Reimagining Our Learning, Research, and Evaluation to Create Transformational Change

Reimagining Our Learning, Research, and Evaluation to Create Transformational Change

Our Vision, Values, and Grounding

June 2023

Visual Story

In the center of our image is a drum. This drum represents and centers the collective voice of our many Tribes and communities, which all use the drum in some way, and for whom the drum symbolizes the heartbeat of our mother/grandmother earth. At the center of the drum is the College Fund’s ‘Flame of Hope,’ which represents our mission of hope and transformation through education. Encircling the flame of hope are people: the Native students and communities we empower through education and whose sovereignty we honor. Woven into the image is the intergenerational sense of being and responsibility we share. There is a strong connection between the earth and the sky reflective of our understanding that what we do here on earth is connected to the spiritual world, of the present, and of our ancestors. Our image shows the interconnectedness of all things. A woman sun figure casts a nurturing gaze towards the drum, her hands with mountain-like features lifting, empowering, and supporting the growth of corn and tobacco, crops that provide nourishing food and medicine to our peoples. Smoke and stars represent prayers and ancestors being lifted skyward by the songs of the drum. The circular style of the whole image represents the intergenerational, holistic, and cyclical nature of our learning and evaluation approach, and how we place Native voice, choice, and visibility at the center. The watercolor evokes the key role water plays in nourishing life. The watercolor also evokes the resonance of learning and evaluation as practices that make ripples across our interconnected communities and generations, inspiring storytelling, reflection, and adaptation so that we can be good relatives to each other, the land, and all beings.

Purpose

The College Fund engages in inquiry research, evaluation, and learning to not only understand the outcomes and impacts of our work, but to become better relatives, and uphold our responsibilities and accountabilities as a nonprofit organization. This document shares our vision and values for the next generation of our inquiry-based work.

The purpose of this document is to describe our vision for how we as the College Fund understand strategic research, learning, and evaluation as a Native-led and Native-serving organization: why we do it, who it is for, and what values should guide it. This document describes the five Indigenous values – the core beliefs – that we have collectively defined and that will guide us in this work and shape our research, learning, and evaluation practices at the organizational and programmatic scales across the organization. This vision and its values also provide a strengths-based grounding for our work.

As the College Fund has grown and changed, especially in the last decade, it is time for us to intentionally revisit our methods of inquiry and come together to create a collective and cohesive vision for why we engage in research, evaluation, and learning so that these practices continue to be transformational. This project

responds to a directive from our President & CEO, Cheryl Crazy Bull, which is also written into our strategic plan, which calls on us to become a learning organization so we can tell stories about our work in more innovative and effective ways. Non-profit organizations that engage in and prioritize learning from data, insights, and experience can more effectively adapt to changing conditions, advance their mission, and support their partners. As an intentional learning organization, we can be even more effective in our work to strengthen TCUs, support Native students, and ensure Native communities thrive.

Grounding Statement

At the American Indian College Fund, we honor that Tribal communities have always had their own ways of knowing that are deeply rooted in tradition and reciprocal relationships with the land. Through 500+ years of colonization and attempted genocide, these ways of knowing have been undermined, disrespected, and displaced. But they are neither lost nor forgotten. The American Indian College Fund’s vision for its inquiry-based practices – research, learning, and evaluation - is one of healing, regeneration, and prosperity for our TCUs, Native students, and Native communities. In this way, we use research, learning, and evaluation to contribute to systemic, long-term, community-led, and transformational empowerment among TCUs, Native students, and Native communities.

We also honor and weave into our work deliberate engagement with allies whose knowledge benefits how we want to conduct research, evaluation, and learning and accomplish our goals for our communities.

Learning and Evaluation Vision Statement

Everything we do at the American Indian College Fund, including learning, research, and evaluation, is interwoven with community and our relatives – past, present, and future. We believe our relational accountabilities in learning and evaluation spaces are not just to ourselves and funders or donors but are centered in our greater responsibility to generations that come before and after our own. Evaluation for evaluation’s sake is not our goal – rather, we do this work to give back something valuable and practical to the communities we serve through the practice of learning, a longstanding Indigenous way of knowing. In this way, our evaluation work is not just a means to learn about outcomes and impacts, but also an opportunity to become better relatives to one another, to the land, and to generations past and future. Evaluation at the College Fund is working with Tribal communities to learn and hold space for the stories, dreams, and needs of the Native students, Tribal Colleges and Universities, and Native communities we support while upholding our responsibilities and accountabilities as a non-profit organization.

Learning and Evaluation Core Values

We have collectively defined five Indigenous values - or core beliefs - to guide us in our learning and evaluation work and anchor our learning and evaluation practices at the College Fund. These values are reflected in our vision statement and in the learning and evaluation visual that represents our approach.

5 Core Values:

 Intergenerational Sense of Being and Responsibility

 Native Community Empowerment and Visibility

 Sovereignty

 Honoring Diverse Native Voices and Experiences To Guide Us

 Being a Good Relative to People and Place

Intergenerational Sense of Being and Responsibility

- All the work we do affects many generations of learners, and we strive to build networks of support that extend beyond just one generation. This enables our relatives to make their own strategic decisions with long-term priorities in mind.

Native Community Empowerment and Visibility

- Our people and communities have survived 500+ years of colonization, attempted genocide, and erasure. Learning and evaluation practices at the College Fund must not perpetuate the same strategies and tactics that have been used historically and contemporarily and have rendered us invisible. In this way, our learning and evaluation principles and practices empower and lift up our relatives with voice and choice. Empowering voice, like lifting up a drum song, means we strive to create learning and evaluation spaces where our relatives can show up, share, and reflect in ways that are authentic and meaningful for them . Empowering choice means that we always center our relatives’ sovereign and inherent rights throughout all aspects of learning and evaluation, including the choice to participate (or not), the choice of how data is collected, and the choice of what findings and conclusions are shared.

Sovereignty

- Honoring and upholding sovereignty through research, evaluation, and learning is integral to what we do. At the College Fund, we hold ourselves to the highest standards: those set by Native peoples and communities we serve. Our research, evaluation, and learning centers the needs and inherent

sovereignty of Native people and communities and belongs to them. The College Fund actively invites the communities we support – Native scholars, tribal college staff and faculty, tribal leaders, and community members - to be part of and drive our work. Sovereignty is as much about self-determination of Tribal Nations as it is about self-expression by our Native relatives.

Honoring Diverse Native Voices and Experiences To Guide Us

- The College Fund staff and the communities we serve come from diverse backgrounds and bring with them teachings from their own communities. At the College Fund, we embrace these ways of knowing and being in the world. We honor the world views, philosophies, and traditions of one another and hold space for many forms of knowledge in our work. We have a responsibility to caretake knowledge and those who share it with us, no matter what form it takes. As Native peoples and allies, we understand that our lived experiences provide context and guidance for the work we do. At the intersection of our lived experience sits traditional knowledge (from origin stories, clan stories), empirical knowledge (from observations), revealed knowledge (that which emerges through ceremony, visions, dreams), and felt knowledge (knowledge located in affect, emotion, feeling). These are all crucial to holistically understanding, learning, and nurturing the contexts in which we work and the Native people with whom we partner.

Being a Good Relative to People and Place

- At the College Fund, we recognize that our work requires and impacts many relationships, including our human and more-than-human relatives (those of roots, of wings, of two-leggeds, of four-leggeds, and of water). We consider interconnectedness and consequences for the whole collective in our work, rather than focusing solely on humans, individuals, or one generation. As Vine Deloria Jr. once said: “Traditional education gives us an orientation to the world around us, particularly the people around us, so that we know who we are and have confidence when we do things. Traditional knowledge enables us to see our place and our responsibility within the movement of history.”

Creation Story

Native people have creation stories that describe the origins of the world Our learning and evaluation vision has a story behind its coming-into-being. Our vision emerged through a highly relational and participatory engagement process with our leadership, Board, and staff It reflects their knowledge, values, and insights From June 2022 to June 2023, our staff, leadership, and Board members – over one third of whom are Native American - participated in focus groups, discussions, workshops, and on project advisory boards to share ideas about learning and evaluation to shape this vision statement and the accompanying visual. Our vision maps out the philosophy and values guiding the College Fund’s broader research, learning, and evaluation strategy.

Our vision statement represents what strategic learning means to us as an organization that is Native led, Native-serving, and, most importantly, in kinship to Native communities It is grounded in Indigenous ways of knowing and being and centers us as caretakers of Native knowledge. At many points in this project, we purposefully and intentionally prioritized and privileged knowledge and insights from our Native staff and leadership to honor who we are and who we support Our learning and evaluation vision is accompanied and amplified by a visual, which reflects and illustrates the five central learning and evaluation values described in our vision statement and draws on Native symbols and teachings

We recognize several key concepts in Native languages to help us walk together in a good way as we do this work Teaching and learning in Tribal Nations is guided by intergenerational observation, storytelling, and evaluation. All Tribal communities incorporate these processes. To learn or to gain knowledge (“Íhooƚ’ aah" -Dine) allows us to be in relationship with all things ("Mitakuye Oyasin"-Lakota). The process of learning ("Kkendaswen"- Potawotami) is balanced by the process of teaching ("Nunipuniku"-Comanche) co-creating wisdom, knowledge, and experience.

Statement About Co-Creating Our Visual

The image on the cover of this strategy document – our learning and evaluation visual - amplifies our vision statement and illustrates our five learning and evaluation values in a culturally resonant and respectful way. It was collectively co-created by American Indian College Fund staff and a visual artist, Jerry Chapa. In April and May 2023, Jerry Chapa hosted a series of three workshops with a six-member Native staff advisory board at the College Fund. Native staff advisory board members were asked to identify images that came to mind as salient representations of the organization’s five core learning and evaluation values and discuss why those images resonated for

them. The team described the following imagery for each learning and evaluation value:

Intergenerational: ripples in water, tobacco as a sacred gift signaling respect, the sky and the earth (the above and below) symbolizing the connectedness between all things and across generations, honoring long-term perspectives, stars representing our ancestors and wisdom, cycles and movement

Empowerment and Visibility: Native voice and choice, centering the well-being of Native students and community especially through education, nurturing and uplifting.

Sovereignty: Native people and the land at the center, mountains as symbolic of the land, the land as part of self-determination, belonging tied to place.

Diverse Voices: a mother figure embracing the world, drums as culturally resonant images across Tribal Nations whose drumbeats bring diverse knowledge and experience into one place and then return that knowledge and experience through the drumbeat

Good Relative: interconnectedness of all things (plants, animals, people, water), sacred plants that flourish and are good medicine that nourish Native peoples, roots that ground us and our culture in place, the sun as a source of healing light, lifegiving heat for growth, and abundance.

The team aspired to create a visual that felt whole, directional, and had multiple points of entry. The final image that emerged brings together these visual elements into a story about our learning and evaluation approach and is representative of many Native voices, cultures, and customs.

Addendum: Definitions

At the American Indian College Fund, research, evaluation, and learning are interwoven strands of our organizational learning practice and grounded in Indigenous ways of knowing and being in the world.

 Learning – Learning is the broader practice that anchors our research and evaluation work. Learning means honoring and applying multiple types of knowledge - evaluation insights, program learnings, and staff experiences - to reflect on our work and inform programming and organizational strategy. Learning is an inquiry-based practice and an important part of being an adaptive and data-driven non-profit organization. It is also a longstanding Indigenous practice. Learning is an active coming-to-know process that is part of the way Native peoples have always observed, experienced, and reflected in the world so that we can be better caretakers of the relationships and landscapes we are part of.

 Evaluation - Evaluation is the systematic collection of data and insights (numbers and stories) about our programs and strategies to help us reflect on and understand if we’ve accomplished what we thought we would and how (effectiveness), what the best practices and strengths are in the work we do (strengths), and where there are opportunities for learning and change (emergence and adaptation).

 Learning Organization - A learning organization values many types of knowledge and information – including lived experience - and applies those insights to purposefully reflect on its practices, adapt its strategies, inform decision-making, and drive continuous improvement to benefit the communities and people it serves.

 Values – Values are beliefs about what qualities are important and should inform practice or behavior. In this case, our learning and evaluation values serve as the framework and philosophy that will guide our learning and evaluation practices.