The mission of the American Indian College Fund (the College Fund) provides a broad context to guide the long-term efforts of the College Fund. We strive to achieve our mission through our five strategic plan initiatives. These strategic initiatives include Student Success, Tribal College and University (TCU) Capacity Building, College Fund Sustainability, Public Awareness, and Community and Cultural Engagement. As our mission states, our immediate focus is supporting TCU education, with the ultimate goal to transform Native communities through institutional and individual student success.
In 2013, the College Fund developed a focused approach to improve its data, research, and evaluation practices with the establishment of the Office of Research and Sponsored Programs (ORSP). The creation of the ORSP provided the College Fund the opportunity to assess its data, research, and evaluation processes, and capacity. From these evaluations, we established a number of strands of work aimed at both developing these important areas and producing timely deliverables to assist the organization's growth and the ability to serve TCUs and American Indian and Alaska Native (AIAN) postsecondary students. Currently we annually host a TCU faculty/research convening, support TCU faculty research, provide faculty master's and doctorate fellowships, and support the development of manuscripts for publication. We also established our own research capacity which has produced the important outcomes of highlighting and informing the post-secondary field about outcomes of TCU alumni, TCU institutional sustainability, TCU student success, TCU program review and development practices, and AIAN student pathways.
In the evaluation sphere we are developing a Strategic Learning and Evaluation System (SLES), which is culturally based, focused on Indigenous values, and will support an organizational effort to better understand our work in student success and College Fund programing.
We are also developing a data/Information system that will utilize the SLES framework to both inform the organization about our efforts at the student, faculty/staff, institutional, and community levels, and to inform our work moving forward.
In data systems, in addition to the development of our comprehensive data/information system, we are collaborating with three other Native non-profit organizations, called the National Native Scholarship Providers (NNSP), to develop a shared data structure which in turn will allow the NNSP to conduct cross organizational research. In 2022 the NNSP completed its first collaborative research project utilizing shared data, a study on American Indian and Alaska Native College Affordability.
Finally, with the generous support of the National Public Education Support Fund we are working with Native faculty and a selected Tribal Nation to investigate the process to develop a tribal education data system.