Q3 Grants Highlight Healing as a Key Condition of Justice

Of the many ways Q3 grantees advance justice, Mountain Shadow Association’s work on healing shows how families help make change happen.

Mountain Shadow Association (MSA) grew out of a grassroots effort to heal the cycle of intergenerational trauma, addressing past and ongoing injustices experienced by its community on the Crow Indian Reservation in Lodge Grass, MT. MSA focuses on a concept of restorative justice that supports its vision of transforming and restoring vitality to its community.

“We’re building a family healing center called Kaala’s Village,” says Megkian Doyle, executive director of MSA, a Native-led nonprofit.

“In the Crow language, kaala means grandma,” shares Doyle. “We chose that name because we discovered in our community conversations that grandma’s house is the place most of our community members say they feel safe.”

For MSA, restorative justice begins with healing.

Seven years ago, MSA started working to break generational cycles of trauma among Apsáalooke families from the ongoing impact of colonization and unfair policies. Plans for Kaala’s Village aim to keep families together and help them thrive. Its supportive services will help heal the effects of substance abuse and other historical and systemic barriers that create poverty, addiction, and family separation on the reservation.

The harm from injustice is a daily reality in Lodge Grass. More than 60 percent of its residents over the age of 14 are experiencing drug or alcohol addiction. Many (60 percent) of the community’s children are being raised by their grandparents.

“There’s a ton of healing we want to do around addiction and the harm it causes families. We try to take a community-wide view, a systems view, of that healing,” Doyle says. “Because people’s health—their wholeness, really—impacts everything they’re connected to.

”Holistic, systems-level healing is also needed to disrupt stark poverty, inadequate infrastructure, geographic isolation, and other ongoing consequences of colonization faced by the community of Lodge Grass. These are some of the factors that fuel the 20-year difference in life expectancy between Native peoples in Montana compared with their non-Native counterparts.

Kaala’s Village builds community-wide healing.

The Foundation’s Q3 grant for $250,000 will help MSA advance its vision for Kaala’s Village, which emphasizes healthy children, recovery, cultural reconnection, safety, and economic development. This includes:

SUPPORT FOR ADDICTION TREATEMENT: MSA plans to fund off-site addiction treatment at facilities with a culturally adapted approach, followed by on-site recovery support. Recovering parents will receive parenting, mental health, life skills, and other supports to help them heal and build healthy families.

CHILDCARE: The Little Chickadee Learning Lodge is a dual-generation center focused on kinship care and an Indigenous-informed early-learning pedagogy. In addition to safe, nurturing childcare, the center provides economic advancement job training for residents in early childhood teaching.

JOBS AND TRAINING: In addition to the childcare staff positions, MSA envisions that building Kaala’s Village will employ local residents, which will provide jobs, of course, but will also offer opportunities to build skills they can use to secure other jobs and to maintain and update their own homes and other local structures.

The 10,000-square-foot facility will be designed for and built on a 13-acre parcel of land in Lodge Grass. When it’s completed in 2026, Kaala’s Village will encompass housing for parenting couples in recovery; spaces for therapeutic, recreational, and cultural activities (e.g., equestrian stables, a community garden, nature trails, a teepee circle, a prayer loop, etc.); and a clinical healing center for counseling, treatment, and health care.

Kaala’s Village aims to be a catalyst for the community’s healthy future.

MSA envisions a profound transformation after 15 years of operating Kaala’s Village and its associated family-focused healing rooted in Apsáalooke culture. With the capacity to serve as many as 30 families a year, Kaala’s Village has the potential to transform Lodge Grass’s community of approximately 450 people.

The goal is for families to move out of Kaala’s Village with financial savings, a new home to go to, employable skills and education, and the ability to function as a healthy family unit. Leaving behind addiction and trauma, parents will teach their children patterns of wellness, self-empowerment, community engagement, and economic security.

That kind of long-term health and wellness will allow the families of Lodge Grass to thrive as they rebuild and proactively lead the community in which they want to live. Kaala’s Village is a big-picture strategy to change how systems operate through healing.

Racial, social, and economic justice remained central to Q3 grantmaking.

The grant to MSA was one of 27 grants we approved in Q3, totaling more than $5.9 million:

The Directors Council of Des Moines, IA: a three-year, $900,000 grant to fuel the One Economy initiative and One Economy Financial Development Corporation, both of which aim to eliminate racial, economic, and other disparities in African American communities of Des Moines. The Director’s Council is a longtime grantee partner, and we blogged about the group earlier this year.

Seattle-based Craft3: a two-year, $500,000 grant to further strengthen its equitable commercial lending efforts and culturally responsive business support for entrepreneurs of color. Craft3 is also a longtime grantee partner. See this profile we wrote on its work in 2022.

Request more information on our recent grantmaking and any of our work from Paul Bachleitner, communications director, at pbachleitner@nwaf.org.

Explore our recent posts that describe more about our work in Q3: