Pueblo program managers, tribal members work to define priorities
Earlier this month, on Oct. 6, Taos Pueblo Tribal Programs hosted a public forum for tribal members over two days at the Taos Pueblo Heritage Center, giving tribal members the opportunity to see some of the work pueblo program administrators and employees have completed in recent months, as well as to ask questions and make suggestions about what these programs will prioritize next.
Aligning Taos Pueblo’s priorities isn’t the easiest of tasks to complete. The current plan has been in the works since 2014 and nearly came to a standstill when the COVID-19 pandemic shut down Taos Pueblo. A later 2021 Tribal Resolution saved the project and called for more tribal member input to further define the tribe’s priorities. The resolution in part reads, “Whereas, The Priority Team held a Community Forum for Taos Pueblo in 2019, and determined that further community work is required and necessary to obtain full disclosure and input from the Taos Pueblo community in order to better complete the Priority strategic plans…”
The Taos Pueblo Priority Team has been working closely with Sage Data Consulting President Dr. Holly Schieb to develop a process for collecting community data, used in vision and mission statements to identify the tribes core values and themes, which Tribal Council reviews when it adopts and amends their own priorities.
Scheib is active in all levels of the tribe’s priority plans and was on the forum floor with volunteers collecting data to aid Taos Pueblo Police Chief Summer Mirabal in tackling the justice issues the tribe faces.
“We have no baseline data for a number of our programs,” said Dr. Scheib. “We want to build our restorative justice plan and for that we need data.”
Scheib was handing out surveys for the justice department, demonstrating the way the tribe’s priority plan works. Involvement at all levels of the process is key, she said. With the tribe’s priority plan in place, tribal programs will be able to piggyback and support one another through their individual works. With tribal priorities aligned, tribal programs will all be working toward the same overall goals. There are currently five major priorities identified: Education, Economic Development, Housing, Community Health and Leadership Continuity.
During the forum, Tribal Programs Administrator Shawn Duran was available to explain how each core priority worked — not only on its own, but in tandem with the other priorities. The process is designed after the natural symbol of a tree, where the people, representing roots, are then brought together to form a trunk; a strong foundation, core branches represent core priorities and secondary branches symbolize the goals of those priorities; the leaves are tribal programs since leaves continually change. “We (tribal programs) need to be flexible, and grow tribal programs that meet our communities needs. And they should not be permanent, they should change with our needs,” said Duran.
In the past, tribal programs followed a federal government model that boxed in many tribal programs and limited the way funds were spent. Today, with a renewed sense of sovereignty, the tribe now outlines its needs based on tribal member-submitted information, prioritizes those needs and allocates funds based on those needs. In an aligned process, the community mission informs all efforts. “This is the opposite of how federal programing works …,” said Duran. “So because of that, we [Taos Pueblo Programs] do this; we look at community vision, area goals, data that’s from our community, programs to address and the budget to support it. Prior to this, we were only looking at the budget piece without the voice of the people.”
Each program had huge white boards with proposed projects for tribal members to chime in on. Tribal programs were, and still are, looking for suggestions on future projects, processes and approaches to current projects. Some programs had polls going on projects that could change the lives of many tribal members. One poll asked, “Where would you like to live?” referring to a proposed housing development that could be taking place on reservation lands in the near future. In July of this year, Dover Kohl & Partners Town Planning company visited Taos Pueblo to help identify potential development zones. Tribal government would like to know what forms of housing developments tribal members would like to see in the future.
“Doing this realignment and refinement process allows us to go by quantitative and qualitative data so we will be able to make the changes necessary to streamline services for our people. Transparency is a big part of this. We want to get community involvement, and this isn’t just gonna be, ‘We had a community meeting and that’s it.’ All the comments that are being taken are gonna be compiled and analyzed to create a baseline for our priorities,” said Tribal Secretary Dwayne Lefthand.
Taos Pueblo tribal members have long asked that their input be taken into account when its government sets its priorities, and now it’s up to tribal members to submit their comments, voice their concerns and ask their questions.
“We’re in a period of change, and there’s going to be growing pains but we all have to come together as a community and address these issues because it’s not just tribal government issues; these are community issues,” said Secretary Lefthand.