Red Feather Development Group

Red Feather is a part of the solution to the housing crisis on the Hopi and Navajo Nations. We are a partner with tribal organizations to ensure the self-determination of American Indians to have healthy homes. Red Feather educates and empowers homeowners to solve their own problems.

First, we educate and host hands-on skills training workshops for homeowners and professional trades people. Outside of Indian Country there is a misunderstanding of the housing crisis that exists across most American Indian Reservations. Part of our fund raising strategy is to bring light to the need and change misperceptions. We also educate people living on reservations about how things like mold and coal stove smoke can contribute to lung diseases like asthma, which is twice as prevalent on reservations. Second, Red Feather empowers homeowners to take on home repairs and weatherization. We teach workshops like Do-It-Yourself (DIY) Home Weatherization and Women's DIY Home Repair. The classes involve discussion of health and safety concerns and then a hands on portion where the students practice the new skills on fellow students' homes. Students receive kits with materials to begin work on their own homes. We also empower homeowners in need of home repair by linking them to available sources of funding and providing professional local referrals for the work. Finally, when all resources and education has been exhausted, and where a homeowner is elderly or disabled, Red Feather may actually take a more active role in ensuring health and safety needs are met, including raising additional funding and managing work crews ourselves. Whenever possible we hire local crews and take the opportunity to provide any business or professional training that is requested and that we can assist with.

Red Feather has a diverse array of staffing with applicable expertise for being successful at our work. We strive to hire individuals that represent the cultural values of the communities we serve. Additionally, we look for the most qualified individuals-those that have skills in housing, health, community development, education, accounting, fund development, other areas as needed. We also have a wide network of professional contract labors (both native and non-native) and specialized consultants that we leverage to provide the best programs and services we can. Current staff bios can be accessed on our Red Feather's website.

For the first of our 20 years we focused mainly on building and teaching Native Americans how to build sustainable new homes such a straw bale houses. Over the course of that time we built over 20 homes in Montana and Arizona. Each one not only represented a new healthy home for one family but it served as an opportunity for learning and for cultural exchange between volunteers from outside the community and members of the community. After listening carefully to the tribal entities of the Northern Cheyenne, Hopi and Navajo nations, we understand there is a need to salvage and make healthier the existing housing stock. We have begun educating and empowering able-bodied people to repair their homes and install wheelchair ramps for the less able-bodied. The need for our services clearly outstrips our ability to reach everyone in need.

In the program period from 2018 to 2021 Red Feather built 27 accessibility ramps, provided 133 home weatherizations, made over 130 firewood deliveries, carried out 150 general housing repairs, provided 171 heating replacements, delivered over 600 handwashing stations, provided 34 education workshops totaling 236 workshop graduates and Healthy Home kits dispersed, and provided 478 client consultations and 231 home inspections.