Funds to support Joint Professor Dr. Kevin Lansey from the UArizona School of Civil Engineering and Hydrology and Atmospheric Science to hire Mr. Christian Jimmie from Arizona State University.

Funds to support Dr. Andrew Curley from the UArizona School of Geography, Development, and Environment to hire Marle Dave Lister from the University of North Carolina.

The award will fund five tribal college students from Diné College to participate in a joint summer research experience between The University of Arizona and Diné College. The program, hosted by the Arizona Institutes for Resilience, is called Bridge to STEAM and immerses students in a 10-week summer research hands-on experience. 

For the last several years, F&B members have been leading Barrio Centro to greater health and safety by building on the community's strengths and assets. F&B transformed the grounds of Julia Keen Elementary School into an urban farm called the Midtown Farm. The farm serves as a training ground for youth and community members to learn a broad range of skills. Children, youth, parents, and grandparents flock to the school grounds to volunteer, harvest produce, and learn about sustainable living grounded in the practices of the community's ancestors. Participants take workshops on backyard gardening, water harvesting, and raising and processing goats for milk, cheese, and meat. Water harvesting, permaculture, and other green infrastructure systems are not widely accessible to marginalized communities, who also suffer from limited access to healthy food. These sustainable living practices are a way to combat the economic, health, and food struggles in the Barrio – and support people in becoming more economically self-sufficient.

The Midtown Farm offers a new model of community engagement through urban agriculture. The Midtown Farm is a tool to build community and address historical trauma in Barrio Centro. Trauma is caused by disproportionate incarceration, substance use, food insecurity, health disparities, and economic inequality. We build trust and community by responding in real-time to the needs of the community.

The project includes the purchase of the property, deconstruction, and renovation of the building, increases in operating costs for two years, and completion of other site elements, including the building to ramadas, greenhouses, workshop spaces, and storages to reduce the cost of renovating the property, minimize future maintenance cost, and create a structure that can harvest rain, provide shade and enable vibrant activities that strengthen Barrio Centro.

The award aims to fund the hiring of two summer staff members to recruit new students and for operational funds for Native SOAR’s first virtual summer program.

In light of the "twin pandemics" of covid-19 and structural racism/police violence, and the greatest impact being on Black communities in the US, as part of the Dunbar Wellness Project, Dunbar will document the impacts both now as well as into the coming decade of the events that have unfolded in 2020. Dunbar will recruit a cohort of 20 Black/African American Tucsonans of varying ages, genders, and socioeconomic backgrounds to interview them about their health status, experiences of care, strategies for maintaining health and wellness, and how place/space factors into their feelings of healing and belonging. Interviews also include "cartographies of healing" through which individuals engage in a process of “counter-mapping” to render visual representations of important sites of healing, care, and belonging as these have emerged or changed during the pandemic.

In addition to soliciting updates to health status and cartographies of healing each year, Dunbar would also seek to collect life histories, genealogies of displacement and family histories, and illness narratives of cohort members. Narratives collected through these interviews are both key to informing future health and wellness programming at the Dunbar and for understanding the broader health and demographic shifts that are underway in our region. 

Funds to support a conference in celebration of the 20th anniversary of the creation of the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples mandate, and the 20th anniversary of the creation of the IPLP program. The two-day conference will bring together Indigenous human rights advocates and movement leaders who were directly involved in creating the mandate. Speakers will included rights defenders on the front lines of Indigenous human rights advocacy from Guatemala, Chile, Canada, New Zealand, Tanzania, and other countries and Native Nations.

The award helped the Navajo Nation COVID-19 Water Access Coordination Group produce the documentary Working Together for a Better Future. The video highlights the collaborative efforts of dozens of state and federal agencies, along with non-profits, universities, and philanthropies working together with the Navajo Nation to address water access challenges during COVID-19.

The Library Preservation Project, conceived to preserve and give public access to valued, one-of-a-kind documents, some dated back to the 1930s, involves three phases:

Phase I consists of securing over 8,000 water resource documents, reports, and maps from NNDWR Library at the Daniel F. Cracchiolo Law Library. For now, the only people who will have access will be researchers that will be pre-approved by NNDWR on a case-by-case basis and facilitated by the Daniel F. Cracchiolo Law Library.

Phase II consists of preparing and digitizing the collection. At this point, Daniel F. Cracchiolo Law Library plans to recruit and hire students to help with Phase II work, including preparing the collection materials for digitization, creating metadata, and performing quality control. Leads secured funding from CERES for phase II.

Phase III is a collaborative effort between the Daniel F. Cracchiolo Law Library and the UArizona’s Communication and Cyber Technologies to create a database to host the digitized library. Once the collection is digitized, most of the collection will be publicly available, with NNDWR determining which resources will require restricted access.

The Library Preservation Project honors the tribal and information sovereignty of the Navajo Nation and their data and resources while working with the NNDWR to provide access to essential information to improve all aspects of water resources in the Navajo Nation

The award supports the work of Dr. Felina Cordova-Marks. The award will be used to hire a graduate student to assist Dr. Felina Cordova-Marks in her research priorities and to provide opportunities for research experiences and mentorship for the graduate student.

The award supports the work undertaken by the Senior Vice President for Native American Advancement and Tribal Engagement office.

As a new member institution of UC3, UA, alongside 20 other leading North American research universities, is prototyping a collaborative model designed to leverage institutional strengths to foster a robust exchange of best practices and lessons learned in pursuit of accelerating local climate solutions that reduce greenhouse gas emissions and build community resilience. 

The UC3 Fellowship Program is proposed as a three-year initial start-up pilot. Over the three-year period, three cohorts (up to ten fellows in each annual cohort) will work with UA’s UC3 liaisons, participate in workshops, activate their networks, and develop specific actionable programs and activities. Each cohort will work with community partners to create and propose projects for launch. One to three pilot projects per year will be selected for funding by the Office for Research, Innovation, & Impact, based on the advice of the UC3 liaisons.

Graduate Student Support for Sharon Megdal, UArizona Water Resources Research Center

Recipient: Miguel Moreno, UArizona Law Student

Mr. Moreno will assist Dr. Megdal with planning for  “Indigenous Water Dialogues”, and the program for the “202X Indigenous Water Issue Conference”

Pre-design is desperately needed to evaluate and connect Leupp Well 2B to the new well located in Leupp, AZ in the southwestern region of the Navajo Nation planned to supply water for the Dilkon Medical Center, currently under construction. The primary well constructed for the Dilkon Medical Center has water quality issues, and additional water source is needed. The Southwestern Navajo Rural Water Supply Program Appraisal Study has been completed by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation Native American Affairs Office for the southwestern region of the Navajo Nation, including Leupp in the southwestern portion of the U.S.  Leupp Well 2B is 1096 feet deep and yielded 745 gallons per minute.  Leupp and the immediate surrounding area receives the least amount of precipitation compared to the rest of the Navajo Nation; it is the aridest area and is susceptible to severe drought conditions. Pre-design costs are $551,314.