Eve’s Fund president Barbara Crowell Roy and founder Dr. Robert Crowell (standing) and ThinkFirst Navajo VIP (Voice for Injury Prevention) speaker Cecelia Fred
Eve’s Fund is proud to announce that its flagship program — ThinkFirst Navajo — has been named the 2015 USA Chapter of the Year by ThinkFirst National Injury Prevention Foundation (TFNIPF), a nonprofit organization dedicated to preventing brain, spinal cord, and other traumatic injuries through education, research, and advocacy.
TFNIPF has 190 chapters throughout the United States and around the world. Of these, ThinkFirst Navajo is the only one that operates exclusively on a federally recognized Native American Indian reservation, an area where injury rates are three times the national average.
“ThinkFirst Navajo was selected to receive the Chapter of the Year award because its programs meet each of the three core elements of the ThinkFirst mission: education, research, and advocacy,” said TFNIPF 2015 Awards Committee Co-Chair Michelle Gibler, Ph.D. “Members of the ThinkFirst Navajo team travel thousands of miles across three states to deliver injury prevention education to the people of the Navajo Nation.”
ThinkFirst Navajo is one of the most active ThinkFirst chapters in the country. Since the program was started by Eve’s Fund in late 2005, its VIP (Voices for Injury Prevention) speakers — all adult Navajos with paraplegia — have educated more than 35,000 Navajo school children on the Navajo Nation about injury prevention and distributed hundreds of safety helmets.
In addition to providing culturally sensitive, free education to schools on the Navajo Nation, ThinkFirst Navajo also provides additional peer mentoring, support, and training to the program’s VIP speakers.
“We are so grateful to ThinkFirst National Injury Prevention Foundation for recognizing the value of the work we are doing, not only in teaching young Native Americans how to use their minds to protect their bodies, but in advocating for disability rights and improving the quality of life of our VIPs,” said Barbara Crowell Roy, president of Eve’s Fund.
Crowell Roy and Eve’s Fund Chairman Dr. Robert M. Crowell received the Chapter of the Year award on May 2 during the 2015 ThinkFirst Conference on Injury Prevention, held May 1-4 in Washington, DC. They were joined by one of ThinkFirst Navajo’s VIP Speakers, Cecelia Fred, who was also one of the conference presenters.
If you live on or near the Navajo Nation and would like to schedule a free injury prevention workshop at a school, chapter house or other event, please contact us here.
