First Children’s Finance CI Report – Interim

What has been most instrumental to your progress?

The First Children First Nations Child Care Collaborative (FCFN) partnership has made tremendous progress in spite of the challenges and obstacles created by the COVID-19 pandemic. One aspect of our work instrumental in making progress was our strong internal partnership between Indigenous Visioning and First Children’s Finance. We remained in constant contact with each other throughout the year, meeting at least weekly, if not more often. Our joint recruitment identified two tribes interested in this project: the Fond du Lac Band and the Mille Lacs Band. FCFN worked with both tribes to identify and recruit two Indigenous Core Teams. FCFN worked separately with the two Indigenous Core Teams through monthly meetings. In between formal meetings, we collaborated to coordinate data collection, exploration of data, and reflection in order to fit the needs of the two Tribal Nations.

The FCFN partnership is unique. IV and FCF each bring specialized knowledge and experience to the collaboration in order to create a successful ‘process’ of child care capacity building and designed specifically for tribal communities. To our knowledge, no other process or initiative to build tribal child care in partnership with Native Nations has ever been undertaken. This context and knowledge helped FCFN focus on outreach and recruitment of stakeholders for the Mille Lacs Band and the Fond du Lac in this first year of the pilot. As unique as this partnership is, we are also learning how unique each tribe we work with is. We have remained open to altering our program design to reflect the values, ideas, and desires of each tribe.

Even though we are conducting this community-based process mainly via virtual means, FCFN appreciates deep engagement with tribal communities and partnership with the Indigenous Core Team. It has been inspiring to witness such dedication to the children and parents of their communities. Each Indigenous Core Team is also distinctive, made up of multiple programs, community representatives, both tribal and non-tribal stakeholders, and elected officials, like the Fond du Lac Tribal Council. Additionally, the Fond du Lac Band has an Internal Review Board process that grants permission for initiatives like ours. FCFN respectfully completed the IRB process and received a waiver as our process is not classified as a research project. This example highlights one of the FCFN values: deeply engaging with the communities and acknowledging and abiding by protocols set forth by communities.

Key lessons learned

FCFN has had to create our own data sources. Demographic data does not exist in the same way for the tribal communities we are working with when compared to working with states and counties. FCFN has learned that this occurs for many reasons: tribal boundaries overlap with county boundaries, service areas may not be linked to a geographic boundary, historical data collection efforts like the Census have not yielded representative data, and the tribal communities (for good reasons) protect their data. Lastly, we do know that some indigenous data does exist within state systems but the tribal and state information systems do not connect with each other.

FCFN is understanding how tribal systems differ from state and federal systems, and how different each tribal nation is from another. FCFN is dedicated in working with and within tribal communities and respect the tribal nation’s tribal sovereignty by abiding by all formal requirements. For example, in order to receive permission to work within the tribe and its citizens, FCFN was required to complete the Tribal IRB Process, before the Tribal Council would review our request and issue a formal resolution that agreed on the partnership with that tribe.

Reflections on inclusive, collaborative or resourceful problem-solving

Collaborative: Engagement of each Indigenous Core Team has been critical to the progress of this initiative. FCFN has positioned itself as a supportive partner as the Indigenous Core Team leads the work. Inclusion and adaptation are our guideposts in this work; we believe our ability to collaborate effectively with each Native Nation has built trust. Without authentic collaboration, our initiative would have stalled due to the pandemic. Although progress has been slowed from our original design, we are impressed with the level of engagement and progress from the Indigenous Core Team members.

Other key elements of Community Innovation

Adaptation and “indigenizing”: the two partners in FCFN share a deep, mutual respect for each other and the wisdom and knowledge that we bring to this work. We also appreciate the shared wisdom and knowledge that each community brings to this process. We have already identified differences in this process with Native Nations as compared to the process used with rural counties, which has led to adaptations and improvements. FCFN has been focused on adapting processes and activities to honor the culture, infrastructure, and desires of tribal communities. As a result, the FCFN model is much improved.

Understanding the problem

FCFN has learned about the dearth of data related to early care and education, demographics, workforce, and more in tribal communities. We thought that this might be the case but the absolute lack of information for communities to reflect upon has meant that we have had to generate the data in partnership with the Indigenous Core Team. The steps to indigenize data collection and analysis has been clarifying and has been an innovative aspect of this community engagement process.

If you could do it all over again…

We would tell our FCFN partnership to take the time that is necessary to build trust on multiple levels: with tribal councils, with the Indigenous Core Team, with the partners who might provide data insights, and more. This process has taken time and that has been completely aligned with what the communities in Mille Lacs and Fond du Lac have needed.

One last thought

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