyond what went into the final manuscript.
In this episode of Beyond the Manuscript, Associate Editor, Suzanne Dolwick-Grieb, interviews Elizabeth Lynch and Alan Ragland, two of the authors of “Results of ALIVE: A Faith-Based Pilot Intervention to Improve Diet Among African American Church Members.”
Hi, welcome to the “Beyond the Management” podcast for the Journal Progress and Community Health Partnerships. I am Suzanne Dolwick-Grieb. I am a Research Associate Faculty at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, Center for Child and Community Health Research, and I’m fortunate to serve as an Associate Editor for the Journal.
Today I’m talking to Elizabeth Lynch and Alan Ragland, two of the authors of the manuscript titled “Results of ALIVE”, a faith based pilot intervention to improve diet among African American church members. Hi. Would you both please like to introduce yourself?
Sure. I’m Beth Lynch, Elizabeth Lynch, and I am an Associate Professor at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago, and the Director of the Section of Community Health in the Department of Preventive Medicine.
And I am Alan Ragland. I am an ordained minister and have been pastor of Third Baptist Church of Chicago on the South Side for 26 years.
Great. Thank you so much for joining me today and to share more about your partnership and the ALIVE project. I guess first would one of you or both of you like to just give an overview both of the partnership, and then the ALIVE study?
Alan, do you want to do that partnership and then I can talk about the study?
Sure. We can do it that way. The partnership began as an extension of the work of Rush University Medical Center’s outreach to community basically as a resource for matters of health. And in the context of one of those meetings and conversations that had to do with religion and health, and I happened to be an attendee along with members of the Rush, Beth and members of the staff.
And I guess I raised the question with regard to the whole matter of the need for there to be a stronger bridge between health and the African American community in light of the issues of disparity. [End Page 31]
But because I am an ordained minister and serve as the pastor of a congregation, I was very in tune with these issues from the ministers’ or the pastors’ perspectives as the one who is the leader of the congregation and as persons who also struggle with matters of health and healthy behaviors, and all of that.
That started a conversation with Beth Lynch and Rush and from that point we began to explore the possibility of how the university, the medical center could be a resource to pastors in African American communities as a segue to a larger issue of community, increasing community health and decreasing disparity.
We spent some time in discovery through research together on the front end, and then explored ways that we could organize several congregations to do some kind of work on how we might in fact work with this issue. The name ALIVE came up as an acronym for abundant living and vibrant energy.
And we built a bridge between our faith teachings and the information that comes to us for behavior modification around improving our health. That’s kind of, sort of a synopsis of what has been a great relationship.
Yeah, so one thing that Alan didn’t dive into deeply is that when we originally connected the first thing we did...
