The NATIVE Project

The NATIVE Project

Website: nativeproject.org

Founded: 1989

Location: Main Campus: 1803 W Maxwell, Spokane, WA 99201 | Children and Youth Services Center: 1907 W Maxwell, Spokane, WA 99201

Contact: Phone: Main Campus: (509) 483-7535 | Children and Youth Services Center: (509) 325-5502 | Behavioral Health: (509) 325-5502 | Pharmacy: (509) 483-4797

Hours: Monday - Friday: 8:00 am - 5:00 pm* | Saturday & Sunday: Closed

Doors open at 8:00 a.m. | Phones are turned on at 8:15 a.m. | *Closed daily 12:00 pm - 12:55 pm

Pharmacy Hours: Monday - Friday: 9:00 am - 5:00 pm* | *Closed daily 12 pm - 1 pm for lunch

Behavioral Health/Youth TX Hours: Monday - Friday: 8:00 am - 5:00 pm* | *Closed daily 12 pm - 1 pm for lunch

Administration Hours: Monday - Friday: 8:00 am - 5:00 pm* | *Closed daily 12 pm - 1 pm for lunch

About Us

NATIVE Project is a community health center that provides health and human services to its patients, while specializing in the care of Native people. We are a leader in the promotion of health improvement for urban American Indians and Alaska Natives, locally and regionally. We believe in Sacred Hospitality for all.

Our Mission

Our mission is to provide quality services that promote wellness and balance of mind, body, and spirit for individuals, staff, families, and communities. Focusing on “Sacred Hospitality,” we provide services for all people who are seeking medical, dental, behavioral health, or wellness and prevention services.

Our Vision

The NATIVE Project has a vision of the community that promotes balance and harmony in the pursuit of the following.

   Drug- and alcohol-free lifestyles
   Spiritual, cultural and traditional Native values
   Wellness and balance of mind, body and spirit for each person
   Respect and integration of all healing paths to wellness for self and others
   Lifestyles which encourage and are supportive of prosperity
   Education and awareness

By creating a circle of care using one team and one voice, individuals, staff, families and agencies will utilize skills, leadership, cultural and spiritual consciousness to give back to his or her community by living as WARRIORS, NURTURERS, SCHOLARS AND COMMUNITY ACTIVISTS.

Patient-Centered Care

Our philosophy for service delivery embraces patient-centered care. In short, our team commits to providing patient-centered care that includes physical, emotional, mental and spiritual wellness and healing through the practice of “Sacred Hospitality.”

Our philosophy has roots in the medical model of disease prevention, treatment and management that incorporates a solution-based recovery-oriented model of care. The recovery-oriented model includes drug- and alcohol-free lifestyles and uses evidence-based and promising practices to promote healing, wellness, and prevention in individuals, families, staff, and communities in the Spokane region.

You, the patient, are the most important part of patient-centered care. When you take an active role in your health and work closely with us, you can be sure that you’re getting the care you need. We develop culturally appropriate plans based on your age, gender, ethnicity, and life circumstances.

In our patient-centered care model, we

• Are available when you need us. You can communicate with us easily and make appointments quickly.
• Know you and your health history. We can suggest treatment options that make sense for you.
• Help you understand your condition(s) and how to take care of yourself.
• Help you coordinate your health needs. We will help you find specialists, make appointments, and make sure specialists have the information they need to care for you.
• Use technology. We share records within HIPPA to help prevent medical errors, ensure that we are always on the same page, and protect your privacy.
• Offer counseling support through an integrated care with behavioral health to protect your privacy.
• Offer prevention services through education, peer support, and mentorship.

Our Logo's Symbolism

The NATIVE Project’s logo has seven stones and four feathers, embracing generations.

From an Indian perspective, that’s what the seven stones are, thinking of seven generations ahead and the four feathers are four directions. If you’re really thinking about the future, it has to be about the kids.

~Toni Lodge, CEO

Our History

From our website:

We began as an organization that serves Native American youth in the city of Spokane, and we have expanded our care to include adult and elder Native Americans as well as other people of color and impoverished who need our services. Spokane is the eighth-largest urban Indian city in the United States (source: Indian Health Service). Spokane County has people from over 300 tribes that live here because of the 1950s federal relocation policy, where people came here from reservations to work in the mines, railroad, and Kaiser Aluminum. Urban Indians are indigenous people currently living away from federally defined tribal lands in urban areas (source: Seattle Indian Health Board). Today, 7 out of 10 American Indians and Alaska Natives live in urban settings. Urban Indians are often an overlooked population in society even though they represent the majority of American Indians and Alaska Natives throughout the country. Over the last century, Native people moved to, or were forced to relocate to, urban areas because of government policy, lack of economic opportunities, and limited access to healthcare and other services (source: Seattle Indian Health Board).

NATIVE Project is a true community-based, community-grown organization. We began in 1989 with $100 and provide services such as leadership camp, licensed adolescent substance use disorder treatment, mental health services for children and adolescents, and family counseling and education.

The NATIVE Project opened its medical facility in 1999. The NATIVE Project’s clinic is funded by Indian Health Services and the Health Resources and Services Administration. In 2011, the clinic became a federally qualified community health center, with services available to everyone, not just Native Americans.

While NATIVE Project’s area of expertise might be Indian Health, we are here to serve all. In 2018 alone we had 6,500 patients. This however created a problem, as the ideal capacity is 5,700 patients. The need is there for a new building, and one that has been constructed in 2024 and is ready to serve as we reach 2025. The Native Project's new youth center is a four-story, 15,000-square-foot building that will free up room to provide wellness, behavioral, and medical services at its existing health care clinic. The youth center will serve the BIPOC kids of Spokane, and its programs will be immersed in cultural humility for therapy, counseling, activities, and prevention education. Behavioral, cultural, and healing services and activities will be provided in both open group settings and private meeting rooms in the new building.

Each floor represents what the NATIVE Project teaches kids throughout their time here. The first floor is the turtle level for the youngest, followed by salmon on the second floor, bears on the third floor, and eagles on the fourth floor. The levels represent what we teach them in our leadership program: to become warriors, nurturers, scholars, and community activists. Those four levels are representative of the vibrance of medicine—the physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual.

The front of the youth center is a circular room lined with large windows and named the Cullooyah Center Circle. This space will be used for ceremonies, healing circles, art activities, and prevention programs. The Circle is named in remembrance for a Kalispel Tribal Elder, Francis Cullooyah, who believed in the future of our youth.

Mistreatment by Spokane Government

Spokane Regional Health District Board (Refusal for State-Mandated) Representation

Range Media has written a detailed overview of The NATIVE Project's attempts to serve Spokane County on our Spokane Regional Health District Board here.

The SRHD Board wields power over regional health policy. For example, once Covid vaccines were created, the board followed national guidelines of prioritizing recipients age 65+. This ignored their own SRHD equity data about populations whose life expectancy is lower, and who need to prioritize vaccinating elders age 50+. Those most impacted were — and continue to be — Spokane's Black and Native populations.

Dylan Dressler, the NATIVE Project's clinic director, applied for an empty seat on the SRHD Board in 2020, before vaccines were created yet. After she applied, the empty District 2 seat was revoked, and the person recalled their resignation.

In 2021, citing health discrepancies and a need for appropriate representation, Washington state passed a law requiring tribal representation on local public health boards. RCW 70.05.035 stated, in part,

If a federally recognized Indian tribe holds reservation, trust lands...within the county...the board of health must include a tribal representative.

Dressler applied to the SRHD Board again, but this time as a tribal representative for the NATIVE Project. RCW 70.05.035 allowed for this,

If a 501(c)(3) organization...that serves American Indian and Alaska Native people...within the county, the board of health must include a tribal representative.

As clinic director of a medical Native-serving 501(c)(3) in Spokane — during a global health crisis — Dressler's lived experience would provide insight on the board and save lives. The Kalispel Tribe of Indians also submitted a representative. But Spokane government refused to comply and kept the Tribal Representation seat vacant.

First, Spokane's Board of County Commissioners — then comprised of Al French, Josh Kerns, and Mary Kuney — refused Dressler's appointment due to having an alternate listed. In their rejection letter, they "find no legal authority for an alternate." Alternates attend when delegates, like Dressler, can't make a meeting. French, Kerns, and Kuney are all delegates themselves to boards — French and Kerns are delegates to the SRHD Board — and they specify alternates for themselves.

The BOCC letter also rejected Tribes and medical Tribal nonprofits each submitting their own respective representatives through the American Indian Health Commission of Washington (AIHCW). They claimed there was only a single board seat for all Tribes to share, emphasizing only the last part of the 2021 law, that they "must include a tribal representative."

More insidiously, while the BOCC and SRHD Board were denying state-mandated representation to the Indigenous Peoples of this land, Range Media's public records request for Tribal Representative applications was closed with zero documents. Spokane told Range there were not any applications or interest in the empty board seat.

Range Media, who had been in contact with Dressler and knew there was in fact an application, only received that information when they reopened their records request specifically citing Dressler's application. How many more applications have there been? We don't know because Spokane does not honestly share that public information unless the public already provides proof it exists.

In 2025, clarifying Spokane's failure to appoint adequate representation, Washington state passed a law (HB 1946) requiring local health boards include representation from each Tribe and medical Tribal nonprofit holding land/serving people within the county.

Commissioner Kerns said adding this representation would make the health board debates “more political.” Kerns was on the board when it fired Dr. Bob Lutz in 2020 at the height of the Covid pandemic. Currently, the board is composed of non-medical members who are not experts in public health. Their decisions do not prioritize the health and safety of Spokanites.

Dressler and The NATIVE Project in 2021, who were forced to work harder outside the SRHD, obtained and provided vaccines for vulnerable Spokane Native populations. At that time she said,

Our approach was very different because we know our community and we knew how that was going to impact us...We’re all in community together. We’re not separate from one another. When we make decisions on the [SRHD] board, it should be with consideration of marginalized communities, disenfranchised communities, unhoused communities — people that really are at the highest risk of dying from epidemics and pandemics.

The SRHD Board was supposed to comply with the increased Tribal Representation seats by July 2025. As of 10 September 2025 Spokane continues to have no tribal representation on our local health board.

Spokane's Lack of Covid-19 Vaccine Distribution

Then president of the Spokane NAACP request Kiantha Duncan said, “In communities of color, our lifespan for us is shorter; elderly for us is in their 50s.” The NATIVE Project clinic director Dylan Dressler made the same case for advanced vaccination priority saying, “Our elders are 50 or 55 and up. They’re not 65. We don’t live that long. When we don’t have elders, we don’t have culture.”

The Spokane Regional Health District Board is the entity that controls vaccine recommendations and distribution locally. Despite their own data agreeing with experts Duncan and Dressler — life expectancy in Spokane varies greatly by neighborhood/ethnicity — the SRHD Board refused to prioritize elders of color and instead followed national guidelines to prioritize people age 65+.

This refusal by the Spokane Regional Health District Board to enact policies that appropriately consider ALL Spokane citizens — and specifically the peoples who have lived on this land since time immemorial — leads to increased mortality rates and worse health outcomes. It is only through the hard work, determination, and community outreach efforts by the NATIVE Project and others that so many vulnerable populations were able to access healthcare.

In Community

Covid-19 Vaccine Distribution

The NATIVE Project closely monitored anticipated vaccines and bought a super-cold freezer in advance of completion. Because the Spokane Regional Health District board refused to appropriately prioritize and share vaccines, the NATIVE Project asked the American Indian Health Coalition of Washington and the Washington State Department of Health to be on the vaccine distribution list — to then distribute locally as they saw fit.

The NATIVE Project worked collaboratively to vaccine more vulnerable Spokane populations.

NATIVE Project Founder and CEO Toni Lodge informed the NAACP, Latinos en Spokane, the Asian Pacific Islander Coalition, and more local organizations about the NATIVE Project's appropriately prioritized vaccine and staff availability, every third Saturday since December 2021. Each org in turn reached their local, vulnerable populations to advertise the effectiveness of vaccines, the NATIVE Project's safe environment, and the date their group had secured for vaccine distribution.

Per the Spokesman Review,

Ryann Louie with the Asian Pacific Islander Coalition [now Asians for Collective Liberation Spokane] recalled going to restaurants and businesses, reaching out to friends and acquaintances and getting translators to come help on a Saturday. Louie and the APIC team did three to four weeks of outreach before their clinic, ensuring they could get food donated and offer people resources when they came to get a shot.

Latinos en Spokane began hosting webinars with bilingual doctors in anticipation of the community clinics. The organization’s comadres (outreach volunteers) made phone call after phone call, inviting people to the clinic.

The NAACP used social media and advertised through the Carl Maxey Center, and team members made a lot of phone calls out to households in anticipation of their clinics.

Every three weeks, from January to mid-June, there was a community clinic at the NATIVE Project. Each community organization had specific dates for their clinics, so culturally appropriate food, entertainment and translation was available. The turnout was so staggering that some days, they had to turn people away when they ran out of doses...The NATIVE Project allowed each community group to tailor their vaccine clinic to what their community needed most. Latinos en Spokane brought in El Mercadito, the free farmer’s market, for their vaccine clinics. Translators and a welcome environment, free of doctors asking for insurance or potentially intimidating police or National Guardsmen, were vital.

Then NAACP President Kiantha Duncan said,

I think the partnership was lifesaving, and I do not say that lightly. There were people and seniors from some of the local Black churches who came to get their vaccination, and they definitely would not have gone somewhere else to get it, so I think it was lifesaving for people of color in this city...What it showed and proved is: We’re capable of taking care of ourselves when we’re given the resources to do so.

Latinos en Spokane executive director Jennyfer Mesa said,

When you don’t have the language skills and don’t know the people there, it’s not a safe environment. The NATIVE Project inverted the whole narrative, creating a welcome and safe space where Latinx community members were not worried about being turned away or not having access to a doctor to ask questions.