Prevention would be Best
by Mark Derewicz
At least forty thousand Americans have been infected with HIV every year since 1998, and 50 percent of them are African Americans.
“Handing out condoms and advocating abstinence are really important things, but they haven’t solved the problem,” says Giselle Corbie-Smith, an associate professor of social medicine at UNC. “We need to think about something better.”
Risky individual behavior causes HIV to spread in any community, Corbie-Smith says, but behavior doesn’t exist in a vacuum, especially in underserved minority communities. Poverty, high unemployment, disproportionate incarceration rates, drug abuse, lack of education and opportunities — all affect behavior.
So Corbie-Smith gathered activists, politicians, educators, police, public health officials, ministers, doctors, and others to address these issues in the black communities of Nash and Edgecombe counties. Together, they drafted a grant proposal and received $1.4 million for Project GRACE, whose goal is to generate prevention ideas and solutions.
The group will train local citizens who will collect and analyze needs, assets, and insights of community leaders. Corbie-Smith could’ve hired interviewers from UNC, but that would’ve undermined the grant’s intention — create knowledge in the community and keep it there.
This has been the spirit of the project from the beginning, when Corbie-Smith called on Barbara Council and Melvin Muhammad of Tarboro’s Community Enrichment Organization for help just weeks before the grant application deadline.
“Within two days, they put together a forum with all these folks who had something to say,” Corbie-Smith says. “I had the typical academic presentation planned: handouts, everything regimented. Then Melvin said, ‘Listen, I think we need to go in a different direction.’”
Corbie-Smith trusted Muhammad, so she backed off and let him show a documentary about AIDS in African American communities.
“It really grabbed people,” she remembers. “It was magnificent. My presentation would’ve been fine, and people would’ve understood and signed on to help or not. But the immediacy of the problem — that’s what Melvin hammered home with that video.”
Everyone joined the project. And several people at that meeting helped write the proposal.
“We’re hoping that these kinds of individuals — with leadership training and support — will be the force that makes change happen,” Corbie-Smith says.
Project GRACE (Growing, Reaching, Advocating for Change and Empowerment) is funded by the National Center on Minority Health and Health Disparities.
