Nominations for the 2019 Barbara Chester Award now open

The Hopi Foundation announced the opening of nominations for the 7th International Barbara Chester Award to Clinicians Treating Survivors of Torture and Abuse.

The award ceremony will be held Oct. 5, 2019, at the Moenkopi Legacy Inn on the Hopi Indian reservation in northeastern Arizona. To nominate a clinician for the award please visit http:// barbarachesteraward.org.

About the Barbara Chester Award

The Barbara Chester Award is the world’s first award recognizing clinicians and healing practitioners for their significant, and often dangerous, work with survivors of torture, abuse and its subsequent trauma. The award honors the life and work of the late Dr. Barbara Chester, who died in 1997.

As a pioneering clinician, she directed the first treatment program for torture survivors in the United States and treated indigenous refugees from Central and South America, as well as survivors from more than 50 countries.

In the late 1980s, she established the Hopi Sexual Abuse Prevention Project for Hopi communities. Her work stressed the role of culture in determining how an individual experienced torture trauma and what would be the best approach for recovery.

Since 2000, seven recipients have received the Barbara Chester Award.

An independent selection committee makes its choice from the nominations received in response to the call for nominations and the selected nominee receives a $10,000 cash prize and a Hopi handcrafted silver eagle feather sculpture made by master silversmith Floyd Lomakuyvaya, Bear Strap Clan and member of Shungopavi Village.

More information about past recipients or to submit a nomination is available by visiting http://barbarachesteraward.org.

The Hopi Foundation, founded in 1987, recognized the late Barbara’s fondness and connections to the Hopi and other indigenous people as she tied the Hopi spiritual worldview to her healing work with societies and individuals experiencing torture and intergenerational trauma. The Hopi Foundation mission of “Lomasumi’nangwtukwsiwmani” signifies a community process of furthering unity of aspiration that blossoms into full maturity over time.

“In conceiving the Barbara Chester Award, the Hopi Foundation chose to honor a deeply meaningful relationship with Dr. Barbara Chester who came to the Hopi communities as a healer and restorer,” says Monica Nuvamsa, executive director of the Hopi Foundation. “This award represents our community’s role to raise awareness and recognize those that give of themselves for the benefit of others, often times at grave personal risk.”

The Hopi Foundation is a 501(c) 3 nonprofit located on the Hopi reservation in northeastern Arizona with a vision of self-sufficiency, self-reliance, and local self-determination so that it engages in proactive participation toward our own destiny and a community. To learn more about the Hopi Foundation, visit www.hopifoundation.org.

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