TAHLEQUAH, Okla. — Cherokee Nation Principal Chief Chuck Hoskin Jr. and Deputy Chief Bryan Warner announced a one-year pilot project to subsidize gym memberships for Cherokee Nation households at eligible non-profit facilities.
“The Public Health and Wellness Fund Act has created new opportunities to approach wellness in a more holistic way,” Chief Hoskin said. “The Public Health and Wellness ‘Fitness Partners Program,’ an idea suggested by Cherokee Councilor Danny Callison, will provide opportunities for hundreds of Cherokee families to access facilities to become healthier.”
The program commits $750,000 from the tribe’s Public Health and Wellness Fund Act to subsidize gym memberships for Cherokee Nation citizens at nonprofit gyms operating within Cherokee Nation and counties contiguous to it.
PHWFA utilizes a portion of the tribe’s third-party health program revenue funds to support public health and behavioral health programs. Nonprofit gyms participating in Fitness Partners may offer Cherokee Nation citizen households a 50% discount on one-year memberships over the next year, up to the limit of each gym’s subsidy.
The tribe’s Public Health department will evaluate the impact of the program on encouraging new memberships, maintaining current memberships and gym usage. Gym usage by participants will be required to maintain the subsidy.
“We are investing heavily in wellness facilities,” Deputy Chief Warner said. “Until we meet a goal of building a wellness facility within reach of every Cherokee citizen on the reservation, a program like Fitness Partner helps us extend our reach immediately.”
Cherokee Nation has identified 18 nonprofit gyms in the area in and around the tribe’s 7,000-square-mile reservation in northeast Oklahoma. Those gyms include the Pryor Creek Recreation Center, where the tribe began the first year of its pilot program last year supported by a portion of the tribe’s American Rescue Fund Act funding.
“I was excited when Chief Hoskin and Deputy Chief Warner brought legislation to the Council to build a new wellness facility in Stilwell, replace our aging Male Seminary Rec Center (Markoma) facility in Tahlequah and include a wellness center at the new Salina Health center,” said Councilman Callison. “We have also built wonderful wellness spaces in Kenwood and Marble City. What I asked Chief and Deputy to consider, though, was how to reach Cherokees who don’t have easy access to those facilities and that Pryor Rec Center was the perfect place to launch a new program for wellness access.”
Membership at the Pryor Creek Recreation Center has grown since the launch.
“This partnership is going well, the membership has grown considerably since we started and it’s created opportunities that we hoped it would,” Mike Moore, Director of the Pryor Creek Recreation Center, said. “Since the beginning of this partnership, the Cherokee citizen membership went from 250 to where it is today, which was 654 by the end of January.”
Darrian Kingfisher, 24, a Cherokee Nation citizen who is a member of the Pryor Creek Recreation Center and utilizes the pilot program, said this partnership gives Cherokee Nation citizens who don’t live close to a Cherokee Nation wellness center an opportunity for health and wellness.
Cherokee Nation is conducting outreach to eligible nonprofit gyms to explain the program rules over the course of the next few weeks, which will include an agreement enabling the gym to collect the subsidy and Cherokee Nation Public Health to collect data on the program’s effectiveness. Cherokee Nation will make a public announcement as gyms sign onto the program.
The tribe will evaluate the impact of the pilot Fitness Partners Program to determine whether to continue it in future years.
Nonprofit gyms in and around Cherokee Nation can reach out to learn more about the Fitness Partners Program by emailing