First Children’s Finance CI Report – Final

What has been most instrumenta to your progress?

Established relationship with Indigenous Core Teams: As we entered into 2022, the FCFN partnership had established relationships with both the Mille Lacs Indigenous Core Team and the Fond du Lac Indigenous Core Team. We spent 2021 supporting the establishing of the Indigenous Core Teams in each tribal community. This was critical for each community getting to understand FCFN partners and the community engagement process we had envisioned. It was equally as critical for the FCFN partnership to and for the FCFN partnership. In 2022, the FCFN partnership was able to have discussions about data, plan community events, present to stakeholders, and work with increased trust, ease, and intensity given the year’s worth of work we had accomplished collaboratively.

Building Internal Capacity: In our second year of the FCFN process, we began to develop our capacity and infrastructure to refine and replicate the FCFN process with more Tribes. FCF hired a Tribal Business Development Specialist and Tribal Sytems Coordinator to develop and expand our work with Tribes. This team has carefully documented the FCFN process and the learnings that have occurred in partnership with each Tribe we have worked with. We have collaborated with our partner IV/ANR to adjust our timeline (shortening some aspects while deepening others) and when we engage key decision makers. While we remain open to adjusting our process to meet the needs of each Tribe we partner with, documenting our process has allowed us to be more strategic, intentional and transparent in how we approach our work with Tribes and the ongoing process of improving it.

Engagement of elected Tribal leaders: having elected leaders as members of the core team or looped into the team’s progress provides critical oversight, access, and momentum to the FCFN process. In one dramatic case, a representative’s questions about how their Tribe’s CCDF dollars were being spent helped revive an FCFN process that had previously been stuck. Through their understanding of Tribal resources, including facilities, funding, and infrastructure, leadership also brings a critical perspective to the solutions development process, which leads to bold, transformative community action plans. We appreciate the engagement of elected leaders at each Tribe we are partnered with and will for this level of engagement in future recruiting processes.

Key lessons learned

As previously described, we have learned the importance of engaging with elected Tribal leaders early and often. Tribal child care administrators can have differing decision-making and fiscal authority. However, we have seen that when our primary relationship with a Tribe is exclusively at the child care program leader/administrator level, there is a significant risk that turnover, lack of time/capacity, or lack of authority will stall or limit the progress of the Indigenous Core Team. It’s our experience that not all Tribes have the capacity or interest in engaging elected leadership in child care – it can put more work, scrutiny and politics onto the plate of busy child care administrators. However, we believe for the FCFN process to result in transformative, lasting improvement in child care access, elected leaders must be involved. As a result of this learning, we have updated our process to consider elected engagement from the recruitment and onboarding stage. We are also preparing to develop tools to better engage elected leaders in the coming year.

The intention of the FCFN process is to build the capacity of Tribes to generate custom solutions to address their child care challenges and goals. FCF and IV/ANR do not offer cookie cutter solutions, instead FCFN is about determining each Tribe’s needs, values, and resources, and designing solutions that the community can sustain. This happens through brainstorming at community gatherings and the extensive community work of the Indigenous Core Team. At the same time, especially because child care is funded through federal programs with convoluted and changing regulations, we have learned it is necessary to provide the Core Team and broader community with increased expertise and examples from other Tribes to understand where opportunity for potential solutions exists. We see this as a careful balance – not being overly prescriptive while ensuring community changemakers feel informed and supported. In response to what we have learned in partnership with Tribes so far, we are developing a crosswalk that will enable Tribes to, if desired, paste sections of their Community Action plan directly into their federal CCDF plan, which will increase Tribes’ capacity to leverage available flex

Reflections on the community innovation process

The FCFN process closely follows the community innovation process diagram. We support Tribes in developing data on their child care needs and challenges as well as building awareness of the impact lack of child care is having on families, community, and the local economy. We gather an inclusive group of key voices within the Tribe’s child care system, government and community to walk through a collaborative solutions development process that leverages Tribal resources. We are now at the point of supporting Tribes as they implement these ideas which will generate learnings for future FCFN cycles with additional Tribes.

Inclusivity and Collaboration are critical elements for completing our work. The FCFN process is most effective when the Core Team includes a wide range of voices, including those most impacted by challenges in the current child care system and those most empowered to make changes in the current system–resulting in both bottom-up and top-down solution generation.

Other key elements of Community Innovation

Trust. Building trust has been foundational to our approach to FCFN. We have worked to maximize transparency so that when Tribes partner with us they know exactly what they are signing up for and what commitments we are making to them. We have embraced IRB reviews, data sharing agreements and Tribal Council approval as a critical component of trust building and necessary to engaging with Tribes on a deeper and more effective level.

Capacity. Working with program administrators and elected leaders at Tribes means working with people who are pulled in many directions. Navigating capacity limitations has challenged us and helped us innovate. We are upfront about the time commitment required by FCFN, have worked to streamline it, and, in future FCFN cycles, will compensate the time of the Core Team lead to facilitate their consistent participation in this process.

Progress toward an innovation

In indigenizing FCF’s successful Rural Child Care Innovation Project (RCCIP), we believe we have made a significant innovation. To our knowledge there are no equivalent programs that work with Tribes to collect and understand their child care system data and develop sustainable child care supply. Through this project, we confirmed that FCFN was a viable and effective program for Tribes. While we continue to refine our approach, we believe this is a process that could benefit additional Tribal Nations facing child care shortages. Our organization is working to build our capacity to offer these services to more Tribes.

What it will take to reach an innovation?

While we believe can FCFN spur innovative, transformative change for some Tribes, we recognize it may not be the right fit for all Tribes. FCF is working to build out a continuum of programs for Tribes at different points in the development of their child care systems. This includes learning opportunities and resources for Tribes that might not be ready for FCFN quite yet as well as offering the ECE Collaboratory for Tribal Nations for Tribes that are ready to jump into transformative, whole-of-government child care systems building approaches and innovations.

What’s next?

FCF and IV/ANR are continuing to develop the FCFN process, currently with support from the Blue Cross Blue Sheild Foundation of Minnesota. Over the next two years, we will provide implementation support to our current partners, interview elected Tribal leaders to learn more about their understanding, priorities, and needs to enhance their advocacy for child care, and partner with an additional Tribe that shares geography with Minnesota in the FCFN process. We are continuing to refine the FCFN approach, train and build our staff, and develop our internal processes and systems to offer FCFN and other child care supply-building technical assistance to more Tribes.
Yes Yes

If you could do it all over again…

A core component of the FCFN process is collecting and analyzing data on child care needs. This is important for generating awareness and political will as well as for developing data-driven, right-sized solutions. We expected there to be less data available for Tribes than counties or states but were surprised by the extent to which data was missing or inconsistent. Additionally, there are complex considerations for developing child care solutions for children who live on and off reservation and who are and are not tribally enrolled.

Two things we are doing that I wish we had done from the start: 1) entering into data sharing agreements with Tribes from the start so that we have access to all available data. We are a trusted partner with the IT infrastructure and staff training to follow the data security and data use policies that Tribes require. We have also built additional time into our process to formalize MOUs and other agreements with Tribes. 2) We are collaborating with data analysts on staff who have worked on other complex analysis projects using community, federal and Tribal datasets. In the coming year we will be working to expand and deepen our analysis for Tribes.