When I was a child, I would accompany my mother to local government meetings at the Oljato Chapter House in my home community of Monument Valley, Utah. There I would listen to my relatives talk about the issues facing the Navajo Nation. As I grew older and watched people leave our community in search of something better, I wondered why we did not have the resources to improve our environment—a way to make our home better instead of looking for a better home.

Then and now, the lack of infrastructure is a major barrier. Roughly 170,000 people are living on the Navajo Nation. Unemployment is consistently at 50 percent, and 38 percent of households are below the poverty line. Thirty percent of households do not have running water in their homes, 30 percent lack access to electricity, and only 4 percent have broadband access. More than three-quarters of households experience food insecurity. There are only 13 grocery stores across the entire Navajo Nation, which covers 27,000 square miles of land stretching into Arizona, Utah, and New Mexico. The systems that are in place simply do not allow our people to lead the lives they deserve and do not allow us prosperity on our own terms.

But we won’t get there simply by digging wells and building supermarkets or building roads to services in which we are only consumers without control. Instead, we must build a family-centered infrastructure—one which builds towards a society where families have autonomy over the trajectory of their lives.

Read the full article about family-centric infrastructure by Shandiin Herrera at The Aspen Institute.