The Center for Native Health INC

This project is an effort to strengthen the Revitalization of Traditional Cherokee Artisan Resources (RTCAR) program by growing the community partner pool and developing resources that better serve the EBCI artisan community and ensure artisan natural resources are protected and available.

Hurricane Helene relief

This capacity grant will help The Center for Native Health develop materials to educate and dialogue with Executive Board members, key constituents and community partners on the potential for CNH to establish a community forest that provides important community benefit.

Program Opportunity Statement (Recommended 300 words or less) To support CNH’s continued growth, the organization has made significant investments in developing a strategic plan in 2024-2025. This work, facilitated by Rowen White (Mohawk) and supported by Native Voices Rising and First Nations Development Institute, is helping to solidify and expand CNH’s capacity for sustainability. A key priority of this work is to conceptualize and implement culturally appropriate governance that reflects the organization's commitment to community-driven priorities and a vision for a thriving Cherokee community. This will be the first completed strategic plan in the organization’s history and is much overdue. To prevent organizational drift and to maximize program impact it is essential that CNH successfully engage in strategic planning development. This work includes reviewing and editing core organizational documents, developing a framework for fundraising and development, and building a succession plan. In addition, the theory of change that CNH staff and board members are developing will be vital to conceptualizing our current and future programming needs while also setting us up to assess organizational impact in the community. While funding for the main strategic planning has been covered we do not have additional funding for the development of visuals to accompany this work. Building off of Executive Director Trey Adcock PhD’s time in the FNDI Fundraising 2024 Co-hort, this proposal seeks funding to support CNH’s logic model development as a form of participatory, culturally responsive planning and evaluation. Specifically, we will use the funding to contract with a facilitator to build a cohort of Cherokee artists to engage in this process. By building the skill set of Cherokee artists to include logic modeling and visualization we are also helping build capacity within the broader EBCI community. The end products will illuminate our strategic planning for key stakeholders, future board members, community members and potential donors.

This project will support a Junior North American Women's Association Club that is focusing on conservation that is working in collaboration with Elohi Dinigatiyi "Earth Keepers," Elders advisory group.

Organizational strategic planning support

River cane is a cultural keystone species for the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, but is threatened by development, agriculture, and a lack of cultural awareness. This project will foster intergenerational knowledge growth for EBCI youth from EBCI Elders with an overarching objective of acquiring land for river cane conservation.