As each generation ofABPsi membership continues to step-up and identify new initiatives critical to our community’s healthy growth and development, Dr. Cheryl Grills’ contribution on this front is The African Centered Re-Entry Project (ACRE). Since August 2009, Dr. Grills has been working tirelessly with Drs. Mark A. Bolden; Deanna Cooke; and Michelle Anderson to establish our footprint in an area that continues to require our full attention, i.e., the excessive incarceration of African American women, men, and children. To date their working efforts have included establishing partnerships with the California Institution for Women (CIW) in order to as Dr. Grills reported, "decrease recidivism among formerly incarcerated African Americans starting first with incarcerated African American women from South Los Angeles using African Centered, community-based pre and post release programming.　

Ultimately the project would expand to include African American men, youth, and communities across the US." Working efforts on this project have also included establishing relationships with relevant state and federal grant agencies to secure funding support for addressing recidivism. Any research on the subject of incarceration among African Americans will clearly reveal the disproportionate numbers caught-up within the U.S. prison industrial complex, which has sorrowfully become a profitable investment for a growing number of private prison companies and their financial stock market investments on Wall Street, e.g., Corrections Corp. of America, The GEO Group, and Cornell Cos. The myriad of circumstances e.g., oppression, poverty, crime, unemployment and failing educational systems that contribute to incarceration and work against successful re-entry among incarcerated women and men must be addressed by psychologists. The ABPsi is now poised to address this issue with ACRE. The recent January 2010 convening General Assembly that included a national ACRE convening or ‘Think Tank’ as I would like to identify it helped to secure our serious trajectory to address this national crisis.

Secondly, I recently made the appointments of Drs. Gislene C. Mariette, Wade W. Nobles and Mary Hargrow to serve as Co-Chairs of The ABPsi Disaster Relief Task Force. Their leadership will help to ensure that we design and deliver culturally congruent (African Centered mental health services and programming to victims of natural and/or man-made disasters to people of African ancestry and communities in need through the world). To accomplish this they have been charged with coordinating and committing relevant resources, expertise and skill sets to address local, national and international disasters. Following the 2005 Hurricane Katrina, Drs. Kevin Cokley, Wade W. Nobles and I authored a seminal document titled: Guidelines for Providing Culturally Appropriate Services for People of African Ancestry Exposed to Trauma of Hurricane Katrina. While this document set the stage for the journal article by: Cooke, B.G., Cokley, K., Moon, L.T., Webb, S.C. (2007). Therapeutic Cultural Competence in Theory and Practice

Following Hurricane Katrina: Culturally Appropriate Therapeutic Responses to Disaster Relief.Journal of Race and Policy, Volume 3, Number 1, 141-165, the need for a task force capable of addressing current and future needs remained vital to ensure the delivery of culturally competent mental health services both nationally and internationally. The ABPsi is now positioned institutionally to begin drawing from our deep reservoir of scholarship/research and clinical practice in coordinating and committing relevant mental health services to Haitians.

This effort to launch vital initiatives that address the long-term mental health needs of our community e.g., prison recidivism and disaster relief speaks to our psychological and cultural capacity to address what The ABPsi is best suited to deal with. Again, I invite the next generation of ABPsi membership to participate in the generational work required to ensure our successful engagement of vital initiatives that enrich and productively transform our community.