The Columbia World Project Confronting COVID-19 Loss in Harlem on Tuesday launched a series of focus groups—a next step toward achieving the project’s goal of reducing COVID-19 related grief in the Harlem community.

The focus groups will engage Black community leaders in Harlem in a series of discussions that will be used to help enhance a set of digital tools – such as apps and videos – developed by Columbia’s Center for Prolonged Grief. The tools are being used to address prolonged grief disorder, a clinically recognized mental disorder in which grief is unusually intense, enduring and pervades everyday life.

The insights from these focus groups will be used to adapt the Center’s digital tools to better serve the Black community. The modified digital tools will be disseminated across Harlem and to other communities of color coping with ongoing grief as a result of the pandemic.

Confronting COVID-19 Loss in Harlem kicked off in October of 2021. The project works in partnership with the Center for Prolonged Grief; Mobilizing Preachers and Community, New York; and SAFELab at the Columbia School of Social Work. It is one of three Columbia World Projects that aims to tackle challenges related to the pandemic.