This set of goals, as articulated by the Native FEWS Alliance, seeks to build and support the development of Indigenous workers and innovators to safeguard Native food, energy, and water systems.

A new project, the Native Food, Energy, and Water Systems (FEWS) Alliance, funded by the National Science Foundation, is emerging as a transformative force in education, bringing innovative pathways to science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education and careers. The Native FEWS Alliance’s aggregated efforts provide expanded and enhanced student training and support, as well as clear and accessible educational pathways that allow Native American students to realize their career goals. The collaborative alliance leadership engages multiple partners, features Indigenous evaluation, and utilizes a “backbone” to manage collaborative change.

The Native FEWS Alliance has a shared vision for building a highly skilled Native American STEM workforce to address crises within their communities—both the insufficient access to food, energy, and water in tribal communities and the paucity of educational and career pathways available to Indigenous peoples. The alliance’s theory of change is a “networked improvement community” (NIC) in which the partners collectively study and examine the challenges and solutions within the community and respond by adapting, evaluating, and refining. Using the NIC, the alliance leaders, evaluation team, and “backbone” work together to develop and test interventions to address education inequities.

Among the partners in the Native FEWS Alliance are the University of California, Berkeley, as the lead, and the University of Arizona as a collaborating lead. Other alliance partners providing critical pathways to success include faculty and staff from tribal colleges and universities (TCUs), community college and undergraduate programs, university graduate programs and postdoctoral programs; community partners; Indigenous knowledge holders; teachers in pre-college programs; and specialists in Indigenous data sovereignty.

One of the two principal investigators, Alice Agogino of UC Berkeley, describes the alliance this way: “The Native FEWS Alliance will address urgent food, energy, and water system challenges in Indigenous communities, [and] will codevelop integrated, Indigenous placebased FEWS curriculum, mentoring and practice experiences. And we’re not starting from scratch, we’re starting from success stories of already proven initiatives that have a track record, making them relevant to our own institutions. This integration of Indigenous knowledge is going to improve STEM education and help us to retain, to recruit, and graduate Indigenous students.”

The project’s evaluation team members are experts in the use of Indigenous evaluation, featuring culturally responsive approaches and developmental evaluation, which emphasizes collaborative and emergent processes. The team will work with Indigenous community partners, both within and outside the alliance, to define success and to select measures that reflect both the alliance and the community’s goals and targets. Their process reflects the Indigenous evaluation framework developed by the American Indian Higher Education Consortium (AIHEC).

The project’s “backbone” resides at AIHEC, offering the facilitation of change via regular convenings, accountability, national visibility, and leadership. For this alliance, the backbone organization offers an emphasis on Indigenous cultural understanding, sensitivity, and experience. AIHEC has a broad outreach to institutions across Native American educational pathways, from pre-college all the way to higher education and professional organizations. AIHEC’s vast network will be employed to support the alliance’s data collection, recruitment, strategy implementation, and knowledge dissemination.

“The goal of the alliance is to work within our own systems . . . and very important, the broader research and education communities to help ensure that our sovereign tribal nations have the workforce, entrepreneurs, and innovators we need to sustain our lands, water, food, and place for generations to come,” says Carrie Billy, AIHEC’s president and Native FEWS Alliance co-principal investigator.

The alliance is developing curricula, offering workshops, developing mentoring guides, adapting and adopting best practices, and sharing results through its open platform to allow small institutions and nonprofit organizations across the country easy access to Native FEWS teaching, learning, and mentoring materials. These curricula and interventions will be designed to recruit, retain, and graduate Indigenous students in higher education and careers in FEWS and related STEM fields, as well as to educate non- Natives in how to build ethical partnerships with tribes. With the interventions described, the alliance hopes to achieve at least a 20% increase alliance-wide in the number of Native students who graduate from our institutions of higher education at all levels during the grant period.