COVID-19 and Indigenous Communities: A Call to Action and Relationship for Philanthropy

As the philanthropic community takes stock of the impact COVID-19 has on our operations and long-term strategies, we must act now to move resources to communities who are hardest hit by the compounding impacts of this pandemic.

California Foodshed Funders, First Nations Development Institute, and Neighborhood Funders Group, with other national co-hosts invite you to join us for a conversation to make visible the people and issues facing Native American communities across the country as they endure this crisis.  Taking the lead from our colleagues rooted in Indigenous Communities, we will look at how this current crisis is made worse by generations of disinvestment of infrastructure and marginalization by mainstream institutions. In Navajo Nation alone, the number of COVID-19 cases has risen beyond 1000; if it were a US state it would rank third in per-capita infection behind New York and New Jersey — yet the crises goes so much deeper than the rate of infection.

Join this webinar to hear from Indigenous leadership, together with non–Native funders, who aim to rise together in this moment and act together to support the health and emergency needs of Indigenous Americans at the front lines of the COVID-19 crisis. Acting now in courage and reciprocity will root strategies for resilience, health, biodiversity, and ecological protection and so much more in the leadership of Indigenous communities who have too often been left out of mainstream philanthropy (receiving an average of .4% of the annual giving from large foundations). Through dialogue and action, we will build relationships and share resources that will help us rise to the moment, and serve us well beyond the COVID-19 crisis.