Thunder Valley Community Development Corporation

This project strengthens organizational infrastructure to sustain and grow programming rooted in Lakota values, ensuring long-term capacity to support community priorities in land stewardship, youth leadership, and cultural revitalization across homelands.

Our Lakota Language & Education Initiative is a multifaceted and multigenerational effort that aims at reclaiming, restoring and revitalizing our Lakota language and lifeways. Our programming ranges from serving children as young as 18 months in our "language-nest" style Lakota Immersion Montessori classrooms, working alongside adults and young adults to learn, speak and empower through our language, preserving our language by recording our elders and providing youth activities in our language.

This project will increase the organizational capacity of the Food Sovereignty Initiative to create job opportunities through the creation of our composting program which will initially focus on training, certifications and composting site construction.

The project purpose will be to increase the scope of the existing Thunder Valley Montessori program to include a new cohort of students and caregivers, leverage existing resources in curriculum development and expand community awareness of the immersion program across the reservation.

The requested grant funds purchase two coolers and one commercial freezer for the Food Sovereignty Initiative, to enhance education and sustainability outreach efforts. The coolers will be used for eggs from the poultry program, as well as vegetables from the model farm program, the freezer will store bison meat.

The purpose of the proposed project is to enhance our current effort to design and create an authentic Lakota language curriculum for our Lakota Montessori, Learners, and families.

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COVID-19 Response

The purpose of the proposed project is to build our internal capacity and increase our knowledge base in the following areas: Lakota language fluency, teacher education, and the best practices in indigenous language revitalization.

This program will increase knowledge of healthy local foods and traditional Lakota foods by utilizing the Sustainable Agriculture Education Center, Food Sovereignty Curriculum, and Lakota Food Knowledge program. Through providing hands on opportunities we will increase access to healthy local foods and encourage community members to take advantage of it.

The ultimate purpose is to utilize local community knowledge to increase traditional food education for community members. This project will help us retain and leverage local knowledge of traditional foods to increase the consumption of healthy foods across our community.

The ultimate purpose is to 1) retain the Lakota language for future generations, keeping alive ehaŋni Lakȟol wičhouŋ and significantly increasing the number of tribal youth familiar with or fluent in the language, increasing the relevance of Lakota language and culture in every day life and activities 2) increase youth's understanding of healthy lifeways and physical activity in order to combat the prevalence of negative health indicators on the reservation, including obesity, diabetes and low self-esteem 3) utilize and build the leadership skills of our high school students, creating meaningful interactions and cultural teaching between age groups.

The ultimate purpose of this project is to increase economic opportunity on the Pine Ridge Reservation through ag economy, and continue to create a food system on the Pine Ridge Reservation. We will do this by leveraging our small demonstration farm by implementing a farmers market and begin to create value added products.

The ultimate purpose of this project is to 1. Create and design the Empowerment Center of the Regenerative Community. 2. Increase innovation and entrepreneurship among local artists through creative placemaking. 3. Utilize local artists to design essential elements of the community while increasing their professional development and capacity to run their own businesses.

The ultimate purpose is to 1)Increase Lakota leaders in our community by connected young people to Lakota culture, and 2)Leverage this project with our Workforce Development Program to have a more holistic well rounded program for young people in the workforce program, further connecting them to our community while 3)Creating an environment that encourages identity development through spirituality and culture.

The ultimate purpose of our project is to (1) restore control our Native food system in order to experience improved health, environmental, and economic benefits in our community; (2) increase access to fresh, healthy, and traditional Lakota foods; (3) leverage community assets including our tribal elders, partners, and other stakeholders to help to improve our community's understanding of nutrition and healthy lifestyles; and (4) create capacity building opportunities to enable aspiring local food producers to replicate Thunder Valley CDC's demonstration farm in other locations across the reservation.