The Center is tremendously grateful to have been awarded a $1.1 million grant from Rockefeller Foundation Catalytic Capital to help fulfill Rockefeller’s testing and COVID-19 mitigation commitment to Native Americans, who are prioritized by the foundation’s mission to serve the poorest people in the world and whose inequities have been made worse by this virus.
This is the continuation of a public health story marked by agility and builds upon support our Center received from the Community Organized Relief Effort (CORE) to mount a comprehensive testing, contact tracing and support model when the first wave of the pandemic struck Southwestern tribal communities. The continuation of this work will continue a public health story marked by agility and resilience to deliver community-driven life-saving support for Native Americans, and a model of pandemic containment for the world.
The new Rockefeller grant will support the following:
- Tribal Safe Schools Initiative: We are piloting a reservation-based “safe schools” model that will inform the development and scale-up of a school-based COVID-19 testing protocol, with lessons for other low-income communities as well, that will be distributed through the Center’s and Rockefeller Foundation’s various channels.
- Extending our Community-Based Testing and Mitigation Model: We will continue to mount our three-pronged “TRI-Protect” model of 1) testing, 2) contract tracing and 3) wrap-around services to support isolation and quarantine on the Navajo Nation and with the White Mountain Apache, and monitor data on testing outcomes and epidemiologic trends affected by this comprehensive approach. We will also continue to design a dashboard with data-tracking tools that uses testing data to drive policy and public health response to COVID, as well an electronic library of resources to disseminate the TRI-Protect model to tribal communities across the country.
Finally, we will incorporate efforts to promote vaccine acceptance among those who are hesitant to get vaccinated.