Who we are
Johns Hopkins Center for Indigenous Health’s Fort Defiance site, located within the Navajo Nation, partners with local communities to deliver culture-centered public health programming, including the Family Spirit home-visiting program to support early childhood development and parenting.
Our Work with SPIRIT
We are implementing a 6 module (Prenatal Care, Infant Care, Toddler Care, Your Growning Child, My Family and Me, and Healthy Living) Family Spirit curriculum that consists of 65 lessons. We are now in the planning phase to bring a permanent playspace to our Fort Defiance, AZ community. This is a home visiting program so most visits are in the home, but a few do like to utilize our office space for lessons/visits. Our program also offers free transports to prenatal appointments & well child visits to our local health care facility. We also connect mothers to our local resources and help distribute items such as cribettes, car seats, booster seats, smoke/carbon dioxide alarms, and many other items as available.
What SPIRIT means to us
SPIRIT has allowed us to keep our families safe by helping us distribute and educate about smoke/CO alarms, carseats/booster seats, and cribette (playpens & bassinet) - a safe place for baby to sleep and play. It has helped us keep more mothers healthy during pregnancy & keeping children healthy and updated with their immunizations through our transport services. SPIRIT has allowed us to equip our mothers with the important education of taking care of herself, child/ren, and family the best way she can.
It was astounding to witness The global SPIRIT collective come to fruition as our Fort Defiance, AZ site was able to successfully transfer one of our families to another fellowship site in Flagstaff, AZ. The transfer was as smooth as could be because of unity. Also this global SPIRIT collective allowed us to share our challenges, successes, experience & knowledge with one another to guide us on how we can continue to help our families the best we can. The highlight for us is to see how we all know that we are FAMILY helping other families in our communities. The love and respect we have for one another radiates to the families we serve in our communities. Although, we maybe be miles and even countries apart, we are united.
We look forward to our very near future planned activities & our playspace for our community to utilize.