The Face of Philanthropy

Nonprofits Work to Bring Water to the Navajo Nation

By Emily Haynes

June 29, 2021

Nancy Bitsue, an elderly member of the Navajo Nation, receives her monthly water delivery in the town of Thoreau on June 06, 2019 in Thoreau, New Mexico. Due to disputed water rights and other factors, up to 40 percent of Navajo Nation households don’t have clean running water and are forced to rely on weekly and daily visits to water pumps. The problem for the Navajo Nation, a population of over 200,000 and the largest federally-recognized sovereign tribe in the U.S., is so significant that generations of families have never experienced indoor plumbing. Rising temperatures associated with global warming have worsened drought conditions on their lands over recent decades. The reservation consists of a 27,000-square-mile area of desert and high plains in New Mexico, southern Utah and Arizona. The Navajo Water Project, a nonprofit from the water advocacy group Dig Deep, has been working on Navajo lands in New Mexico since 2013 funding a mobile water delivery truck and digging and installing water tanks to individual homes.

For more than a year, public-health experts encouraged people to stay home, wear masks, and wash their hands. For the more than 2 million Americans who lack running water, that was no easy task. On the Navajo Nation, one in three families leaves home each day to refill the water supply. DigDeep, a national nonprofit that brings clean water to communities in need, launched the Navajo Water Project in 2014 to build wells, deliver drinking water, and install solar-powered 1,200-gallon cisterns to pump hot and cold drinking water into homes.

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The pandemic sharpened the project’s focus on dependable water delivery. Kaitlin Harris, a field engineer for DigDeep, says the message was simple: “Stay home. Be safe. We’ll come and fill up your water.”

The project has installed roughly 1,000 water storage tanks across the Navajo Nation, each of which holds 275 gallons and is refilled monthly at no cost to the homeowner. The goal is to provide storage for a month’s worth of water for a family of four — but Harris says families often need more.

Local government leaders and nonprofits, which have long advocated for water infrastructure, are the key to the project’s growing reach. One local nonprofit, St. Bonaventure Mission, has operated a 50-mile water delivery route for 20 years. When the Navajo Water Project installs a new cistern or storage tank on St. Bonaventure’s route, the nonprofit adds the home to the roughly 200 others it supplies.

“The idea is to develop that local capacity to be able to have a long-term, sustainable project in the area that we can eventually hand off to the project partner to fully run,” says Harris.

The Navajo Nation was hit hard by the pandemic last year but has since contained Covid-19 through vaccinations. Now the Navajo Water Project is planning a return to usual operations, only with greater ambitions — installing more cisterns and starting a pilot effort to bring toilets to homes that lack septic systems.