Thanks to receiving our third Quality of Life Grant from the Christopher and Dana Reeve Foundation this year, we been able to continue to expand our injury prevention education program across the Navajo Reservation where preventable injuries and deaths are three times higher than the national average.
Our dedicated teams of paraplegic VIP (Voice for Injury Prevention) speakers and trained health educators travel great distances across Arizona, New Mexico & Utah to teach school children how to avoid preventable head and spinal cord Injuries and deaths. You can “meet” our ThinkFirst Navajo team here.
So far this year, we have already made 34 presentations to1900 students in K-12 grades. We will continue through the summer giving presentations to kids in summer camps, youth leadership groups, chapter houses and other venues on the Navajo Nation.
In addition to our Navajo VIPs sharing their powerful personal stories of how they became injured, we use an age-appropriate, science-based curriculum from ThinkFirst National Injury Prevention Foundation.
During all of our presentations, we emphasize the importance of wearing a safety helmet when riding a bike, a horse, or an ATV. Our health educators also use life-size brain and spinal cord models to show the children how much damage can be done if they don’t wear a helmet.
