Learning and Impact
The American Indian College Fund is an Indigenous Learning Organization
The College Fund engages in research, evaluation, and learning to understand the outcomes and impacts of our work and to be better relatives to our partners: the Native students, tribal colleges, and Native communities we serve. Having an organizational learning strategy and a data gathering system to support our organizational learning are best practices for data-driven non-profit organizations focused on clearly communicating their impacts.
To uphold our responsibilities and accountabilities as a Native-led non-profit organization, we have developed our own unique Indigenous learning strategy to guide us.
Learning and Evaluation Vision Statement
Everything we do at the College Fund, including learning, research, and evaluation, is interwoven with the Native students and communities we serve, and 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 seek 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 learning are not just about describing outcomes and impacts but are also an opportunity to be better relatives to one another, to the land, and to previous and future generations.
We work with the Native students, tribal colleges, and Native communities we serve to learn and hold space for their stories, dreams, and needs, while upholding our responsibilities and accountabilities as a non-profit organization.
How We Reimagined and Decolonized Our Learning Approach
In 2022, the College Fund’s leadership decided that it was time to revisit our inquiry-based work, grapple collectively with the histories of evaluation and science as colonial tools of extraction and oppression in Native communities, and create a forward-looking collective and cohesive vision for engaging in research, evaluation, and learning for the greater good of Native people. We want our work to continue to be transformational for the Native students, tribal colleges, and Native communities we serve. In 2022, we began a project to develop our own Indigenous learning strategy to ensure our approach reflected our needs and values.
Native people have creation stories that describe the origins of the world. Our learning strategy also has an origin story. College Fund leadership, Board members, and staff – over one third of whom are Native American – came together through focus groups, listening sessions, hands-on workshops, and participated in internal staff advisory boards to share their thoughts and wisdom to shape the vision, philosophy, and values that define the College Fund’s Indigenous learning strategy.
The result? Our learning strategy is a reflection of the knowledge, values, and voices of those who created it, and is grounded in Indigenous values. It emerges from our community and who we are rather than us adopting an externalmodel or framework that does not fit our organization.
Learning and Evaluation Core Values
We collectively defined five Indigenous core values to guide our learning and evaluation work and anchor our learning and evaluation practices. These values are reflected in our learning vision and in the visual that represents our approach.
Hover on a core value to learn more.
Learning and Evaluation Core Values
We collectively defined five Indigenous core values to guide our learning and evaluation work and anchor our learning and evaluation practices. These values are reflected in our learning vision and in the visual that represents our approach.
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 June 16, 2023 FINAL 5 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.”
Telling Our Learning Story Through Art and Imagery
Art and story play a key role in communicating important cultural beliefs and knowledge across generations in Native cultures. To honor this cultural practice, we translated our learning vision into an image and a story.
Our learning visual illustrates our five Indigenous learning values in a culturally resonant and respectful way.
The learning visual was co-created by American Indian College Fund staff and a visual artist, Jerry Chapa, through 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 describe images that came to mind as salient representations of the organization’s five Indigenous learning values and share stories about why those images resonated for them. Our visual artist then wove these images together into a compelling visual, and we developed a story around the themes advisory board members shared when explaining the images they chose.
Visual Story
In the center of our image is a drum. The 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 symbol, which represents our mission of hope and transformation through education.
Encircling the Flame of Hope are the Native students and community members 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, the present, and the past world 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 medium evokes the key role water plays in nourishing life and how learning and evaluation practices ripple across our interconnected communities and generations to inspire storytelling, reflection, and adaptation so that we can be good relatives to each other, the land, and all beings.
Read Our Indigenous Learning Strategy
You can read and download our complete Learning Strategy here.
