77 Southwestern Oregon Community Projects To Benefit From Over $500k In Awards By The Coquille Tribe
NORTH BEND, Ore. — $509,976 in funding from Coquille Indian Tribe Community Funds awarded to 77 projects for 2024 was handed out at a celebration event that took place on February 1.
Attending in person, the recipients gratefully collected their awards at a reception held at The Mill Casino Hotel. The Community Fund was established to share the proceeds with organizations that benefit Southwestern Oregon and seeks to strengthen the community by improving opportunities and lives throughout the Coquille region. Funding from the Coquille Tribe will help organizations serving 5 Southwestern Oregon counties with projects in categories that include:
- Environmental
- Health
- Historic preservation
- Education
- Public safety
- Arts and Culture
Dana Mills of the Salmon Trout Enhancement Project at the Coquille High School Hatchery Project accepted their grant of $2,000 on behalf of the Coquille River STEP Association for their Cunningham Creek Hatchery. Mill confirmed that the funding will help revitalize a program that is meaningful to the students and the community.
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About The Coquille Indian Tribe
The Tribe celebrates its 35th year since being restored in 1989, inviting the crowd at the reception to join in a song whose name translates to “There Is Plenty.” Reflecting a cycle of blessing, the Coquille Tribe helps organizations that- in turn, help many of the community members in the five counties that are on land historically belonging to the Coquille.
Flourishing in over 750,000 acres in Oregon’s Southwestern corner for many thousands of years, the 19th-century influx of Europeans almost erased their people. Treaties were made, ceding their homeland, but these promises went unfulfilled, leaving their ancestral culture almost extinct. Congress declared the Coquille Tribe terminated in 1954, but they endured, and federal recognition was restored in 1989. Since then, they have been rebuilding their nation and now number over 1,100 members.
The over 10,000 acres of ancestral homeland regained is managed as a sustainable forest, and the Coquille provides health care, education assistance, housing assistance, and elder services where needed to their people, and contributes substantially to the economy of the surrounding community.
The mission of the Coquille Indian Tribe is “Honoring our people’s past. Building our community’s future.” Mills acknowledged that they are the stewards of the land and take their responsibility seriously. The amount of $509,976 awarded this year brings the total amount distributed by the fund since it was established in 2001 to around $8.7 million. More than one thousand grant projects have benefitted from the community fund.
Grant applications are accepted by The Tribal Fund in the fall of each year. More information is available from the fund administrator Julia Willis at 541-756-0904, ext. 1254, or on their website at www.coquilletribe.org.