Nearly two dozen families living in the Navajo Nation have electricity for the first time because of the skillful work of volunteers with Electrical Workers Without Borders North America.

Since its founding by International President Edwin D. Hill in 2015, IBEW members have worked on EWWBNA projects in some of the poorest places in the world, including Haiti and Angola.

But a passport isn't necessary to find people who could benefit from the skills of our construction members.

For several weeks last autumn, volunteers with EWWBNA crossed the border into Navajo Nation — the largest reservation in the U.S., straddling the Four Corners region of the Southwest — to help right a terrible wrong right here at home.

Navajo Nation has thousands of homes that have never been connected to the power grid. Median household income is less than half that of the rest of the country, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

"We wired up the house for Jenny Cody, who first asked for a connection when her son was 7 years old. He came by while we were working. He's 48," said volunteer team leader Tom McCann, a general foreman and inside wireman with New York Local 3.

McCann and his team of five journeymen — Tashna Forest, Chris England, Timmy Howard, Jon Wilson and Doug DiMeo — stood up poles, installed a meter panel and connected the 100-amp service to, on average, two houses a day over their eight-day visit. For Cody, the house had no internal wiring at all, and the team took care of that, too.

Three other teams of about six volunteers from Local 3 rotated in and out of Navajo Nation two weeks at a time from September to October. Tools were donated by Milwaukee. EWWBNA paid for travel and per diem, and the Navajo Tribal Utility Authority provided food, housing, materials and plans, as well as a project manager and, where possible, apprentices to learn from the IBEW volunteers.

"We are a union that cares for all people," said EWWBNA Chairman Chris Erikson, who is also Local 3's business manager and chairs the International Executive Council. "We have great minds in this Brotherhood, but we have bigger hearts."

It wasn't the first time that IBEW electricians answered the desperate call for help in the Navajo Nation. In spring 2019, dozens of members from around the country headed there for phase one of a mammoth project known as Light Up Navajo. Working alongside the NTUA, they hooked up 233 homes over several weeks. Read more about this effort in the January 2020 Electrical Worker: https://bit.ly/4iv9jo9 .

When Erikson learned from NTUA General Manager Walter Haase that more than a third of the reservation's 45,000 homes are still not connected to the grid, he immediately saw an opportunity for EWWBNA.

"We are all about going deep and far foreign, but our bylaws allow us to do work in the U.S. where the need is great," Erikson said. "The decision to go to Navajo is that they are a sovereign nation and no kid in the United States should be doing homework by candlelight."

Because the homes are often so isolated — Navajo Nation is larger than 10 states and has only 140,000 residents — the cost to wire up the homes would be $40,000 to $50,000 each, Haase estimated.

"With substations, distribution and safely wiring up homes and trailers that were never designed to have electricity, it's nearly a billion-dollar problem," Haase said.

At the rate they were connecting houses, Haase said at the 2024 Membership Development Conference, it would take 50 years to connect everyone on the reservation. With the help of IBEW members, donations of tools from Milwaukee and — sometime in the future — grant money, his hope is to get that down to 15 to 20 years.

EWWBNA Executive Director Jim O'Leary hopes to quintuple the number of volunteers next spring and expand the call for volunteers coast to coast.

"We have projects in Angola, Peru and one in a refugee center in Sicily coming up, but this is a priority for us and will be for years," O'Leary said. "It will hopefully be bigger. We want at least 100 volunteers and more the following year. Our goal is to connect everyone who wants to be connected."