Collecting Health Data With Youth at Faith-Based Institutions: Lessons Learned

other faith-based organizations (FBOs), such as religion-based summer day care programs, are resurging in popu-larity because they are an appropriate and relatively personal vehicle for health promotion. Evidence of this transformation is President Bush’s faith-based initiative (Bush, 2001), the essence of which is that successful gov-ernment social programs work in fruitful partnership with organizations that are community serving and faith based. Churches and other FBOs have several advantages in health initiatives with culturally diverse populations. One, FBOs can reach many age, race, sex, education level, and income segments of the population. FBOs have unique access to disenfranchised subpopulations commonly underserved by the conventional health care system (Duan, Fox, Derose, Carson, & Stockdate, 2005)