Who They Are
Belle Glade and Pahokee have more than thirty churches between them. Researchers at Florida Atlantic University's Christine E. Lynn College of Nursing built on exactly that: instead of asking rural residents to travel to a clinic for health education, they trained members of local congregations as faith health educators and sent the education to where people already gather.
The method is an adaptation of Faith Moves Mountains, a protocol first developed for cancer screening in rural Appalachia and applied here to cognitive decline. The work has run under FAU's ORCHID project — Optimizing Rural Community Health Through Interdisciplinary Dementia Detection and Care — led by Dr. Lisa Wiese, funded by the National Institute on Aging at the National Institutes of Health and the Florida Department of Health's Ed and Ethel Moore Alzheimer's Disease Research Program, with Palm Health Foundation helping sustain the community side of it.
In practice, FAU nursing students — many of them from the Glades themselves — work alongside the faith health educators at churches across Belle Glade, Pahokee, South Bay and Canal Point, teaching brain health strategies, running brief memory checks, and offering free screenings for the conditions that raise dementia risk, high blood pressure and diabetes among them.
Why it matters to us
- Physical activity is one of the risk factors these educators teach about — and it is the one you can act on the very next morning.
- A member screened at church on Sunday and told to move more has somewhere to go on Monday.
- We do not screen, diagnose or advise on medication. We are the exercise half of that conversation, and we stay in our half.
What it is
Members of Glades congregations trained to deliver health education and screenings inside their own churches
Behind it
Florida Atlantic University's Christine E. Lynn College of Nursing — the ORCHID project, led by Dr. Lisa Wiese
Funded by
The National Institute on Aging (NIH) and the Florida Department of Health's Ed and Ethel Moore Alzheimer's Disease Research Program, with Palm Health Foundation support
Our connection
Shared members and a shared message — exercise is the dementia risk factor a person can change
Who Else We Work With
Come And See A Class
Every partner on this page leads back to the same thing: a room in the Glades where people are moving. Call and we will tell you when the next one starts.