Tribal College Initiative

The Tribal College Initiative is a project funded by the American Legacy Foundation designed to develop capacity of tribal colleges to engage in health surveillance and monitoring. Because of their intimate connections with the communities in which they reside Tribal Colleges are in an excellent position to provide health surveillance and monitoring support to Tribes and Tribal Health Departments. The initiative will provide training and technical assistance to Stone Child College located in Box Elder, Montana, and Dine’ College, located in Tsaile, Arizona, to plan and implement the American Indian Adult Tobacco Survey (AI ATS).

The AI ATS was developed through a collaboration of the CDC Office on Smoking and Health and CDC funded Tribal Support Centers. The goal was to develop culturally appropriate surveillance tools through which Tribes could collect Tribal Specific data that could be used to inform and improve their own tobacco programs. The methodology  used in this surveillance system were uniquely designed by tribal members in order to respect tribal sovereignty, respect traditional tobacco use, and culturally appropriate methods of data collection.

The implementation of the AI ATS by the Stone Child College and Dine’ College will generate data that can inform and improve the development of tribal policies aimed at reducing the consumption of tobacco products and exposure to secondhand smoke.  In addition, the project will impact Tribes by guiding the development of tribal specific interventions by providing representative, tribal specific data that can be used to set health priorities, direct program planning, establish well defined benchmarks and assess progress over time.

For more information on the Tribal College Initiative, or the Adult Tobacco Survey, please contact Lisa Abramson at labramson@itcmi.org.