Spring Already Sprung and Summer’s Almost Gone!
Mitakuyapi Anpetu Was’te! Good Day My Relatives!
I am excited to share with you what the Pathfinder Center has been doing during these past two Seasons. Here you will find a recap of what your support and generous donations helped us accomplish.
We have some great news to share and could not have done it without you.
May 5th was National Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (MMIW) Awareness Day! Pathfinder Center, Project Safe Shelter, and the Crow Creek Waciyanpi Program partnered to hold an awareness walk to honor MMIW along with having an informative training session for the community. The training included Troy Morley, Assistant US Attorney from Pierre, SD, along with Chief of Police Yuma House, who spoke about the Dos and Don’ts when someone goes missing.
During this awareness event, we handed out roses to all the family members of MMIW in attendance, and our MMIW awareness and healing walk brought over 125 people together to recognize and honor MMIW. Each participant was given an MMIW t-shirt that was made possible through the generous donation of the Solidaire Foundation. Thank you Solidaire! We are grateful to all those who made this event a huge success.
We are grateful that one of our long-time dreams finally came true! The Pathfinder Center has been working on having solar power installed to help defray our electric costs. In early June, after a long wait, we were cleared by the state inspector and our solar panels are now installed. We are hoping this makes a big difference with our monthly electric bill. Wopida Tanka (huge thank you) to our funder, the contractors, and all who helped make this dream of going green a reality.
On June 16th, Pathfinder Center attended the Two Spirit Wacipi at the Sioux Falls Cultural Center. There we set up our awareness booth, handed out information, and visited with people who stopped by. We had a young woman stop at our booth and stress that she did not believe that sex trafficking existed in South Dakota, let alone Sioux Falls. This is proof that we still have a long way to go in educating our communities that human trafficking does happen in our state and providing education and awareness in our communities is the key to ending it.
Pathfinder Center was honored to provide human trafficking training at the Costello Properties Annual Convention on June 17th in Sioux Falls. Costello oversees approximately 4,000 affordable units within SD, NE, and WY. Over 100 participants attended our training on what human trafficking signs to look for when renting properties.
We are here to help. If you or you know of any organizations, groups, churches, youth groups, or schools’ first responders interested in sex trafficking training we have our training available on our website. And, we can bring our awareness booth to your upcoming event. The more people become aware and are educated about sex trafficking they will become aware of it, recognize it, speak up, and may prevent it from happening. But we must be consistent in providing sex trafficking training and awareness.
To see our training list or schedule our information booth click HERE. We have a contact form to use or email me at wiconi@midstatesd.net
