by Janet Wagner

t's only a Thursday night, but the fellowship hall is packed. A woman is talking. She thanks her pastor. She thanks God. And then she begins to talk about food—how hard it was, at first, to cut back on the things she had loved. Gravy. Butter. Pound cakes. "And last but not least," she says, "Baptist people's most favorite dessert: sweet potato pie."

The audience laughs. They know what she means because they have all given up something to be here tonight. But they've also gotten something back. For many, it's been new friends, new waistlines, and a new devotion to health. And so tonight, when they gathered, the table was heavy with fruits and vegetables and light on desserts. Because this is a gathering of PRAISE!

The PRAISE! (Partnership to Reach African Americans to Increase Smart Eating!) project, with its 60 participating churches in eight North Carolina counties, began with a call from the National Cancer Institute (NCI) for nutrition interventions (programs that help people make behavior changes), aimed at minorities. Carolina teams are old hands at community-based nutrition interventions, but this time the project would include the gamut of NCI's dietary recommendations for healthy eating and blood studies—firsts for UNC-CH nutrition intervention research.

When the nutrition professors received funding in September 1996, the enormity of the project sank in, and they worried that they might have taken on too much, recalls Boyd Switzer, associate professor of nutrition. They needed to tailor their message to their participants' culture and lifestyles. And, they weren't interested in the fleeting; they wanted to create a program that would become woven into the fabric of each church community, that would be managed by church members, and that would outlive an 11-month intervention.

irst, the researchers had to identify target counties, with similar urban or rural characteristics, that could be paired as intervention and control counties. Funeral home directors provided leads on church locations and congregation sizes.

The team mailed project materials to pastors and followed up with phone calls, explaining every aspect of the project and offering to set up presentations for Sunday services. The project's name, which lent itself to a spiritual message, helped get a foot in the door with pastors, and the project's faith-based framework further inclined pastors to listen. Even so, recruitment wasn't easy.

"Among [the barriers to recruiting churches] were credibility, trust, tradition, and economics," says Lee Downing, pastor of Friendship Missionary Baptist Church in Fayetteville, N.C., Although pastors admitted that food at church events was high in salt and fat, they didn't want just anybody bringing just any project into their churches. One woman remarked to Chanetta Washington, UNC-CH intervention specialist, that her church had scrutinized the Carolina team to see if they were people with whom the church wanted to be associated. How the investigators treated those in subordinate positions, how the African Americans on the team were treated, and whether the team respected church traditions were important considerations in deciding to be part of the project. Downing feels that Carolina's "professional yet personable staff, which included African Americans in key positions" helped to secure his church's trust.

Next: Collards, hold the fatback

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