Report / Brief

[Practice Brief] Tribal Success Stories

(September 27, 2021)

Tribal Success Stories are practice briefs developed by tribes for tribes.  In their own words, each success story describes the tribe’s journey towards achieving its goals, including its strategies, lessons learned and resources that supported their effort.  Success stories serve as a resource for other tribes who might be on a similar journey.

Aligning Systems for Health

The Coeur d’Alene Tribe and Marimn Health partnered with the University of Washington’s Seven Directions Program to develop the Wellbriety Program’s Referrals Strengthening Project, aiming to improve the alignment of services for Wellbriety clients. The program focuses on improving and tracking referrals for clients in order to improve the assistance and care they receive from a multitude of health and tribal departments and programs.

Wabanaki Public Health and Wellness (WPHW) prioritized creating an Indigenous public health surveillance system to ensure Tribal health data is accurate and representative of Indigenous people in Maine. Read Strengthening Data Sovereignty: Teachings from the Eel Life Cycle to learn how WPHW efforts provided training, discussion, and engagement, empowering Tribal leadership to be active partners in the pursuit of Wabanaki data sovereignty.

The 100% Community Taos Pueblo initiative worked with multiple community partners to create a data sharing system to measure their collective impact. The goal of the system was to strengthen partnerships, improve program services, and increase data-based decisions to collectively improve community health.

Aligning Systems for Health was a partnership between Red Star International, Inc., Seven Directions, A Center for Indigenous Public Health at the University of Washington, and 5 Tribal Nations. This practice-based study explored how health care delivery, public health and social services sectors work together to achieve shared goals.  

Red Star administered small grants to Tribal partners and provided capacity assistance, such as technical assistance, referrals to resources, short web-based training, and tribe-to-tribe sharing and learning.

Link to the article “Indigenous Health and Health Systems: Revitalizing Inherent Alignment” describing project outcomes on page 250 of Aligning Systems for Health: Research Learnings from Across the Nation by the Georgia Health Policy.

Article

Tribal Public Health Accreditation

Red Star partnered with the Northwest Portland Area Indian Health Board, Ho Chunk Nation, Cherokee Nation, and the Lac du Flambeau of Lake Superior Chippewa in the Tribal Accreditation Readiness through Guidance, Education and Technical assistance (TARGET) Project with support from a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Working together like we have one heart was the basis for the partnership, with the primary goal of increasing public health accreditation readiness among Tribal Health Departments.