Alfiee M. Breland-Noble, PhD, MHSc, is recognized with this APA Citizen Psychologist Presidential Citation for her commitment to integrating community-based participatory action with culturally relevant research methods to address mental health disparities and improve the lives of young people, families, and communities of color.
Breland-Noble is the principal director of the AAKOMA Center and the AAKOMA Project. AAKOMA is an acronym for African-American Knowledge Optimized for Mindfully Healthy Adolescents and it was born out of her desire to build a world where everyone has the opportunity to achieve optimal mental health. AAKOMA includes volunteer efforts in research capacity-building in Black faith communities, schools and community-based organizations, to public speaking with community scientist partners on suicide prevention, to volunteer service on national advisory boards of organizations devoted to reducing mental health disparities. Via the AAKOMA Project and Center, Breland-Noble has spent the last 20 years training Black faith community leaders to develop and staff “research ministries” (designed to reduce the historical exploitation of Black communities in clinical research) and “compassionate care teams” (designed to train faith communities on how to support congregants with mental illness). Her goal in this effort is to engage Black faith communities in becoming self-actualized entities capable of designing and building their own research to address mental health and to help them better vet academic researchers seeking to partner with them in clinical research in general.
As a nationally recognized expert in depression treatment and research for reducing mental health disparities, Breland-Noble’s goal is to prepare the communities she works with to do the work necessary to address mental health needs themselves through her utilization of Community Based Participatory Research. In doing so, she has spent countless hours without external funding, training African Americans and other people of color in the basics of how to seek federal funding for mental health research, how to engage communities in caring about research and learning how to properly vet and develop mutually beneficial partnerships with academic researchers. Her work is noted for creating healing and building bridges between academic researchers and communities with historical distrust of academic institutions.
Black faith communities, eager to spread culturally-relevant knowledge about depression, stress, and suicide in teens, repeatedly invite her to deliver workshops and presentations with her trained community-scientist partners. Her efforts in building capacity in the Black faith community (and other communities of color) has led to partnered research teams of academics, patients, community leaders and stakeholders with over ten years of external funding from National Institutes of Health, PCORI and foundations. Notably, her team, which includes community-scientists as co-investigators on all awards, received PCORI funding from 2014 to 2018 including multiple Pipeline to Proposal awards and a Eugene Washington Engagement Award. In all efforts, Breland-Noble is steadfast in her commitment to creating healing for Black youth, youth of color, families and communities by prioritizing optimal mental health for all and empowering underserved communities to lead.