Assistant Professor Deborah Moon has received University of Pittsburgh Year of Engagement funding to support "The CHURCH (Congregations as Healers Uniting to Restore Community Health) Music Project."
Launched in June 2020, the CHURCH (Congregations as Healers Uniting to Restore Community Health) Project is a Community-Partnered Participatory Research collaboration between Homewood Community Ministries—a network of Homewood clergy and congregations—and faculty from the University of Pittsburgh’s School of Social Work and Department of Psychiatry.
The CHURCH Project was created to develop, pilot, and evaluate a culturally tailored behavioral health intervention to improve the mental health of African American congregation members. Based upon the findings of past research on the benefits of music on mental and physical health and the central role of sacred music in African American congregations, the CHURCH Music Project expands the work of the CHURCH project, to incorporate music into the overall intervention.
“To our knowledge, the CHURCH Music Project will be one of, if not the first behavioral health intervention to explicitly incorporate sacred music into a mental health intervention for African Americans,” said Dr. Moon.
An advisory board was formed at the inception of the CHURCH project, which is comprised of the executive director of Homewood Community Ministries, senior pastors of the three black churches in Homewood, and Pitt researchers, including a mix of clinical, tenure-stream, and appointment stream faculty. Additionally, master’s and doctoral students are assisting with the project. The CHURCH project was launched in June 2020 and will continue until June 2021. The board has held biweekly meetings for the past 6 months to plan and execute a needs and asset assessment with senior pastors in black churches in Homewood, which will inform the process of developing the mental health intervention as well as identifying implementation strategies that can sustain the intervention in black churches. The CHURCH project is jointly funded by the Center for Interventions to Enhance Community Health (CiTECH) and the Center on Race and Social Problems (CRSP) at the University of Pittsburgh.