Metropolitan Community AIDS Network: Faith-Based Culturally Relevant Services for African American Substance Users at Risk of HIV (PRACTICE FORUM‪)‬

Although representing 12 percent of the U.S. population, African Americans represent more than one-third of all cumulative AIDS cases and the majority of all new AIDS cases in the United States (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2003). Despite this disproportionate representation by African Americans, traditional approaches to both substance abuse (Jones, 2004; Longshore, Hsieh, & Anglin, 1993; O'Connell & Langley, 1997) and HIV/AIDS (Cochran & Mays, 1993; Jones; Land, 2000) prevention and treatment continue to be problematic given unfavorable views of available treatments and distrust of mainstream social services (Wright, 1998). Furthermore, traditional middle-class European American intervention and treatment models do not consider the barriers to prevention and intervention facing African Americans and ignore the idea that individuals engage in behaviors that are functional for the environment in which they exist (McNair & Prather, 2004). Research has increasingly emphasized the need for promoting prosocial motives (that is, re-entry into a moral community, renewed spirituality, collective and individual self-esteem, as well as establishing/reestablishing role in family) to increase service use among African American clients (Longshore, Grills, Anglin, & Annon, 1997; O'Connell & Langley). The integration of a faith-based or spiritual component is important in the provision of culturally relevant services to African Americans. Spirituality has been a fundamental aspect of the African American experience (Constantine, Lewis, Conner, & Sanchez, 2000; Frames & Williams, 1996) and involves a relationship between the individual and some transcendent force or the representation of an integrative force in the individual's life providing "meaning" and core values (Van Hook, Hugen, & Aguilar, 2001). This concept is particularly important when working with African American clients in that as a group, African Americans' ethos is spiritual in nature.