workforce development

Why culture and institutions matter to developing a tribal workforce

Year

In its multi-year project examining tribal workforce development approaches across the country, NCAI’s Partnership for Tribal Governance (PTG) worked to identify and document key foundational strategies that are empowering tribal innovation and, in turn, workforce development success. Distilling lessons learned from that endeavor, PTG identified 15 strategic considerations that tribal leaders, workforce development practitioners, and other decision-makers must tackle as they craft workforce development approaches capable of achieving their definition of what “success” looks like for tribal citizens and the nation as a whole.

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Citation

NCAI’s Partnership for Tribal Governance. 2018. "Why culture and institutions matter to developing a tribal workforce." Indian Country Today. August 13, 2018. https://newsmaven.io/indiancountrytoday/opinion/why-culture-and-institu… 

Why citizen engagement and assessment matter to developing a tribal workforce

Year

Distilling lessons learned from that endeavor, PTG identified 15 strategic considerations that tribal leaders, workforce development staff, and other decision-makers must tackle as they craft workforce development approaches capable of achieving their definition of what “success” looks like for tribal citizens and the nation as a whole. These mission critical aspects of workforce development have a direct bearing on the ability of tribal workforce development approaches to make a transformative, sustainable difference. The following explores two of those considerations: citizen engagement and assessment.

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Citation

NCAI PTG. 2018."Why citizen engagement and assessment matter to developing a tribal workforce." Indian Country Today. August 28, 2018. https://newsmaven.io/indiancountrytoday/opinion/why-citizen-engagement-…

Closing the loop and advancement are key to developing tribal workforces

Year

Distilling lessons learned from that endeavor, PTG identified 15 strategic considerations that tribal leaders, workforce development staff, and other decision-makers must tackle as they craft workforce development approaches capable of achieving their definition of what “success” looks like for tribal citizens and the nation as a whole. These mission critical aspects of workforce development have a direct bearing on the ability of tribal workforce development approaches to make a transformative, sustainable difference. The following explores two of those considerations: closing the loop and advancement.

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Citation

NCAI PTG. 2018."Closing the loop and advancement are key to developing tribal workforces." Indian Country Today. September 11, 2018. https://newsmaven.io/indiancountrytoday/opinion/closing-the-loop-and-ad… 

Tribal Workforce Development: A Decision-Framing Toolkit

Year

This toolkit shares the main findings of NCAI’s multi-year research project examining the innovative approaches to workforce development that tribal nations along with Native organizations and tribal colleges and universities are forging, how they are achieving success (as they define it), and why. The project seeks to answer the following questions:

  • How are tribal nations working to create reliable, sustainable career – not just job – opportunities for tribal citizens that directly advance the long-term goals of the nations to which those citizens belong?
  • How are they investing in and preparing tribal citizens to succeed in particular careers that their nations need, and how are they creating pathways for those citizens to provide their nations meaningful returns on that investment?

To date, the project has produced a policy brief outlining 28 key ways that the federal government can support and empower tribal innovation in workforce development, as well as four in-depth case studies of leading tribal workforce development approaches. The following explores two of those considerations: removing obstacles and targeted solutions.

Native Nations
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Topics
Citation

NCAI Partnership for Tribal Governance. Tribal Workforce Development: A Decision-Framing Toolkit. Washington, D.C.: National Congress of American Indians. 2018.

Partnerships and sustainability are key to developing tribal workforces

Year

Distilling lessons learned from that endeavor, PTG identified 15 strategic considerations that tribal leaders, workforce development staff, and other decision-makers must tackle as they craft workforce development approaches capable of achieving their definition of what “success” looks like for tribal citizens and the nation as a whole. These mission critical aspects of workforce development have a direct bearing on the ability of tribal workforce development approaches to make a transformative, sustainable difference. The following shares the final two considerations explored in the toolkit: partnerships and sustainability.

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Citation

NCAI PTG. 2018. "Partnerships and sustainability are key to developing tribal workforces." Indian Country Today. September 17, 2018. https://newsmaven.io/indiancountrytoday/news/partnerships-and-sustainab… 

Why leadership and funding matter to developing a tribal workforce

Year

Distilling lessons learned from that endeavor, PTG identified 15 strategic considerations that tribal leaders, workforce development practitioners, and other decision-makers must tackle as they craft workforce development approaches capable of achieving their definition of what “success” looks like for tribal citizens and the nation as a whole. These mission critical aspects of workforce development have a direct bearing on the ability of tribal workforce development approaches to make a transformative, sustainable difference. The following explores two of those considerations: leadership and funding.

Resource Type
Citation

National Congress of American Indians. 2018. "Why leadership and funding matter to developing a tribal workforce." Indian Country Today. August 20, 2018. https://newsmaven.io/indiancountrytoday/opinion/ncai-ptg-in-its-multi-y…

Why strategic vision and integration matter to developing a tribal workforce

Year

In its multi-year project examining tribal workforce development approaches across the country, NCAI’s Partnership for Tribal Governance (PTG) worked to identify and document key foundational strategies that are empowering tribal innovation and, in turn, workforce development success...

Resource Type
Topics
Citation

NCAI’s Partnership for Tribal Governance. 2018. "Why strategic vision and integration matter to developing a tribal workforce." Indian Country Today. August 6, 2018. https://newsmaven.io/indiancountrytoday/opinion/why-strategic-vision-an… 

Tribal workforce development: Success starts with governance

Year

A movement is sweeping across Indian Country. Over the past several decades, a growing number of tribal nations have reclaimed their right to govern their own affairs, and are slowly but surely charting brighter futures of their own making. Wrestling primary-decision making authority away from the federal government, they are “addressing severe social problems, building sustainable economies, and reinvigorating their cultures, languages, and ways of life.” In the process, they are affirming what Native peoples have always known – that tribal self-determination and self-governance is the only policy capable of improving their lives and the quality of life in their communities.

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Citation

Indian Country Today. 2018. "Tribal workforce development: Success starts with governance." July 30, 2018. https://newsmaven.io/indiancountrytoday/opinion/tribal-workforce-develo… 

Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate Professional Empowerment Program

Year

Across Indian Country, programs and businesses depend on skilled, committed, and responsible workers. However, some Indian citizens on reservations have limited experience in the workplace; little education; and face problems finding day care, adequate transportation, and other necessities. Representatives of various programs of the Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate got together to discuss the challenges of equipping their workforce with adequate skills. The result of these conversations was the Professional Empowerment Program (PEP). Offered six times a year to every employee of the Nation, PEP’s therapeutic model focuses on interpersonal problems and conflicts and provides participants with the necessary tools for maintaining successful employment. It has led to significantly less employee turnover in the tribe’s programs and businesses and a dramatic drop in recidivism in the tribal TANF program. But PEP does even more: it helps people live healthier lives and become more productive citizens of the Nation.

Native Nations
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"Professional Empowerment Program". Honoring Nations: 2005 Honoree. Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. Cambridge, Massachusetts. 2006. Report. 

Permissions

This Honoring Nations report is featured on the Indigenous Governance Database with the permission of the Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development. 

From the Rebuilding Native Nations Course Series: "Administrative Competence"

Author
Producer
Native Nations Institute
Year

NNI Executive Director Joan Timeche discusses the need for Native nations to develop administrative competence through the cultivation, attraction and retention of qualified staff.

Citation

Timeche, Joan. "Administrative Competence." Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy. University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. 2013. Lecture.

"When you have administrative competence, you also have to look at the people factor of it, and it's finding competent people to go...capable individuals who can come and work for you. And these don't all have to be tribal citizens. Oftentimes, we have to go out and depend on them -- on non-citizens -- to come and work in their communities. And I've had...every community can probably name a number of individuals who've been non-Natives who've come in and worked and done a tremendous job for us and helped us improve and become more effective. But one of the things you have to do is you have to find these individuals and when you find them you have to be able to support them. And this is where things like brain drain occurs. This is where you don't want council -- this is where politics can come into play and you're going to want to make sure that you're hiring people who can do the job and not people who are getting hired because they happen to know the chairman or the mayor of their town and not people who know...who got a job because their cousin was a council member or their last name was the same as the party that's in favor. You're going to want to make sure that you hire skilled individuals and you have to be able to retain these people and that means not second-guessing them at their jobs, because after all you pay them the great salaries to come in and provide that expertise to you. Otherwise, what'll happen is off they'll go off the reservation, and you can talk to a number of individuals, Native individuals who perhaps at one time worked for their own tribes and left. I'm one of those where politics was just too much for me, I was too young at that time and I had different ideas of where we should be going, probably too progressive for their likes, one of the only females at my level, there was no upward mobility for me, so it just got to be a really difficult situation so I said, "˜I know I can be treated elsewhere better,' so off I went to work for a university. And so they lost the talent there and that's what you don't want to have happen is you want to keep those people that are talented on the reservation to help you to deliver services."