By Steven & Alexandra Cohen Foundation
The Steven & Alexandra Cohen Foundation is pleased to welcome DigDeep to our Grantee Blog. DigDeep is a human rights nonprofit working to ensure every person in the United States has access to clean, running water and safe sanitation at home. Through its Navajo Water Project, DigDeep brings hot and cold running water to homes on the Navajo Nation that are not connected to piped water or sewer lines through a community-managed utility alternative.
Courtesy of DigDeep
DigDeep began with a single family in Thoreau, New Mexico. Like tens of thousands of others across the Navajo Nation, their home had no running water. They hauled heavy tanks for everything: drinking, cooking, bathing. Every gallon had to be rationed against the next mile-long trip to refill.
DigDeep’s mission is to ensure that every person in the United States has access to clean, running water and sanitation at home. We worked with that family to get water running into theirs. From the first moment that faucet turned on, we knew we had embarked on something more.
“Every tap we turn on is a promise kept to our community.”
– Cindy Howe, Navajo Water Project Director
That single promise grew into the Navajo Water Project, a movement that now serves thousands of families across the Navajo Nation, stretching more than 27,000 square miles across Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah. From the start, we knew that addressing an issue that had impacted families for generations would require more than infrastructure. It would require putting the community at the center of everything we built.
The Navajo Water Project is Indigenous-led and Indigenous-staffed, guided by local leadership and grounded in long-term relationships with the families and chapters we serve. To date, we’ve brought clean water, sanitation, or WASH (water, sanitation and hygiene) support services to more than 3,500 households across the Navajo Nation. Our flagship DigDeep Home Water System, for clients who live beyond traditional infrastructure, delivers 1,200 gallons of hot and cold running water to a single home, runs on solar power, and is engineered to withstand the region’s climate and terrain. Our partnership with Navajo Technical University also created the Navajo Nation’s first plumbing certificate program, a workforce initiative opening new pathways for closing the water access gap.
Today, approximately 30% of residents of the Navajo Nation still live without running water or basic plumbing in their homes. While the community continues to show incredible resilience in face of their struggle for water – going to work, getting children to school, and maintaining their physical and emotional health – they simply shouldn’t have to. Clean, running water should be a basic human right.
The impact of water access is transformative. It changes a life forever. It doesn’t just improve health and hygiene; it creates time and space for families to focus on their futures. At DigDeep, our belief in clean, running water as a human right drives everything we do; with it, the innovative work of our incredible team, and the heart of our communities, we hope to close the water gap, once and for all.
About DigDeep
DigDeep is a human rights nonprofit working to ensure every person in the United States has access to clean running water and sanitation at home. The organization has served thousands of families across the country through its award-winning and community-led field projects: the Navajo Water Project (Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah), Appalachia Water Project (West Virginia and Kentucky), and Colonias Water Project (Texas). DigDeep is a leading force in U.S. water access research and policy advocacy underscoring its commitment to addressing the sector’s lack of comprehensive data.
Learn more about DigDeep and the Navajo Water Project at digdeep.org.