Despite an abundant body of research demonstrating the value of early childhood education and its positive impact on everything from school readiness to long-term health, quality ECE is too often in short supply — particularly in low-income communities.
The American Indian College Fund is a longtime supporter of early childhood education in Native American communities, and its efforts just got a boost. The fund recently announced a set of new grants in support of its Ihduwiyayapi Advancing Indigenous Early Childhood Education program, putting its total funding to date at $6.25 million. The grants will support learning readiness projects at 11 tribal colleges and universities (TCUs). The college fund plays an intermediary role, providing funding and technical assistance to support TCUs with the development of their place-based early childhood programs.
The program, which builds on a long-running track record of ECE work, was originally launched in 2021 as a pilot, with grants from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation ($600,000), the Heising-Simons Foundation ($350,000), and American Family Insurance ($30,000). The Bezos Family Foundation stepped in recently with a $5.3 million grant over four years. The college fund hopes to raise a total of $11 million for Indigenous early childhood education.
Philanthropic support for early childhood education has increased in recent years, but it still lags behind funding for K-12 education and other areas, despite the need, as IP concluded in its State of American Philanthropy brief on the topic. Low-income and rural communities typically have few early care options. This is the case in many Native American communities; some have access to Early Head Start and Head Start, but many do not. The pandemic simultaneously made the situation worse — not just for Native Americans, but communities across the U.S. — and made it clearer than ever that the country is in a child care crisis.
“We have seen that reckoning over the course of the pandemic — it’s like we’re doing the opposite of what the science says we should do when it comes to our youngest children,” said Erin Griffin, senior program officer at the college fund. “You couple that with the fact that American Indian and Alaskan Natives are still the most educationally underrepresented minority group in the United States in terms of bachelor’s degree attainment, and it makes this work imperative. This investment is ultimately about creating a professional pathway for early care and education providers in tribal communities to demonstrate the value of early childhood and graduate more educators who represent Native communities.”
Getting ready
The college fund’s early learning initiative is called “Ihduwiyayapi,” which means “they are getting ready” in the Dakota language. Its goal is to increase both the number and the quality of early education programs in Native communities. To do so, it has forged strong partnerships with tribal colleges and universities, and helped them build the capacity of their programs and strengthen teacher education. To date, the college fund’s Indigenous early childhood education programs have engaged “more than 5,000 children, 3,900 families, and 2,700 teachers at TCUs across Indian Country,” according to the announcement.
The TCUs that the fund works with all approach early learning differently, but all incorporate best practices in the field of early childhood education. They all also integrate Native language and culture, which Griffin calls “the foundation of this work, the starting point for all of us.”
An in-depth report on the college fund’s early education initiatives, published in 2018, describes this Indigenous approach to early education: “All of the college fund’s ECE initiatives provide support, resources, technical assistance and professional development for Native communities to grow their own early childhood education teachers, centers, curricula, and TCU programs of study. The outcome is that, across different TCU sites in different Native communities, the specific early learning curricula and activities will be unique to each community, based in the community’s language, culture, heritage, traditions and modes of communication and inquiry.”
The college fund emphasizes a strengths-based approach, which builds on the assets of individual communities, according to Griffin. ”A strengths-based approach means looking for the sparks that are happening within a community, those bright spots where something really positive is happening, ” she said. “For example, there’s a space where people are speaking the language together on a regular basis. Or families are coming together to harvest plants and medicines. Those are strengths-based areas that it’s important to focus on and learn from.”
The emphasis on Native language and culture is in sharp contrast with federal policies earlier in this country’s history (and not so long ago). Native American children were taken away from their families and tribes and housed in boarding schools where they were punished for speaking their languages or following Native cultural practices. The impact of those policies is still felt today.
“I think most people are aware that we’re really struggling across all of our communities with language and cultural loss,” Griffin said. “And research shows that a disconnection from one’s identity can be highly disruptive to a person’s success. Whereas children whose connection to identity and family and ancestors, to land and culture — when that connection is nourished, those children are incredibly healthy and do really well.”
Partners in the front seat
The W.K. Kellogg Foundation has been supporting the college fund’s early childhood work since 2011, when it provided $5 million for a five-year initiative that supported early learning programs at tribal colleges and universities. The Bezos Family Foundation is a more recent supporter of the college fund’s early education work. In 2020, the foundation provided funding for the college fund’s strategic plan, and is now backing Ihduwiyayapi.
Not to be confused with Jeff Bezos’s philanthropic endeavors, the Bezos Family Foundation was created by the Amazon founder’s parents, Mike and Jackie, in 2000. As IP has written, Jeff Bezos’s education funding still appears to be taking shape. The Bezos Family Foundation, in contrast, has clear priorities: It zeros in on early childhood and adolescence as two life stages that science has identified as periods of intense brain development.
“It’s because of the research on child development that we’ve made the first five years such a major funding and programmatic focus,” said Megan Wyatt, managing director of the foundation. “Our interest in working with the college fund — and specifically their work with TCUs — is because they reach a particularly vulnerable population of adult learners who are teaching and educating students that are the farthest from educational justice. They are in a really strong and unique position to address the needs of early care and education professionals serving Native children and their families.”
Cheryl Crazy Bull, the president and CEO of the American Indian College Fund, hopes more funders will step up to support early childhood education, but cautions that it’s an area that funders need to approach with a level of humility.
“I think sometimes in the early childhood environment, funders have a model and they want to impose that model on every community they work with, and that can be a real challenge,” she said. “There’s a tendency to ‘model pick.’ That is, ‘I’ve picked this model, and this is what I want you to adopt.’ We believe the community knows, and we don’t feel comfortable imposing a model.”
Crazy Bull says her experience with her organization’s current funders has been positive, and the Bezos Foundation’s funding philosophy appears to avoid the pitfalls she described.
“If you visit our offices or our website, you’ll see a tandem bike; we put our partners in the front seat.” Wyatt said, referring to the organizations the fund supports. “We start from a place of strength, understanding the strengths and the expertise that our partners bring. There are such strengths within the Native communities — they don’t need us to validate them. But they do need resources to grow and sustain the work, to systematically bring together what we know from the science of early childhood development and the rich practices within Native communities to create systems of early care and education, and to help spread that to other communities.”