SAFL's Diana Dalbotten in Alliance to Increase Native American Participation in STEM Careers

Diana Dalbotten, SAFL's Associate Director of Diversity and Broader Impacts, has joined the Native FEWS Alliance with the shared vision to build a highly skilled Native American STEM workforce in the areas of Food, Energy, and Water and to address the insufficient access to food, energy, and water (FEW) in Indigenous communities. The Native FEWS Alliance strives to become a transformative force in education, bringing into being innovative pathways to STEM careers that engage local communities and are based on Indigenous ways of living and learning.

To reach their goals, the Native FEWS Alliance, bolstered by a 10-million-dollar National Science Foundation INCLUDES grant, will leverage the strength and potential of each partnering program, expanding the Alliance’s collective capacity with a tight network of exchanges and collaborations.

As a partner in this Alliance, Diana Dalbotten will serve as a Program Lead, focusing on Community Based Partnerships. 

"As a co-director of the Geoscience Alliance, we are excited to join the INCLUDES Native FEWS Alliance.  Through collective action, we increase and strengthen our ability to support opportunities for Native American students interested in Earth focused careers."  

Among the partners in the Native FEWS Alliance are the University of California Berkley as the lead and the University of Arizona as a collaborating lead, with the American Indian Higher Education Consortium operating as the backbone of the Alliance. Other Alliance partners that provide critical pathways to success include Tribal colleges and universities (TCUs), community college and undergraduate, graduate, faculty career, postdoctoral, FEWS career, community partnerships and Indigenous knowledge, pre-college programs, and Indigenous data sovereignty.

“The goal of the Alliance is to work within our own systems . . .  and very important, the broader research and education communities to make sure that our sovereign nations have the workforce, entrepreneurs, and innovators we will need to sustain our lands, water, food, and place for generations to come,” said Carrie Billy, American Indian Higher Education Consortium President and Native FEWS Alliance co-principal investigator.

The Alliance will develop curricula, offer workshops, develop mentoring guides, adapt, and adopt best practices and share results through its open platform to allow small institutions and non-profit organizations across the country easy access to Native FEWS teaching, learning, and mentoring materials. These curricula and interventions will be designed to recruit, retain, and graduate Indigenous students in higher education and careers in FEWS and related STEM fields as well as educate non-Natives in how to build ethical partnerships with tribes. With the interventions described, the Alliance hopes to achieve at least a 20% increase average Alliance-wide in the number of Native American students who graduate from our institutions of higher education at all levels during the grant period.

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