The organization
The Rural Utah Project (RUP) empowers underrepresented voters in rural Utah through training, education, and issue advocacy. RUP’s Navajo Nation voter registration program provides addresses to Navajo Nation residents to aid in voter registration, emergency services, and mail delivery.
The challenge
The Navajo Nation, the largest Native American reservation in the United States, occupies a large but sparsely populated territory of 16 million acres. Few roads other than state highways are named or numbered, and virtually none of the houses are addressed.
A traditional street addressing approach would not work well in the territory. Some streets have local Navajo names as well as English-language names—adding to the addressing confusion.
The complexities of the unaddressed territory affects residents’ ability to access services. For example, residents couldn’t register to vote, they had trouble getting mail and also if students missed their daily school buses, teachers couldn’t drive to their homes to pick them up.
Many Navajo Nation voters were listed in incorrect voting precincts—a problem that could be solved with better addressing. In addition, RUP identified other services that could be improved through addressing:
- Better emergency services
- Targeted education services
- Home postal and package delivery
- Obtaining official IDs
How they did it
Plus Codes were an effective solution for the Navajo Nation because the codes work independently of house numbers and road names. RUP took the following steps to bring addressing to the area:
- Obtained buy-in from Navajo Nation officials in Utah and resolutions from Navajo Nation chapters.
- Secured relevant databases from counties.
- Conducted pre-field reconnaissance processes:
- Used building footprint database and satellite imagery to identify structures.
- Identified 5,500 addressable structures.
On receiving approval from reservation leaders to use Plus Codes, RUP hired local Navajo speakers to visit the thousands of identified structures on the Utah portion of the Navajo Nation.
The impact
The RUP team identified the addressable structures and assigned Plus Codes for the several thousand inhabited homes. Field staff subsequently returned to each home to give residents outdoor Plus Code address boards, fridge magnets, and wallet cards printed with Plus Codes to help with memorization of their unique addresses. Often times, field staff paid multiple visits to the households over the course of months to ensure the resident could be reached, understood the use of their Plus Code, and were able to install the Plus Code on their property.
Since the installation process began, Plus Code addresses have been used by the Navajo Nation residents for services such as emergency response and voter registration; they were also effectively used by relief organizations during the COVID-19 pandemic to distribute food. Rural Utah Project staff has seen first hand the impact that a physical address has had for residents of the Navajo Nation, as neighbors have called for help in times of crisis, used their Plus Code to direct friends to their home, and have had access to services that for far too long were out of reach.