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Purpose: Collaboration among organizations offering sexual health and youth development services has the potential to provide youth with effective sexual health support. However, formally structured efforts (eg, coalition formation) may be impractical or unsuitable for low-income communities where resources are often already limited. Social network theories provide an alternative approach for building collaborative organizational networks. Approach: Research aims to evaluate the barriers and facilitators to collaboration in sexual health organizational networks. Setting: Organizations in low income, urban, communities in Chicago and San Francisco that serve African American adolescents. Participants: Providers (n = 22) from organizations that offer sexual health services and youth development services. Methods: Focus groups (n = 4) were conducted and analyzed utilizing a combination of coding strategies. Results: Barriers to collaboration included resource limitations and competition, differences in organizational roles and deliverables, and prejudice and stigma. Identifying common ground among organizations was found to be a facilitator to collaboration. Social network concepts in conjunction with study findings lead to the development of a practice model that hypothesizes a pathway for organizations to improve collaboration without formally structured efforts. Conclusion: Our findings offer ways to encourage collaboration among organizations that support youth sexual health in low-income, urban, African American communities without relying on formal structures. Such collaborations may be critical for improving the provision of comprehensive sexual health support. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The publication of Mindy Fullilove’s Root Shock in 2004 turned the oft-cited narrative of top-down progress on its head. For the first time, the words of ordinary neighbourhood folk emerged as counter points to urban renewal and rapid community change. Now, twenty years later, the process Fullilove established still resonates among the people with whom she interacted. One city she profiled, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, suffered through several rounds of emotional and physical trauma in the form of African American displacement from urban renewal in the 1950s and 1960s, then the demolition of public housing units in the 1990s and early-2000s. This article synthesizes the responses of Terri Baltimore, a neighbourhood activist from Pittsburgh’s Hill District; Phil Hallen, the former President of the Maurice Falk Medical Fund which funded Mindy’s research in Pittsburgh; and Duquesne University history professor Dan Holland as they recount their reactions to Root Shock in 1994 and the inspiration Mindy Fullilove continues to provide today. But as a new round of root shock unfolds – the exodus of African Americans from traditional inner-city neighbourhoods as a result of gentrification – Fullilove’s lessons provide a cautionary tale for how cities respond to the latest housing crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines Black preaching as a vital force in African American communities, offering a powerful testament to resilience, spiritual enlightenment, and social transformation. Black preaching emerges as a beacon of hope and resistance amidst oppressive conditions, weaving together theological insight, cultural richness, and communal resilience. Through a rich historical lens, the article explores the performative and substantive dimensions of Black preaching, highlighting its capacity to navigate complex theological and social realities. While acknowledging moments of complicity and challenge within Black preaching, this article emphasizes its enduring legacy as a catalyst for liberation and justice. Ultimately, Black preaching emerges as a dynamic expression of faith, embodying the enduring struggle for dignity, justice, and freedom within the African American experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Today's cities are seeking more social equity—a response in part to police violence, pandemic disparities, and the racial wealth gap. Activists, planners, and local government reformers are looking for bold examples of equity planning—single initiatives and multi-faceted equity plans. The mayoral administration of Harold Washington in Chicago (1983–1987) shows how a grassroots electoral campaign combined with participatory policy development produced the Chicago Works Together (CWT) Development Plan—that promoted jobs, neighborhoods, and citizen participation. This article recounts the development of CWT and examines the impacts of CWT for Chicago and equity planning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This short article is an exploration of selected portions of the essays and non-fiction of James Baldwin. In recent years the writings of Baldwin have enjoyed something of a renaissance. A new generation has been exposed to his work and the existence of video recordings of Baldwin has assisted in bringing his potent ideas to life. Baldwin’s importance as a social critic and public intellectual has been confirmed by his nearly prescient engagement with issues and challenges that confront African American communities today. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

African American communities have experienced negative effects from a history of medical abuse, lack of proper research procedures, and misinterpretations of study findings because of racism. These past injustices have led to a mistrust of research and researchers. This paper focuses on how some methodological challenges, in a study funded by a National Institutes of Health grant on two low-income African American communities in Kentucky, were mediated through the collaboration of a multi-racial/ethnic team of researchers engaged in cross-disciplinary research. The information for this paper is based on the reflections of key members of the research team. The reflections show that having researchers with different epistemologies resulted in a culturally aware and sensitive study in which emic and etic research approaches were adopted. The inclusion of race-based epistemologies and close community ties were found to be particularly useful in building trust and getting the support of the two communities. However, these outcomes were only possible because research team members provided each other latitude for intellectual freedom and leadership. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Researchers creating knowledge about African-American culture use various methodologies, including field research. Field research is knowledge creation in the space and location of interest to the researchers and is not limited to either qualitative or quantitative research methods. In this article, we focus on our diverse field research experiences as members on a multi-disciplinary research team that utilized mixed methods to examine the various factors that affect fruit and vegetable consumption in two African-American communities. Interacting with participants at community events and at various data gathering sites became part of the experience of our fieldwork. Accounts of interactions and relationships such as these, however, are often missing in journal articles, particularly those reporting findings from quantitative studies. This article, therefore, focuses on the reflexive methodological reporting of ways in which each researcher's positionality may have affected the observed phenomenon, the data collection process, and the dynamics of participation in fieldwork. The authors' reflective statements show that the researchers were aware of their positionality before, during and after the research process. Positionality is a concept that has largely been individualized. In this paper, although we present our individual research experiences, we also had to consider our position as a group. As a multi-disciplinary, cross-cultural team, our group identity was complex. Those who were part of the African-American community or identified with a similar heritage acted as "insiders" (while simultaneously reflecting upon the ways in which they were "outsiders") and as cultural brokers, enabling us to respectfully gain access to willing participants. Those who did not identify as people of color played other vital roles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Do performances of brutality have to be part of institutional social control in African American communities? Are these communities haunted by historical beliefs, practices, and stereotypes that once disenfranchised them? More important, if so, why in a post-civil rights era do African Americans receive abuse from our institutional sentinels – the police? Why do our guardians utilize informal and formal social control mechanisms, similar in nature, type, and in some instance in kind to slave patrols? This article examines criminologists’ analyses of policing in the African American community. Despite a substantial amount of work addressing the complaints of violence and distrust in the Black community, policy-makers as well as police departments have ignored their findings. Does the will exist to bring about a different form of social change in the configuration of justice or does African American marginalization persist as one of the strongest elements of social stratification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Obesity is more prevalent among African Americans and other racial and ethnic minority populations than among whites. The behaviors that determine weight status are embedded in the core social and cultural processes and environments of day-to-day life in these populations. Therefore, identifying effective, sustainable solutions to obesity requires an ecological model that is inclusive of relevant contextual variables. Race and ethnicity are potent stratification variables in U.S. society and strongly influence life contexts, including many aspects that relate to eating and physical activity behaviors. This article describes a synthesis initiated by the African American Collaborative Obesity Research Network (AACORN) to build and broaden the obesity research paradigm. The focus is on African Americans, but the expanded paradigm has broader implications and may apply to other populations of color. The synthesis involves both community and researcher perspectives, drawing on and integrating insights from an expanded set of knowledge domains to promote a deeper understanding of relevant contexts. To augment the traditional, biomedical focus on energy balance, the expanded paradigm includes insights from family sociology, literature, philosophy, transcultural psychology, marketing, economics, and studies of the built environment. We also emphasize the need for more attention to tensions that may affect African American or other researchers who identify or are identified as members of the communities they study. This expanded paradigm, for which development is ongoing, poses new challenges for researchers who focus on obesity and obesity-related health disparities but also promises discovery of new directions that can lead to new solutions.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the perceptions of faculty, staff, and residents regarding the town–gown relationship on the sustainability of the African American communities as it related to educational benefits, home ownership, employment and job training, earning potential, and graduation rates. A survey design was used to collect and analyze the data. The one-way of analysis of variance and the Scheffe’ Multiple Comparison Test were used to analyze the data. The findings from this study indicated that in general, faculty, staff, and residents exhibited similar perceptions regarding the town–gown relationship on the sustainability of the community with respect to graduation rates, educational benefits, and employment and job training, and it appeared that the earning potentials of African American communities perceived that town–gown relationships had been more effective in increasing the earning potentials in the community than did the university staff members. Data suggested that faculty members perceived that the town–gown relationship had been more effective in enhancing home ownership in the community than staff members’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

That African American communities are too often desolate places where it seems, in Hurston's words, “life have been and gone,” argues for increasingly creative community development strategies. This paper presents an historically-based, corporate empowerment model designed to address the desolation, by re-uniting scholars, practitioners and other community stakeholders for collective benefit and empowerment. Through an African-centered evaluative discussion, the authors assume the professional risk of sharing an outcome that may be viewed as a failure. The efficacy of the model, juxtaposed against the continues powerlessness of African American scholars, practitioners and communities, is explored. Practice challenges and implications are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

• This is the first study to examine foraging activities for an urban, African American community of place in the U.S. South. • About one out of five respondents indicated they had foraged in the past five years in their community. • Lack of information about wild food locations was a primary foraging constraint. • Foraging activities appeared to increase respondents' sense of collective efficacy. • Neighborhood transiency may negatively affect residents' perceptions of community and ultimately their engagement with foraging and other neighborhood stewardship activities. Concerns about food sovereignty in western nations have increased in recent years, as incidents of food-borne pathogens are highlighted in the popular press, and calls for locally-sourced food have increased. Wild food foraging has emerged as a response by some segments of the population under the twin rubrics of food sovereignty and food justice. However, virtually all studies looking at these activities focus outside of the U.S. South and contain little information on African American involvement. We investigate both perceptions and participation in urban foraging by African Americans in Atlanta's Browns Mill-Lakewood community and smaller sections of adjacent communities, with attention to the role of collective efficacy as a predictor of foraging and foraging as a precursor of collective efficacy. A modified proportionate, census guided, systematic random sampling method was used to administer a door-to-door, household survey in the study area to gather these data. Twenty percent of the nearly all African American sample indicated that they had foraged in their neighborhood in the past five years, but not being aware of wild food locations was the most-cited barrier to participating. Results from ordered, logistic regression models also indicated that women were significantly less likely than men to forage, other factors equal; and those who foraged were more likely to have higher collective efficacy scores. Recommendations are made for increasing awareness of wild food locations in southeast Atlanta communities. This involves partnering with a local foraging non-profit group, Concrete Jungle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]