Project Hope and supporting the Navajo Nation

In partnership with Indian Health Services, Project HOPE has been supporting the indigenous communities of Navajo Nation with personal protective equipment and ongoing deployments of frontline medical volunteers to provide surge support in hospitals.

Home to more than 500 tribes and 300 reservations, the vast Navajo Nation spans across Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah. Yet there are just six hospitals, seven health centers, and 15 health stations serving the entire territory — with fewer than 20 ICU beds for the whole population of 300,000.

It’s an inequity that doesn’t just put Navajo Nation’s residents at a disadvantage; it’s proven devastating during the COVID-19 pandemic.

One-quarter of all households in Navajo Nation lack electricity, and a third don’t have running water. Half of Navajo Nation’s entire population lives in multigenerational households, which can make social distancing or isolating to stop the spread of the disease impossible.

At the height of the pandemic, Native Americans were 3.5 times more likely to contract COVID-19 and dying at nearly twice the rate as white Americans. Nearly 1,300 people in Navajo Nation have died in total, a number equal to 1.4 million deaths if extrapolated out to the entire U.S. population.

In partnership with Indian Health Services, Project HOPE has been supporting the indigenous communities of Navajo Nation with personal protective equipment and ongoing deployments of frontline medical volunteers to provide surge support in hospitals.

Thanks to generous support from the New York Life Foundation, that support has been able to continue through a devastating surge of winter cases and a critical inflection point in the fight against the disease. Read more about Project HOPE and the New York Life Foundation’s partnership with Navajo Nation.

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