Tribal Nations Research Group
Report date
December 2017
What has been most instrumental to your progress?
The greatest part of our work that has been instrumental in making progress toward our key objectives is the collaborations we helped established between the citizens of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians (TMBCI), Tribal Government and organizations/agencies within the county and at the state, regional and national level. The most important part of work is bringing people together to develop partnerships and to use these partnerships to address the serious needs of the TMBCI community. This aspect is important because our work relies on relationship building and developing partnerships that will foster growth for the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa.
One of the largest contributions to our community is creating and developing various community needs assessment surveys for TMBCI. These assessments provide valuable data about our community. Each of the projects required a community advisory board, thus increasing collaboration among partners. Throughout the project period we launched 3 major assessments. The first was an effort to determine needs in four major housing sites where community centers are being developed. The second is a community health assessment, this assessment provided information on the health status of the TMBCI. The third assessment is a food sovereignty project. The food sovereignty assessment provides key data on the food resources in the community, including access to healthy foods, traditional foods, and stability of the food system with the TMBCI community. These assessments have been instrumental in the development of the data center, the results will provide a set of baseline data that will help our leaders and community members move forward strategically.
Another great contribution to our community is the ability to provide guidance on data uses. TNRG is actually training individuals on how to use data to address critical areas of concern. We are officially changing the way decision makers are thinking and how they make decisions. TNRG is educating the American Indian community on the data needs and how to develop, test, and implement problem solving strategies to address the identified issues. Because of our work and the data, we collected, the citizens of TMBCI know more about the demographics of the community.
Key lessons learned
A key lessons learned is the need for transparency. Many times tribal leadership is left out of the equation and issues about the operation and the purpose are brought into question. Engaging in open conversations with the tribal leadership is one of the most important aspects in operating an organization such as TNRG. By being transparent, the tribal leadership ensues trust into our purpose and organization and endorses into our mission of becoming the centralized data center. Along with building trust with the tribal leadership, we also must build trust within our community. We have provided open houses, we held a data conference, we have a quarterly newsletter, we update our social media regularly, we have an active website, and TNRG makes every effort to be a part of other tribal ventures such as open houses, workshops, fairs, etc. We found that the more open our doors are to the community, the more they appreciate and trust what we do as an organization. Everywhere TNRG goes, our story follows, and more interest in our organization is gained, which makes us a trusted and reliable organization. This is not considered a failure by far, but we learned from our experience.
Tribal Communities often experience instability in their tribal governance and TMBCI is not immune to this issue. This past year TMBCI has experienced how a complete change in governance can impact a Tribal community. The challenges that came with a change in leadership required TNRG to reevaluate how we build relationships with new leaders. We realized that communication and community education were our greatest assets and we needed to use our experience to foster relationships with our new Tribal leadership. This has been a challenge because new leaders often enter office with an agenda of their own and that is fine but building upon previous work is also important. It has been a great challenge to thoughtfully guide our leaders in maintaining momentum with work conducted from previous tribal administrations.
Reflections on the community innovation process
It is difficult to choose just one of the elements that have been important in the innovation process; all three rely on each other. By being inclusive in our efforts we were able to make and grow partnerships with tribal, state, and federal organizations. This is extremely important because these organizations feed into our data center. Not only are they providing data, but they are willing to rely on TNRG for assistance in making their efforts stronger. For outside organizations this makes their initiative more effective and efficient, and for TMBCI, their efforts will provide benefit for the tribal citizens. By making the project inclusive the collaboration between these entities is strong and beneficial to the TMBCI community. TNRG advises the entities on how to properly communicate with their partners so that they can become effective in their efforts. With the inclusiveness and collaboration efforts of TMBCI and TNRG, the data center thus becomes more resourceful for all entities to be able to thrive and provide more opportunities for the TMBCI population. We cannot say one is more important than the other, they are equally important to the success of TNRG.
Progress toward an innovation
TNRG is one of its kind, there is no “status quo” approach to resolving data issues in tribal communities. Building this process has provided TNRG with even more clarity on the need for quality tribally driven data collection and analysis throughout American Indian communities across the country that is free from political involvement, and serves as a trusted source for data. We have made great progress toward this innovation. Our work is spreading throughout Indian Country. We have shown that we are capable of taking control in understanding community needs, developed a process to identify those needs and now are taking steps to develop, implement, and test strategies to address the needs. We have accomplished a lot in two years but there is still a lot more work that needs to be done. We need to train the community to continually use data to drive decision making efforts. More work needs to be done in planning and evaluation.
We are closer now because we have data that is specific to our community and that has been collected by ourselves. We have identified issues, and not developing strategies to address the issues.
We are closer now because we have data that is specific to our community and that has been collected by ourselves. We have identified issues, and not developing strategies to address the issues.
What it will take to reach an innovation?
Although we feel that we did reach an innovation we have not been able to complete the whole innovation process. We now need to help our community to use the data to address community needs. We need to complete the whole process from development of potential actions, programs, or technologies, and select the best for implementation.
What's next?
TNRG will guide community stakeholders through the process of using data to identify and understand areas of concern, then develop, test, and implement problem solving strategies to address identified issues. We coordinate discussions, meetings, and conduct focus groups with tribal leadership on the need for data, and when to use data for decision-making. We will build new data partnerships with other tribes and entities throughout ND, MN, SD; Develop a system of education and re-education about data and data driven decision-making that can be used for new tribal leaders or those who have changed their job or role in the community. Convene and facilitate meetings with the Food Sovereignty Coalition and additional stakeholders to develop strategic initiatives based on the results of the Food Sovereignty Assessment. Convene and facilitate meetings with the Community Health Coalitions and additional stakeholders to develop strategies to address the key areas of concern identified in the Community Health Assessment.
If you could do it all over again...
Going back to the beginning of the grant period, the advice that TNRG could give is to be patient. TNRG is very excited to see the end results of the hard work on this project, but we are still in the development stages and a lot more work needs to be done. Although we are seeing some fruits of our labor, the end result is still being developed. But, after this grant, ideas are starting to be made from data collected, the partnerships that have been created are more valuable than expected, and the work that has been done is starting to place TNRG on the map of greatness. To build a process at this level takes time and resources. Results are not always immediate so patience is important.