BUFFALO BLESSINGS

Buffalo Blessings' mission is quite simple. We want to alleviate hunger and lack experienced by the Hopi and Navajo people. We visit the reservations once a year and give away food and supplies to 760 Hopi and Navajo families, as well as the Hopi Senior Citizen Nutrition Center which serves meals to about 50 elderly per day.

Through fundraising events, direct mail, email, social media, and manning booths at local festivals, we talk about the great poverty and hardscrabble life the Hopi and Navajo people endure, and their need for food, clean water, home repair supplies, hygiene supplies, school supplies for the children, and how the prevalence of diabetes and sheer isolation factors into the difficulties the people face. Through these various platforms we ask for monetary donations, as well as donations of hygiene supplies, school supplies, etc. Buffalo Blessings operates strictly with the help of unpaid staff and volunteers, ensuring that nearly 100% of all monetary donations are utilized for the purchase of food, supplies, and trucking costs for transporting the goods from Salt Lake City, Utah, to the areas in Arizona where we serve the people. Buffalo Blessings purchases food in bulk, thereby receiving a tremendous discount, allowing for each dollar spent to provide its greatest possible value.

Our capabilities for accomplishing our mission can be exemplified by looking at our yearly functionality. For example, in October 2018 nearly 100 unpaid volunteers assisted in the packaging of 760 boxes of groceries. In addition, volunteers loaded the goods onto trucks. Volunteers also traveled to the reservations to assist in the distribution of the food and supplies. UMCOR in Salt Lake City donated warehouse space to Buffalo Blessings for the purpose of food storage. Sundance Institute/Sundance Film Festival donated thousands of new clothing items to Buffalo Blessings for distribution to the Hopi and Navajo people. Our partnerships with organizations such as these, as well as a steady donor base and loyal volunteers are what make Buffalo Blessings able to do this work, year after year.

Since our inception and establishment as a 501(c)3 nonprofit charity, Buffalo Blessings has been able to provide assistance to impoverished Hopi and Navajo individuals facing hardships, in addition to providing food and supplies for hundreds of families every year. We were able to provide a Hopi elder with an old, but working, tractor with which to work his fields so that he would no longer need to resort to using a crude tool consisting of a round blade attached to a pole. When we heard that an older Hopi woman had no wood stove with which to heat her one-room cinderblock house, Buffalo Blessings provided her with a beautiful used wood/coal stove. When we learned that a diabetic gentleman, who was undergoing dialysis three times a week, had no bed, that he and his wife had been sleeping on the floor for over a year, Buffalo Blessings provided the couple with a brand-new, comfortable bed with new pillows, comforters, sheets. We also provided an elderly Hopi lady who was blind with a new bed, as she had none and also had been sleeping on the floor. When we learned that an elderly Navajo lady had taken in her three grandsons to raise after their mother had been incarcerated, we provided the boys with new coats, shoes, school supplies, firewood, and extra quantities of food to help alleviate the elder lady's burdens. Buffalo Blessings seeks to ease suffering and hardship whenever possible.