- Coming up, we've got a great episode of "American Black Journal" for you.

Our Black church in Detroit series examines the challenges of caregiving and the resources available in the church.

We're gonna talk about the importance of respite for caregivers, and we'll get the details on a new initiative that is creating caregiving ministries in Detroit churches.

It's a really important topic that will affect all of us at some point in our lives.

So stay right there.

"American Black Journal" starts right now.

(upbeat music) - [Announcer] From Delta faucets to Behr paint, Masco Corporation is proud to deliver products that enhance the way consumers all over the world experience and enjoy their living spaces.

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- [Announcer] The DTE Foundation proudly supports 50 years of "American Black Journal" in covering African-American history, culture, and politics.

The DTE Foundation and "American Black Journal," partners in presenting African-American perspectives about our communities and in our world.

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And viewers like you.

Thank you.

(upbeat music) - Welcome to "American Black Journal."

I'm Stephen Henderson.

Today we're continuing our series on the Black church in Detroit, which is produced in partnership with the Ecumenical Theological Seminary and with the Charles H. Wright Museum of African-American History.

It is Minority Health Month, and we're taking a look at the stresses that are faced by caregivers and the importance of self-care.

The Black church has always been a place to turn for hope, for inspiration, and for resources.

A new initiative called the Detroit Family Caregivers Project is helping churches support caregivers in their congregations.

I spoke with Dr. Marilyn French Hubbard, who is heading up the project, and with Reverend Dr. Georgia Hill from Life Church Riverside about how faith communities can help meet the needs of caregivers.

So I actually wanna start with a story about me.

This summer, this coming summer, my mother, who is 81 years old and who lives in Missouri near my sister, is gonna come and live with me for nine weeks while my sister and her husband are abroad for the summer.

And just the anticipation, the things that I find myself having to do to prepare my house, the physical house for her, to prepare my mind to care for her, and to make sure she has all she needs.

I'm still five weeks, six weeks away, and the stress is already starting to weigh on me.

So I say that to say this is something that we all face at some at some point in our lives.

And there aren't a lot of places to turn when you get stressed.

There aren't a lot of places that tell you how to manage all of this.

So I'm really excited to talk to the two of you about how this is playing out in the church.

So Dr. Hubbard, I'm gonna start with you.

Talk about this new program, why it's so critical to our community.

- Thank you, and what you just described, thank you for telling that story about your mom going to stay with you, and I want to congratulate you for doing some of the right things.

You're planning, you're preparing, and that's what this whole program is about, is planning and preparing for family caregiving.

Because it usually happens with a phone call.

Somebody's sick, somebody got injured, and it's a crisis and you gotta run and take care of it.

So if you don't mind, I'll just kind of tell my story.

I have worked as a senior level executive with Henry Ford Health System for many years.

I knew how to navigate the system and who I am as a person who wants to help other people.

So anybody that would call me and say, "Can you help me?"

I would do it above and beyond my job.

And I became the trusted resource within my own family as well as my circle of friends.

And I ended up being at the bedside of over a dozen people as they were taking their last breaths and say, "Marilyn, you make sure this happens" and all that, but I did not realize I was a caregiver.

I did not realize I was an advocate.

And I did not realize that being at the bedside a dozen times was taking a toll on me.

And I crashed.

And the last friend that I cared for had brain cancer.

And she was estranged from her family.

And she had said "Don't tell my family I'm sick."

But when it became imminent that she was passing, I contacted her family and her family came.

I did not know her family.

What they did first of all was get rid of me, go straight to the bank, and do a lot of things that she knew her family would do, but I did not.

Well my feelings were hurt.

And she had told me a lot of things that she wanted to have done, but we had no paperwork to give me the authority to do that.

So I saw them do so many things against what she really wanted.

And so then I began to see, when family comes in, next of kin is trump, and especially if it's mama.

And so I'd be, it was just really hard.

And I would tell the sad story to everybody that would listen.

I was hurt and everything.

And then one day I decided, I gotta make sure this does not happen to anybody else.

And so as I began to search out ways, I heard about healthcare advocates, of which I was serving as, but I was unidentified as that, I began to hear about caregivers.

And then in the process of that, I, like many other people, went to my church and my pastor to say, "Help me, I'm struggling."

And I found out as a result of my interaction, and also later as I began the journey that many people like me call the church when they needed help.

And I found out that the church is prepared to provide health and inspiration, but they don't normally have resources like restful services, bus tickets, food.

And so usually when a caregiver calls or loved one calls the church, they're calling for resources.

And so this project is to help people to plan, prepare, and prevent crisis as it relates to family caregiving.

- And talk about the importance of this being rooted in the church.

It plays such a critical role in our community.

But I don't know that we automatically associate that with something like this.

- Well I'm sure Reverend Hill's gonna talk about this, that I've learned that people call the church for absolutely everything.

Just absolutely everything.

And I've really become very sensitive to the role that's on the faith leader in the church, especially as it relates to just the hearing of people.

So we were blessed enough to be able to get funding from the Ralph C. Wilson Junior Foundation to do this.

And as a process of that, we did a lot of focus groups with Detroit area pastors and faith leaders.

And one of the things that stood out for us is that people don't talk about family caregiving.

And Rosalyn Carter was the first one who came up with a statement saying that there's four kinds of caregivers, those who are currently caregivers, those who have been caregivers, those who are caregivers, and those who will need care.

And so all of us, whether we wanna admit it or not, will need care.

And we're not prepared for any of the roles.

And so what we learned, and one of the things that we're focusing on is that we as families are not talking about this.

And through our focus groups and conversations with faith leaders, two of the things that came out was that we don't wanna talk about caregiving because we don't wanna talk about death and dying.

And so what we wanna do is to normalize the conversation about death and dying.

It's gonna happen.

And so our program focus is planning and preparation to prevent crisis, to know that caregiving is gonna be in your life and death is gonna be in your life.

And we're hoping the church can help tell the story and help us to get the point across that everybody wants to go to heaven.

But nobody wants to plan it though.

And I'll just say one other thing.

The project really isn't about dying.

It's about living.

And it's about living well, and it's about the caregiver living well.

And the span of life that we're talking about is between the time a person becomes disabled and cannot care or speak for themselves and they need somebody else to help them.

What happens then and how can we plan for that?

And most of us don't just drop dead and die, we linger.

And it causes a burden on the family.

- So Reverend Hill, I know you have a personal story as well that connects to this, but obviously you're a church leader and you see this all the time in your congregation.

So talk about the way this intersects with our church community.

- Well, I'm so glad that we're talking about this topic because it's so important.

As our population does better in aging, so folks are living longer, so there's more folk to care for.

And we wanna care for them in a way that's wise and also preserves the life of the caregiver.

But in our church, what I see is the same thing that many of us see.

And that is that there are many, many people who need this caregiving.

And as Dr. Hubbard was saying, it can begin when a person is completely unable to make their own decisions.

But it actually starts well before that.

And so as mom or dad or auntie is aging, we see family members stepping in.

Often there's conflict that needs to be resolved.

People come to the church.

There's a search for resources, where can mom live.

People come to the church.

And so what I think the church is great for is for being that community of people where we can help one another and resource one another.

So one of the things that I often have conversations with church members and other individuals about is about what are good places for rehabilitation?

What are good places for hospice?

What are good places for nursing care and the like?

And so there's just a range of needs that folk have.

Sometimes it's a temporary need.

Even folks who are not aged have a temporary need sometimes to be in a place, perhaps while they're going through cancer treatment.

Other individuals have an injury, and once they get healed from the injury, hip replacement, or something like that, they come out of the therapy.

So there's a range of situations that come into play here.

But the church can be a great resource for collective conversation.

- The caregiver side of this is really important as well.

When we are in the position of taking care of someone, whether it's family or a friend, it's stressful, there's a lot of responsibility.

There's a lot of work that's involved that we may not anticipate or be fully prepared for.

Talk about the church trying to meet the needs of the caregivers as much as those who need care.

- So glad you asked.

I'm currently residing with my mom, and so I'm a caregiver.

While my mother does not have any discernible illness that we're aware of, she's up in age.

And so there are lots of things that I do in my daily schedule to provide support and care for her.

And of course there are many people in churches, in faith communities, and in our cities that are providing care for someone that they love.

So one of the things that church can do is to be, as Dr. Hubbard said, which is beautiful, to be honest and open about the conversation.

And then to support the caregivers, we like to come together and provide opportunities for folk to get rest, refreshing, laughter, joy, even just coming to church, sometimes just being able to come to church and have a church service and sit down and just enjoy what is going on in church and not have to be caring for somebody else can be a break.

But Jesus commands us to come to him, and he will give us rest.

And so we really need to, as caregivers, we need to take that very seriously.

I have a couple of friends, some of whom are connected to Dr. Hubbard's project, but others that have their own projects and who provide support for caregiving.

Both support groups and also fun activities and places and times where people can just breathe.

I also have noticed something, which is really wonderful.

I have some friends who will, as they say, they will spell me and they will do things like call me up and say, "Hey, we've got a delicious meal for your mother."

And I say, "Bring it on" because it helps.

- When can you be here?

- That's right.

That kind of thing really, really helps.

Or, "Hey, we're gonna take you and your mom out to dinner."

I mean, these kinds of things really help.

And this is the way that the faith community can be so helpful to support one another and to have a watchful eye for those who are in distress because sometimes the caregiver is really in distress.

And as we are watchful looking at one another, we can say, you can pull somebody aside and say, "You know what?"

I think you might need a little help, a little respite."

But I think the community of faith is such a great place for these conversations to take place and for this sharing and support to take place.

- Dr. Hubbard, we're all still trying to put our lives fully back together I think after the pandemic and all the disruption that it caused.

It seems to me that it reminded us in some really stark ways about the importance of caregiving and how all of us will be called at some point to do it.

It changes the picture, I think, for caregiving in a pretty profound way.

- Yes.

COVID-19 did do that for us.

And within the church, we had started the program just prior to COVID-19.

And what happened then, we found out that a lot of the churches were not prepared.

So we took as families weren't, you know, so what we did was to get churches prepared electronically so we could address the crisis.

And so what we're hoping is that we can build upon that.

So when crisis or something may happen like that in the future, and for me, I think that the church has so, so much to offer already.

What the church does is already care.

And as Reverend Hill said, there's so many things that happen within the church.

And I think that the church can provide lessons to the larger communities.

So we see ourselves developing cultures and communities of care and caregiving and the congregations of where we're starting.

And we hope that we can spread that out to other communities with the church taking the lead.

And in this program, the training that we did, what we did was to bring the two most respected people within the African-American community, the pastor and the physician.

And so the pastor and the physician in our training, they're approaching this subject both from a medical perspective and a theological perspective.

And so there's so many decisions that have to be made, like say cremation, hospice.

And those things need to be talked about before you're in ICU.

So we're really looking at the church as a catalyst of doing this.

We have 27 churches that we're really excited about in the Detroit area.

And this is gonna be a three year project.

So we look at bringing more churches on, and the church is really taking the lead.

And so I'm really, really grateful that we've had so many pastors that have said, "Yes, we're on board."

And I think our community needs this.

And we'll be able to normalize the conversation about family caregiving.

And in many churches, and in many communities, the church is the only family that many people have.

Because we look at the mothers of the church, we call them offering elders.

And so what we wanna do is to build a culture to say, "Mother Jones hasn't been looking to good.

What do we need to do to prepare her?

We know she doesn't have a family."

So put our arms around.

And then the other thing about our project is we're bringing resources.

The resources within the community, there's lots of resources beginning with the Detroit area aging and area agency at aid.

And so what we've found in working with the churches is that caregivers, when they're stressed, and churches, when they're in crisis trying to meet the need, you don't have time to try to, where are the resources?

So we're gonna bring the resources to the church to let people know where the resources are so they'll be readily available when they need them.

And we're developing a role called legacy leaders to build upon the legacy of leadership in the church of care and to be a facilitator or a health advocate.

And to also help us to gather the resource in the church of past and present caregivers who will become professionals on the job.

And so in addition to the professionals, the doctors and nurses and lawyers who are already in the churches, you also have people who walk the caregiving journey who can help other people on their journey in the future.

- Reverend Hill, I want to spend the last bit of time talking about the way the church is called to kind of manage relationships and conflict around this kind of caregiving.

This is difficult stuff.

And often we haven't had the right conversations before something needs to be done.

And it does cause tension.

It does cause conflict.

And I imagine that in your office there, you get knocks on the door or phone calls that say, "Look, help us sort this out."

- Many times, that's been my experience, but let me just say this one foundational point I'd like to make, and that is that the days of the early, early church, the Christians were known for their caregiving.

And so caregiving comes out of the Christian tradition.

And that there were literally people who were willing to give their lives to care for others when people were too frightened to care for someone with say, a communicable disease.

And so this comes directly out of our faith tradition that is to be caregivers.

When families come to their pastor when they're in a time of conflict, the problem is that oftentimes the person is also at extreme point in their illness and something needs to be done fairly quickly.

I think Dr. Hubbard pointed that out.

And so what pastors I think try to do, we try to discover A, what are the resources that are needed?

And because pastors and physicians and lawyers are often key figures in the African-American community, we try to network and try to get people the help that they need.

Also I have been for many years a practicing attorney.

I don't practice full-time now, but of course these issues are near and dear to my heart as Dr. Hubbard said because a lot of people have not planned in advance.

We try to find out, hey, has there been advanced planning?

Have you done an advance directive?

And this is what people sometimes don't do it because they don't wanna talk about death.

And the families that are most in crisis are the people who spent the least amount of time talking about death.

And so what happens when we gather folks together is we try to resource them.

What are the resources that are needed?

Can we help them find those resources?

And then of course, there's a counseling role that churches provide both directly with pastors or pastor counselors, and also with referrals that we make for people who need ongoing support and care as they go through the caregiving journey.

But the church is a resource for this kind of thing because our goal, as Dr. Hubbard said, our goal is not to focus on death.

We will all walk that way.

But we're trying to give people abundant life, as Jesus says.

And so we wanna come together in ways that promote the joy.

Like we're hoping that your summer is filled with all kinds of joy.

And the burdens of sometimes the extra work and all of that that you've prepared for them, there are people who will be supporting you, and all the friends of Stephen Henderson, bring his mother some dinner during the summer to call out to you.

But there are ways in which we can support each other so that it can be joyous.

Because I'm telling you, I'm so happy to be caring for the woman who cared for me.

I have two sisters, and we work together as a family, and I'm telling you, there is no greater blessing than taking care of the people that took care of us.

- Or just being with them, like I said, my mom's 81, she had a serious cancer scare two years ago and got through it and you wouldn't know she had cancer.

And I count every day that we have her as a blessing.

It's extra.

She might not have been here.

And so as much as it is, of course, more work than it used to be when she was younger, it's great to have her.

And it'll be great to have her here this summer.

Congratulations on the program, Dr. Hubbard, and congratulations on the work in the church, Reverend Hill.

And thanks to both of you for being here on "American Black Journal."

- Thank you.

Thank you.

- Yes.

Thank you so much.

This was wonderful.

- That is gonna do it for us this week.

You can find out more about our guests at americanblackjournal.org, and you can connect with us anytime on social media.

Take care.

And we'll see you next time.

(upbeat music) (upbeat music continues) - [Announcer] From Delta Faucets to Behr paint, Masco Corporation is proud to deliver products that enhance the way consumers all over the world experience and enjoy their living spaces.

Masco, serving Michigan communities since 1929.

Support also provided by the Cynthia and Edsel Ford Fund for Journalism at Detroit PBS.

- [Announcer] The DTE Foundation proudly supports 50 years of "American Black Journal" in covering African-American history, culture, and politics.

The DTE Foundation and "American Black Journal," partners in presenting African-American perspectives about our communities and in our world.

- [Announcer] Also brought to you by Nissan Foundation.

And viewers like you, thank you.

(bright music)