How has the path to high school and college success changed since you were a student?

I was actually one of the first recipients of The CIRI Foundation scholarship, after we became an organization in 1982. The path to high school and college has changed a lot since then. Students can’t work a summer job now and pay for school. I know lots of people, including me, who worked during the summer and could come back and pay for tuition and books and be fine. You can’t do that these days; it’s a huge challenge. It’s a very challenging patchwork of putting funding together for people to attend school, especially for those folks who may be the first in their family to attend higher education. Even people with means and who have had some experience with higher education, they have to plan and think about it, and if they have multiple kids… it’s very expensive.

What are the biggest obstacles to improving graduation rates in your community?

We have a low graduation rate for Alaska Native students, stemming from home-related challenges, teacher turnover, historical trauma, language and culture disconnection, and other issues which are barriers to being set up for success early on. Stemming from the “Molly Hootch case,” if you have 10 kids in a community, you need to have a school. But Alaska is so spread out, you can fit two states of Texas in it; we have as much coastline as the whole rest of the United States. This creates all kinds of challenges for access to consistent quality education, especially for rural kids.

What are your core strategies for supporting students and improving graduation rates from high school and/or college?

• Early childhood: TCF helps fund tribal organizations and nonprofit organizations trying to help set kids up, especially Alaska Native kids, for success. We’ve been helping to fund the Best Beginnings Alaska work, focusing on the ages of 0 to 5, getting books into their home. In rural Alaska, there basically aren’t libraries outside of the hub communities (and those may be the school library). If you don’t have libraries and you can’t afford books, then you don’t have books. It is more than just reading to kids; it’s talking, playing and cuddling with them to help stimulate those neuron connections that are forming. Zero to 5 are critical years.
• K through 12 education: We fund project grant programs focused on preserving and perpetuating culture and heritage as well as improving education. Kids need to be grounded in who they are and know who they are to be successful.
• College scholarships & vocational training: We offer individual scholarships and grants to eligible Alaska Natives. They can live anywhere in the world and be studying or training for anything they’d like to pursue. We do have a few areas of emphasis for the higher awards. We’ve funded people in Australia, Estonia, wherever they live. They just need to show proof of relationship to an original enrollee of CIRI.

How are demographics changing and affecting your funding priorities and strategies?

CIRI original enrollees are anybody born on or before December 18, 1971. Now we’re going farther and farther back into the family tree, which is impacting TCF’s scholarship eligibility criteria. We’re getting information connecting to great-great-grandparents, and it’s harder to connect with them. We recently received a birth certificate from 1897 in Russian!

We’ve also opened up a special pool of funds for people who are voting CIRI shareholders — Alaska Natives who inherited or been gifted CIRI shares, but are not lineal descendants of an original enrollee. This is a big deal. People in that category didn’t even exist in the beginning, but it’s a growing pool. Our board decided we were going to do a trial fund; this is the second year. We’re going to look at it and see if it’s going to continue.

As you go along and time goes farther down the line, it becomes more complicated. Our applicants may not understand the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA); they don’t even know which group of Native people they technically belong to. A third of the people enrolled live in Alaska, a third live in Alaska and a third live all over. We have scholarship recipients who haven’t ever been to Alaska.

What’s been a big success for your organization related to supporting high school and college students?

Our academic year scholarship is $5,000 and they go up from there for the more competitive awards. TCF offers generous scholarships and other resource ideas to help folks fund their educational endeavors. TCF is committed to being fair and equitable and trying to make a significant dent in the costs while preserving funds in perpetuity for generations to come.

We believe we have been helpful at funding tribal and nonprofit organizations that are doing the programmatic work through grants; supporting programs such as the Alaska Native Heritage Center’s programs focusing on culture and combining that with academic success. We’ve helped fund the Native Youth Olympics program. Kids have to keep their grades up in school to participate and learn cultural ways as part of the games. It’s really being able to help other organizations that are better equipped and suited to offer those programmatic things to augment TCF’s goals. We’re very happy to be partnering with local partners as well as a national funder to move forward together in these areas.

What are the most important public policy issues for you this year, and what are you doing about them?

We weigh in occasionally on education topics, and we’re interested in using more of our voice in the future. Our board is looking into doing more with public policy, especially given the budget situation here in Alaska.

What’s one more question we should ask, and how would you answer it?

Q. How do we find out more about The CIRI Foundation and how to partner with them?

You can email me or go to our website. For scholarships and grants, the Education Resources Handbook we've put together is useful.

We work with the ANCSA consortium group here in Alaska, including 11 other foundations, trusts or entities working toward helping Alaska Native people succeed in their educational goals. Contact us for that list. Also, we recommend working with Native Americans in Philanthropy to narrow in on what’s going on with the Alaska Native and American Indian world, related to philanthropy.

Susan Anderson is president and CEO of The CIRI Foundation, joining us this month for our virtual roundtable with graduation funders.