Thank you for your generous gift to the American Indian Youth Wellness Camp! We are thrilled to have your support. Through your donation we have been able to accomplish our goal for 2022 and continue working towards improving the health and well-being of American Indian youth and their families. You truly make the difference for us, and we are extremely grateful!

A major facet of our camp is to assess whether our program is making a difference. The way we do that is through ongoing measures over 6-months. The assessments include the youth, as well as the parents (caregivers), and they participate in the following: 

- body composition (height and weight) ,

- waist circumference, 

- blood pressure, 

- cholesterol,

- Hemoglobin A1C, 

- carotenoid measurements (vegetable/fruits consumption),

- physical activity using an ActiGraph, wrist accelerometer and

- 24– hour dietary recalls.

All participants receive personalized information to help them better understand their own health and to hopefully incorporate all the different components of camp to make healthier decisions. 

If you have donated, Thank you for your investment. If you have not, you have a few days to be part of our efforts to promote healthy lifestyles among American Indian Youth. 

One of our camp’s components is teaching our American Indian youth the importance of cultural preservation, particularly revolving around the youth’s Native tribal communities and where they come from.

From storytelling to language greetings, to traditional songs, and to dances, we incorporate these teachings into our youth’s physical and mental well-being. This is because American Indians believe in a holistic approach to health and wellness that includes spiritual health.

Please, help us reach our goal of making the longevity of our camp a reality, donate today, no matter the amount! You can help make a difference in the young lives of American Indian youth and help us continue to teach about culture and heritage.

If you have donated already; thank you and may you and your family be blessed for your generosity!

Our campaign is underway after launching on November 9, 2022, and we have reached 40% of our goal. We greatly appreciate everyone who has supported and donated to our program; thank you!

Our camp program includes various components, including one focused on Arts & Crafts. This camp curriculum component is a favorite amongst our families and is important because it allows youth to practice traditional activities. We’ve seen so much creativity in this component!  

Our Arts and Crafts projects allow our youth to show self-expression and develop a stronger bond between family members, as these are usually done as a family unit. Some of our activities include weaving mini rugs and bracelets, making pottery, and seed planting. All of which have strong traditional Native ties.

Your contribution will help provide Arts & Crafts supplies to our American Indian youth. Please spread the word about our crowdfunding campaign and please donate if you haven’t already.

Arts & Craft is our second focus area

On November 9, we launched our campaign for the American Indian Youth Wellness Camp. As of this week, we have raised $1,585.00, which is 31% of our goal! Thank you to all who have donated and for supporting our program!

As part of our program, we introduce several health components. One of our focus areas is Nutrition. Following are some of the nutrition topics that we introduce to the families:

*Portion size vs. serving size              *The 5 food groups                 *Reading food labels

*Preparing meals on the run              *Added sugar in drinks           *The importance of water

*Healthy grocery shopping                 *Saturated fats/added salt     *Menu planning

*Preparing meals on a budget            *30-minute meals                   *Eating out healthy

*My Native Plate                                *Traditional foods

We provide instruction on these nutrition topic areas and provide hands on activities. We also provide links to videos, for example, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SEn6-egakkQ. The goal is to have participants and their families incorporate these concepts into their everyday lives. 

Nutritional snacks like popcorn, carrots, celery, Veggie Straws, beef jerky, Sun chips, apples, oranges, and whole grain cereals were just some of the snacks that were provided to participating families and were used in the various hands-on nutrition lessons. 

If you haven’t already, please consider supporting our program and help us to continue to teach our youth about nutrition. Thank you!

Investing in our youth is one of the most impactful ways we can focus our resources. Healthy kids will make healthy adults.

We launched our 2022 American Indian Youth Wellness Camp campaign on November 9, 2022, and through generous donors, we are at 29% of our goal. We truly appreciate the support of our program and want to share how we assess our impact.

Our process evaluations are both objective and subjective. For our objective measures, we complete physical assessments and surveys at baseline, 3-months and 6-months of our program, and although our analyses remain ongoing, we are seeing positive results in our focus areas of nutrition, physical activity and mental wellness.

Our subjective measures include open-ended evaluation questions and here we share select responses from youth, in the respective topic areas:

"I learned that there are different names of sugar and that eating and drinking foods and drinks with too much sugar is not good for your body."

"It’s important to exercise 1 hour every day to stay fit and healthy."

"It’s important to take not only your own but everyone’s feelings into consideration."

Thank you for taking interest in our work and if you have not yet donated, any contribution to support this important work is appreciated.