Ann Marie Penzkover: “Grant writing in the old days was a very serious business. You sat down with a yellow pad and pencil knowing that the very future of the institution was at stake.” Photo by Lee Marmon

“Then you better start swimmin’ or you’ll sink like a stone. For the times they are a-changin’.”  – Bob Dylan

Last year Lac Courte Oreilles Ojibwa Community College (LCOOCC) received a National Science Foundation grant, a Title III award, an initiative from Wisconsin’s Governor Work-Force Development, and a NASA program, with several other grants to boot. The excitement of being awarded a grant changed fairly rapidly. Exuberant “Yays!” became concerned “oh no’s” as our college scrambled to meet the demands of this growth. Who would have thought 15 years ago that our biggest challenge would be a result of being successful?

As I sit and talk with Ann Marie Penzkover, our dean of student services, she explains institutional development, the way it was 15 years ago. The Lac Courte Oreilles Ojibwa Tribe had recently established the college on the reservation in western Wisconsin in 1985, and just four individuals fulfilled the roles of administration and faculty. They pursued grant funding when it was available, and the college had not yet defined its bent.

“Grant writing in the old days was a very serious business. You sat down with a yellow pad and pencil knowing that the very future of the institution was at stake. The needs at LCOOCC were extreme…science equipment and computers were still a dream. We needed a roof over our heads, teachers, and books.” She leans back and shakes her head, “Today, many of the RFP’s (funders’ requests for proposals) are lengthier than our grant applications were then. Colleges are hiring professional grant writers from outside their ranks.

Back then grants were written from the heart, proclaiming a need, explaining the school’s goals, and writing a budget “long hand.” Just before the due date, Penzkover would frantically call around to different tribal entities to find a copy machine with toner that would actually make legible copies.

Over time, our funding needs have changed. We have a roof over our heads, personnel, computer equipment, and we no longer rely on “road kill” for biological dissections. No joke: The forestry and transportation departments used to deliver deer and raccoon carcasses to the science instructor to provide lab experiences for our students. A few times, “lab” was delivered outdoors, due to olfactory offensiveness; the biology classroom had no ventilation system. Luckily those days are behind us.

Grant writing today remains a serious business. Competition for funding is tough. Proper planning and preparation is a relentless imperative. As Dan Gretz, the academic dean, affirms, “The challenge lies in guiding development along constructive, vital, and enduring paths even when new projects, faculty, and resources are not forthcoming.”

The Office of Sponsored Projects is a business. It functions in a supply and demand mode, while evolving in concert with the college’s strategic planning for institutional effectiveness. Determining which funding to write for and prioritizing those efforts are just pieces of the puzzle.

Institutional development is not easy. We’ve been through self-studies; we have facilitated affinity, nominative, and group processes; and we have surveyed and met with the college’s constituents. Our SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Trends) Analysis has been established. We have a faculty-developed academic assessment plan and a long-range strategic plan. Our accreditation organization, the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools, granted us a status change so that degrees can be conferred at our outreach sites. What does all of this reflect? We are a viable and competitive institution. So, is everything running smoothly? Not exactly.

Trust without blind faith

A few years ago, the college was much easier to manage. We had a seasoned group of grant managers with a relatively small number of grants. Meeting objectives and fulfilling fiduciary responsibilities was simpler. Now, it’s not so easy. Dan Gretz said, “The infrastructure necessary to accomplish tasks with 14 full-time, experienced faculty is not the same as when there are 30 full-time faculty, a quarter of whom have been with the school for less than two years.”

One key to making growth successful is hiring competent people and then trusting them and empowering them to do their jobs. This is not to say that the college should rely upon blind faith. Instead it is important to know when to intercede and make suggestions and when to permit managers the freedom to exercise their own discretion. After all, the college is responsible to the granting agencies. Giving the grant manager the support to be successful is a good investment.

Our Continuous Improvement Plan 2000 (strategic plan) is living up to its name: meetings upon meetings, new databases requiring new learning, reports being submitted, data being interpreted, and adjustments being made accordingly. All of these duties are being assigned to either administrative staff that currently have a full workload or to new employees that are faced with a very steep learning curve. It’s a ton of work.

With all the grants that the college received last year, the college needed to update its adolescent system of grants management. It has taken a lot of systemizing to finally see things starting to come together.

LCOOCC is very close to placing all of our grants’ objectives on the college’s web site. The business manager found our accounting software inadequate to track varying line items, percentages of salaries with fringe, insurance, etc. Thus we’re in the process of providing our managers with a sophisticated means of tracking expenditures through a Cuff Account (a rolling account on Excel). Finally, we have established a system that allows all grant managers to stay on top of their budgets and that provides them with the capability to develop a Web “face.” Each grant will be represented on our Web site. Each grant (its objectives, time frame, status, and personnel) will be readily accessible through a password to myself, the college president, the business manager, program officers, other PI’s (principal investigators or grant managers), and the deans of our college.

This systemization will help all grant managers by keeping them informed of the resources and obligations of the college without having to wade through hundreds of pages of grants. Many of our proposals hold related objectives. If we can expedite internal communication about our programs, then instructors, other grant managers, and staff will be able to more efficiently use our resources.

Facilities planning and construction have not kept pace with program development. We are teaching classes in the auditorium. We’ve made offices out of closets and are hiring another six people within the month. Where do we put everything and everybody? The information technology faculty spent part of the summer on their hands and knees putting desks together, spackling, painting, laying carpet, and wiring their own classrooms. We are currently building two offices in the back of a garage. It’s not peculiar anymore to see everyone wearing blue jeans on the same day, because we are raising the roof for the addition to the pipestone-carving lab or unloading another truck full of desks, computers, etc.

Feast or famine

Sporadic funding can result in tribulation. Overall institutional development would be much easier if we could count on solid, timely funding. Because of our reliance on soft monies from grants, it is difficult to plan for more than three years. LCOOCC has had the financial rug pulled out from under us before and has been forced to shut down programs and let personnel go. It’s a struggle living a feast or famine.

An obvious remedy would be increasing the federal funding provided to tribal colleges through the Department of Interior (PL95-471 funds) and by providing tribal colleges with Operations and Maintenance (O&M) Funds for facilities. Having solid base funding to strengthen our infrastructure would make all the difference. Too many employees hold tenuous positions dependent upon soft monies. Our 471 funds currently cover unexpected maintenance problems. It’s not comfortable knowing that if a major problem occurred in the physical plant, your job could be cut. But that’s the reality.

Equity in education is a concept that has many definitions. The language is used regularly in the press and amongst politicians, but words do not necessarily reflect equity. The majority of tribal colleges (24 of the 33 AIHEC members) receive their core funding from 471 funds based on their full time Indian student count, according to Meg Goetz, Director of Congressional Relations for AIHEC. In FY00 these tribal colleges received $3,433 per Indian student. Like most of the tribal colleges and universities, LCOOCC receives no federal or state funds for our non-Indian students. If these same non-Indian students attended any other public institution, the state would provide “core funding” ranging from $4,600 to $11,000 per full-time student, according to AIHEC.

LCOOCC faculty and staff are amongst the lowest paid professionals in higher education in the nation. A master degreed instructor, without prior experience, starts around $20,000. But as written in the NCA (North Central Association of Colleges and Schools) team report of April 1998, “They [the faculty] feel their work makes a tremendous difference in their students’ lives, building hope for a better future. Across the board, the faculty displayed an almost ‘missionary’ zeal to improve and expand opportunities for enriched lives of people on the LCO reservation and in the surrounding region.”

The college has been lucky; faculty turnover is not extremely high. But it is easy to picture a new college graduate coming on board to gain two to three years of experience and then moving on to another institution where the salaries are commensurate to the workload. This is another reality facing tribal colleges. Just when programs are beginning to strengthen and grow, grant funding runs out or personnel move on to higher paying colleges.

How does a tribal college build sound institutional development strategies when we do not have a solid financial base? We’re still working on it. But until there is financial “Equity in Education,” we must continue to work within the framework we have.We must be able to document our work, utilize data, find relevant resources to meet our needs, and continue the struggle.

We’ve come a long way from the yellow pad and pencil approach to grant writing. Institutional development leads to growth, leading to more planning and development, leading to growth, and on and on. It becomes more complicated with more opportunities, but we’ll continue to write from the heart, manage with our heads, and monitor with technical savvy. We have to. Somewhere down the road we will muse about our naiveté and breathe a sigh of relief. With maturity comes wisdom.

Ann Marie Penzkover shared some advice with me, “Swim…don’t allow yourself to sink. It all falls in the realm of self-determination…you’re worth it…we’re worth it. Howah.”

Dana Gretz: Acting Indian

Dana Gretz now feels as if she has a home on the reservation. -Photo by Lee Mormon

Dana Grams-Gretz grew up on a small horse ranch in northern Wisconsin. “We knew that Dana would be doing something in education,” said her mother, Doris Merrill. “At three she was reading and begged us to let her go to school. So we brought her to the high school to be tested. She began kindergarten one month before her fourth birthday. When she was 16, she was given a full scholarship in acting to attend UW-Superior.” She became the first person in her family to graduate from college.

After earning her master’s degree in communications, Gretz accepted a position teaching English at Lac Courte Oreilles Ojibwa Community College. Now feeling she has a home within tribal collges, she recalls times when she was made uncomfortable being Native American. The public school she attended had no other Indian students. During history week, the students staged a play. “I walked on stage in a gunnysack dress and moccasins wearing a feather in my braided long hair and said, ‘How. My name is Sakakawea, and I led Lewis and Clark on their expedition to open new lands.’ Ugh. I was too naïve to know anything better…I was just happy because I had a line in the play,” she said.

In college one of the girls in her group of friends worked in the admissions office and came across her file. Gretz had checked the Native American box. “I evidently am not a good judge of character because these ‘friends’ called me squaw and a timber nigger from then on,” she said. Before this, she had never really felt discrimination. Although she has dark brown hair and eyes, her father was German so her skin is light.

Bartending her way through college gave her more insight into discrimination. Many people hated Indians because of the newly built casinos. After hearing over and over about “those damn Indians” taking away their business, she pulled out her tribal identification card and threw it on the bar. A very long silence followed before a woman said, “But you don’t act Indian.” Gretz said, “Everyone in the room laughed to the point of tears at the stereotypes and the stupidity of it all. Many apologies were made that night along with a good deal of learning and understanding.”

In her first year of teaching at LCOOCC, she taught 15 credits per semester. Her workload exemplifies what many tribal colleges expect of their faculty and administrators. She became the faculty development coordinator, helped standardize the general education requirements, did layout and authored the college catalog, edited the self-study, and wrote the annual report.

At the college, she also found a husband, Dan, who is now the academic dean. They are proud parents of identical twin girls: MADWEWE GIIZHIGOKWE (Sounding Sky Woman, aka Hayley Jordan) and ZHAA WAANO BINESOKWE (South Thunderbird Woman, aka Berit Kendall). Both girls danced in their ribbon dresses in the Honor the Earth Pow Wow last year. This year she is taking a year off to work as Fort Berthold Community College’s director of technology.