Date: Wednesday, October 14, 2026
Hello! We are Jemzi Ortiz, MS (Northern Cheyenne/Mexican) and Summer Chupco-Boyajian, MPH (Muscogee/Seminole/Cherokee). Jemzi is the Research & Evaluation Program Manager and Summer is the Youth & Family Services Evaluator in the Community Wellness Department at the Native American Health Center, based in the San Francisco Bay Area. The legacy of cultural resistance for Indigenous peoples and deep-rooted relationships that we have make us proud Bay area Urban Natives and sustain our motivation to serve our community.
Founded in 1972, NAHC aims to provide services to improve the health and wellbeing of American Indians, Alaska Natives and the surrounding communities with respect to cultural and linguistic differences. Within NAHC’s Community Wellness Department, our Data and Evaluation team evaluates and provides evidence on the culture-based and trauma informed programming, services and resources we provide. We do this by listening to our community on what matters to them using strength-based approaches while balancing federal, state and private funding evaluation metrics. Our most significant, prominent example of this is the implementation and evaluation of Gathering of Native Americans (GONA).
GONA is a multiday manualized community defined evidence practice that has been implemented since the 1990s. GONA is a culture-based program founded on themes of Belonging, Mastery, Interdependence, and Generosity, and it functions as a community needs assessment and intervention. At NAHC, we host an annual Youth GONA, hosted the first Elders GONA at our clinic this past year and are co-hosting a Two-Spirit GONA this fall with the Bay Area American Indian Two Spirits and Intertribal Friendship House.
To demonstrate GONA’s benefits to our youth’s overall wellness and mental health, our community said we needed to shift from deficit-based measures to strength-based measures that highlighted our connection to culture and were culturally appropriate.
Investing time in the relationships and understanding the lived experiences of our community members is integral to the mission of our research and evaluation practices. These discussions came from dedicated groups of community members who were compensated for their expertise and acknowledged for their contributions.
From these conversations, we found and adapted Dr. Snowshoe’s Cultural Connectedness Scale to be specific to our unique multitribal community. We know that connection to culture is important to our community and we have gathered the evidence to prove it is a social determinant of health. The Cultural Connectedness Scale allows us to capture data that proves culture is an important program objective and health-related outcome measure.
We digitized the CCS-CA as a tool for Cultural Health Practitioners to use in their practice to assess and develop cultural wellness plans.
In our work, the best tools to measure and evaluate success are made by, with, and for our community.
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