The Native TEACH partnership is a collaborative project between the Northwest Indian College (NWIC)(NWIC) and the Community Outreach and Ethics Core of the CEEH. The project was initially funded in the summer of 2008 by the Partnership for Environmental Public Health, a new umbrella program of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. The goal of the original proposal was to develop a sustainable partnership to explore environmental health in a Native context. Integral to the project is the belief that each of the partner organizations possesses unique knowledge, resources, and capacities, and that sharing these is mutually beneficial. The Native TEACH Partnership helps each of the partners attain their institutional goals and build capacity in ways that would not be possible without this collaborative effort.
The partnership aims to produce a set of best-practices for collaborative research efforts between large research universities and tribal colleges, to develop innovative teaching materials for Native Environmental Health classes, and to create a method of process evaluation that reflects the values of mutual respect and capacity building that are central to collaborative research methods. This innovative project will ultimately develop a model for campus-community partnerships that could be used in a variety of settings and across many disciplines.
In our first year of collaboration, we:
- Created a written survey exploring perspectives on the relationship between health and the environment, important issues within native communities, and the prospect of collaboration with larger universities. This survey provided the foundation for the following research endeavors:
- Collecting surveys from 60 NWIC students and jointly analyzing results for major themes and core concepts;
- Adapting the written survey for use in two student-facilitated talking circles at NWIC;
- Administering the written survey to over 100 tribal college students and staff at the American Indian Higher Education Consortium (AIHEC) student conference in Missoula (March 2009).
- Involved students from both NWIC and UW in our partnership activities with the understanding that these students are our future tribal leaders and/or future researchers.
- Hosted a series of informal discussions with elders with the Lummi Nation and NWIC community.
- Developed a case study highlighting native perspectives on community, environment, and health.
- Submitted two proposals, both of which were successful, for oral presentations at the 21st Annual Native Health Research Conference in Portland, OR (August 2009).
- Piloted a class on community-based participatory research methods at NWIC.
The partnership is still going strong and plans are underway to seek additional funding for future collaborative projects.
For more information about the Native TEACH Partnership, please contact:
Jon Sharpe, Project Manager, UW-CEEH: 206.685.5333