Awarded Grants

This grant will allow CRRC to hire a climate coordinator to do community outreach, education, and trainings.

Program Opportunity Statement (Recommended 300 words or less) The Yukon River Inter-Tribal Watershed Council is an Alaska non-profit organization whose members are 74 Alaska Tribes and Canada First Nations in the 330,000 square mile area of the entire Yukon River and tributaries. YRITWC seeks funds to operate and provide environmental services and sciencitific research to help meet its mission of protecting the Yukon River waters. The grassroots organization seeks out federal and foundation funding. 95% of the funds received are from the US federal government. The Watershed Council does not have an established indirect rate and therefore receives the deminimus rate for general and administrative expenses. Therefore, the Council utilizes a small amount of the indirect budget for governance. With an area of 330,000 square miles and two board members from seven regions in Alaska, it is difficult for the executive board to meet, plan, provide direction and set policy for the organization (Cananda covers its own expenses). Funding from this opportunity will provide financial support for the executive board to meet and set direction for organization and to plan for a Biennial Summit for all the Alaska tribes and First Nations to meet in late summer/early fall of 2025.

This project will increase tribal environmental asset control on or near Native lands.

This project will address and prepare for the impacts of climate change that greatly affect our region, by increasing our operational capacity, retaining and continuing our sustainable energy initiatives, and supporting food security education in the Bering Strait Region.

This project will support a third year of leveraging funding to increase the impact of our shellfish garden program to create and retain jobs that support climate preparedness utilizing education, training, monitoring, and strategic planning.

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.