PAST INITIATIVES

As the leading national advocate for urban Indian families, the National Urban Indian Family Coalition is working with our network on a series of vital projects across the country. These past initiatives supported our work of building a movement that promotes visibility, enhances resources, and mobilizes systems to be more reflective of the needs of urban Indian issues.

past INITIATIVES:

REsurgence Urban Indian Education INITIATIVE 

Over 90% of all Native students attend public schools. The national graduation rate for those students is 40%. They are disciplined and suspended at rates far higher than their peers. NUIFC's position on these numbers is plain: this is not students failing the system. This is the system failing students.
 
The Resurgence Urban Indian Education Initiative was NUIFC's response to that failure. Grounded in traditional Native values, knowledge, and pedagogies, Resurgence worked to reimagine K-12 education for urban Indigenous youth, supporting their social, emotional, intellectual, and academic development on their own cultural terms. By empowering Native educators, we created a curriculum that centered the urban Native experience and closed the gaps through which so many Native students were falling through.
The initiative operated through two strategies:
 
Resurgence Practitioner Network: Brought together the vanguard of urban Native K-12 educators from across the country in a first-of-its-kind cohort. Educators shared knowledge, built relationships, and strengthened their collective capacity to serve Native youth in cities.
 
Resurgence Schools: A comprehensive program for urban Indigenous youth that grounded core academic domains in cultural context, meeting students where they are and affirming who they are in the process.

Census 2020 and redistricting 

The NUIFC and our coalition of urban Native nonprofits worked tirelessly during the 2020 Census to address the persistent undercount of urban Native communities. We organized in cities across the country to ensure our people were counted accurately in the decennial Census, leading to record-breaking numbers.
The American Indian and Alaska Native population, alone and in combination, rose to 9.7 million nationally, an 87% increase since 2010. In the states where the NUIFC organized, that population grew by an average of 78%. In the counties where we organized, the increase averaged 84%. Every county where NUIFC was active saw its urban Native population grow, and six counties saw increases of more than 100%.
These numbers reflect real people who were seen and counted, many for the first time, and shaped federal policy and funding for the next decade.
We then turned to redistricting, working to ensure that the thousands of new legislative and political maps drawn in the wake of the Census reflected the urban Native communities. Our partners attended community listening sessions, built maps and datasets documenting the urban Native population in their cities, worked in coalition with other communities of color, and participated fully in every stage of the redistricting process.