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Fort Belknap nonprofit in desperate need

Lose of warehouse and vehicle puts vital food distribution efforts at risk

Harlem-based nonprofit Day Eagle Hope Project, which provides services for cancer patients and survivors in Fort Belknap and provides food to people in need in the area, is in desperate need of help itself after losing a storage facility and vehicle.

Tescha Hawley, who created the organization, said the warehouse they use to store the food they distribute, a building owned by the tribe and used by its Commodities Program, was recently found to have black mold and electrical problems, forcing them to vacate and leaving them without a place to store food.

That same day, Hawley said, the retired police vehicle the tribe donated to her organization, which she uses to distribute food throughout the community, also broke down.

“Everything that could go wrong, did go wrong,” she said.

The organization has since put up a page on GoFundMe which has raised money she’s been able to use to help people undergoing chemotherapy get the help they need, but without a vehicle and a building her efforts to help some of the most at-risk people in the area has been crippled.

“It’s a really bad situation,” Hawley said.

The Day Eagle Hope fundraiser can be found at https://www.gofundme.com/f/tescha-hawley-day-eagle-hope-project .

Hawley, a cancer survivor herself, established the organization to help bridge the gap between Native American cancer patients and the health care system.

She said there is a significant disconnect between the mainstream health care system and Native Americans who use very different clinical and cultural language when it comes to care like this, which can make an already difficult journey all the more confusing and difficult.

She said she has master’s degrees in both social work and health administration, but without the help of a patient navigator at St. Vincent’s Hospital she never would have been able make sense of everything, and her experiences, as well as hearing some other people’s horror stories, motivated her to start this organization.

Initially the organization focused on breast cancer specifically, she said, but they have since expanded to all kinds of cancer, providing education, patient navigation and culturally sensitive support for patients on the reservation.

Hawley said elders, especially men, have a lot of trouble asking for things, and she wants to be a bridge for them.

However, she said, one of the most vital services they provide is food, having distributed thousands of meals throughout the area since the pandemic began in 2020.

She said her organization coordinates closely with the Fort Belknap Commodity Program, which has been able to help store some of their food, along with the tribe’s forestry service, which lent some vehicles to their most recent distribution.

Many people they service are raising families and need a lot of support, Hawley said.

Fort Belknap is a food desert, she said, an area where people have to travel a significant distance to find places that can provide all of their nutritional needs, and that makes supporting families a more difficult task.

She said she’s met grandparents who are trying to support as many as 12 children, which would be a monumental task at the best of times, and these are not the best of times.

She said without a place to store food and a vehicle to distribute it, this job has become incredibly difficult, if not impossible, and, come winter, they are going to have even more problems getting this food to people in need.

“It’s just one problem after another,” Hawley said.

Even before this most recent disaster, doing these food distributions was not an easy task, she said as their warehouse already didn’t have a ramp adequate to effectively offload the semis they get their food from, which made for an incredibly energy-intensive job.

Now, she said, they don’t even have that, with the organization using space in the Fort Belknap Community Center filled with personal refrigerators donated to them to store their food, and she has no idea how they are going to offload the semis now, especially in winter.

“It’s going to be brutal,” she said.

She said there is always a possibility that they could get some grants or more direct assistance from the Montana Food Bank, but she hasn’t been able to sit down with them or the tribe to see what can be done.

Hawley said she coordinates with the tribe, and while they do lend support to her program, they are stretched thin.

She said she’s told the tribe how essential these services are and how desperately they are needed only to be told that the funding just isn’t there.

And, unfortunately, she said, they are right. The tribe just doesn’t have the resources to address all of the essential issues in the area and are often given the impossible task of deciding what gets priority, a position she doesn’t envy.

Hawley said her organization faces challenges all of the time, and she’s always managed to find a way through, but, this time, the situation is dire and the weight of trying to run this program has become incredibly heavy.

“I’m not going to lie, when my car broke down, I cried that night and just thought ‘what’s going to happen now?’” she said. “ ... I can’t do this job with nothing.”

The latest challenge, combined with months of logistical compilations has taken a toll, she said, and her frustration isn’t just with the immediate problems of her organization, but the fact that the needs they have to address have gotten to the point they have.

She said non-profits like hers are supposed to fill in the gaps left by community services, not replace them, but many people in the community rely on her program for something as fundamental as food.

Hawley said she dreams of creating a food bank that can help the entire region, but right now they can’t even cover all the needs of Fort Belknap.

She said so many large corporations are making tremendous profits while communities like hers feel like third-world countries sometimes.

People shouldn’t be going hungry in modern-day America, she said, but so many of them are and these corporations aren’t sharing their vast profits.

“We shouldn’t be living like this,” she said.

She said she’s hoping Hopa Mountain Executive Director Bonnie Sachatello-Sawyer may be able to help her find a grant and the tribe may yet be able to do something, but, in the meantime, she’s trying to raise $25,000 to buy a semi that can refrigerate food.

Unless they can get both the transportation and storage problems solved, she said, the winter food distributions are in serious danger.

“This is a really bad situation,” she said. “If we don’t have food, we have nothing.”

Despite all of this, Hawley said, she is trying to maintain optimism.

“I’m not going to give up,” she said. “There is always a solution, there always is.”

She said this week may bring some solutions and elections are coming up on the reservation, which might bring some change.

She said every time she’s seen major change in the community it has always come from the bottom up, from grassroots people, but elections can always change things for the better.

 

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