Beyond Organizational Health Promotion: Opportunities for Black Interfaith Collaboration to Build a Healthy Neighborhood in Boston, MA, USA.

While religious congregations are often placed at the organization level of the Social Ecological Model, recent research argued that partnerships between public health practitioners and Black Protestant churches may be effective in community-wide health promotion. Yet, it is unknown how different religious traditions within the same neighborhood might view this work. Thus, we examined how Black Americans at a Sunni Muslim mosque and a Protestant Christian church in the same Boston, MA, USA, neighborhood defined a healthy person, a healthy congregation, and a healthy neighborhood. Ethnographers engaged in participant observation, in-depth interviews (n = 25), and a community-based participatory workshop. Inductive themes show shared understandings of healthy neighborhoods as healthy environments, as economically stable, keeping families and youth safe, and made up of neighbors who are engaged and supportive. These shared understandings are a religious health asset and suggest that it may be fruitful to engage in neighborhood interfaith coalition work.