One of the crowning achievements of One Spirit has been building the Charging Buffalo Meat Processing Facility. This building not only provides jobs and food in an area with too little of both, it also helped mend a sacred circle by restoring the buffalo to prominence on the reservation. The buffalo house was creating jobs, feeding the Lakota, sustainably managing buffalo, and honoring and preserving Lakota heritage.
As 2024 ended and 2025 began, the meat house was in a good spot. It was providing food to the reservation as part of the commodities program and working toward full USDA certification. In January, however, the Trump administration froze a large number of federal programs, including the Local Food Purchase Assistance program, which promised millions of dollars to feed locally sourced, nutritious food to the Lakota people and to promote food sovereignty.
Now, people are going hungry due to the loss of local foods, jobs are being lost at the meat house, and there's no significant funding source to pay for the upgrades needed to meet the USDA's requirements.
We're asking donors to consider giving to One Spirit at this time to help us finish the work that we started with the Charging Buffalo Meat Processing Facility. We're close to our goal: we've built the structure of the expansion and even added electricity, but we still need money to add refrigeration, HVAC, and a rail line to finish the job.
We have an opportunity to preserve this critical infrastructure for the Lakota people, to help bring nutritious, healthy food to an area that desperately needs it, and to create economic opportunities in an area with some of the highest unemployment in the country. Please give to One Spirit and to the Charging Buffalo Meat House today.
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