Identifying Systemic Factors when Counseling Black Women of Christian Faith in the USA.

When Black women of Christian faith in the USA receive secular help for psychological symptoms, their spiritual and religious communities often view the decision negatively. The women may feel shamed, ostracized, and condemned. They often experience emotional, physical, and spiritual trauma from the rejection that increases the frequency, duration, and intensity of their psychological symptoms. This article identifies specific community-based and systemic factors that exacerbate mental health issues in Black women of Christian faith. The authors discuss the influence of such factors on mental health and provide evidence-based practices for mental health clinicians working with Black women of Christian faith.

Sustainable smallholder poultry interventions to promote food security and social, agricultural, and ecological resilience in the Luangwa Valley, Zambia.

In Zambia's Luangwa Valley, highly variable rainfall and lack of education, agricultural inputs, and market access constrain agricultural productivity, trapping smallholder farmers in chronic poverty and food insecurity. Human and animal disease (e.g. HIV and Newcastle Disease, respectively), further threaten the resilience of poor families. To cope with various shocks and stressors, many farmers employ short-term coping strategies that threaten ecosystem resilience. Community Markets for Conservation (COMACO) utilizes an agribusiness model to alleviate poverty and food insecurity through conservation farming, market development and value-added food production. COMACO promotes household, agricultural and ecological resilience along two strategic lines: improving recovery from shocks (mitigation) and reducing the risk of shock occurrence. Here we focus on two of COMACO's poultry interventions and present data showing that addressing health and management constraints within the existing village poultry system resulted in significantly improved productivity and profitability. However, once reliable productivity was achieved, farmers preferred to sell chickens rather than eat either the birds or their eggs. Sales of live birds were largely outside the community to avoid price suppression; in contrast, the sale of eggs from community-operated, semi-intensive egg production facilities was invariably within the communities. These facilities resulted in significant increases in both producer income and community consumption of eggs. This intervention therefore has the potential to improve not only producers' economic resilience, but also resilience tied to the food security and physical health of the entire community.