What we are calling “Coordinators” are those people who are responsible for the systems and environments provided to First Nations students at our institutions. Coordinators may be responsible for the following:

  • Ensure that student services are in place
  • Provide leadership to set up practices, policies, and systems that support First Nations student access and success
  • Build community relations, including bringing cultural or community experts into the institution
  • Build relationships between First Nations programs and services departments with other areas of the institution, including providing cross-cultural information or training to other areas of the institution
  • First Nations program planning or development
  • Proposal writing and budget
  • Staff supervision.

Student Services

The majority of students we serve have complex lives that include children, community, and extended family responsibilities. Students may also carry significant cultural responsibilities and often have their education complicated by the need to find ways of walking between two (or more) very different worlds with very different value systems.

The students we serve often have to sort out complicated funding processes. They are unlikely to have strong financial supports behind them but are very likely to carry financial responsibility for people other than themselves. They are quite likely to distrust or fear educational institutions and processes. They may have to work through personal histories that convinced them they were incapable. They may be seeking cultural learning at the same time they are seeking academic credentials. In the “Advisor’s Role” section, we talked about tasks and processes to support students through a one-on-one (or group) approach. The following are tasks and processes that help develop a systemic support system. Coordinators may be responsible or partially responsible for some or all of the following:

Academics, facilities, and marketing

  • Address access issues by developing admissions policies for First Nations students. For an example of such a policy, please see Appendix E, p55.
  • Carry knowledge about the roles, responsibilities, and relationships of faculty, staff and students and ensuring this information is communicated to students.
  • Collect and maintaining information about all First Nations programming on campus.
  • Ensure that there is First Nations-dedicated space on campus to provide an environment where students are comfortable studying, discussing issues, and resolving problems.
  • Work with the institution to collect art or other cultural symbols to welcome students and give them a sense of belonging.
  • Maintain a resource centre of books and videos for student research projects.
  • Keep up on current events and issues, and interpretations of them. Being willing to speak about current issues to individuals or groups.
  • Keep current on First Nations literature and other forms of knowledge.
  • Develop and facilitating processes to address systemic racism and its impact on students.
  • Work to ensure that students with physical disabilities have access to the First Nations services area.
  • Provide advocacy or seeking resolution for students who are conflict with instructors.
  • Follow up on complaints from students, community, and the institution.
  • Tracking student numbers, graduation rates, and post-institution experiences.
  • Support the set-up and maintenance of a functional website for the First Nations services department.
  • Develop brochures about services and programs.
  • Attend career fairs to promote services and programs.
  • Organize mail-outs to high schools, upgrading centres, and First Nations organizations to provide information about services and programs.
  • Support the development of a First Nations Student Association:

Most if not all, institutions have by now established some form of First Nations Student Association. Some are affiliated with the institution’s main Student Society; some are stand-alone. Some have formal processes and work from a political perspective; some are very informal and are focussed on social or cultural activities.

Student associations provide excellent value. They can provide peer support, student voice, learning activities, social services kinds of support, and advocacy. They can organize events. They can build connection with community.
Student associations can also be prone to conflict. When disagreement occurs, it can often be traced to conflicting visions about what the association should be.

When invited, Coordinators can work with student associations. Some of things you may be able to provide are:

  • Mentoring and advising when students are engaged in planning events and activities.
  • Assisting with fundraising for functions and activities.
  • Assisting partnership building with the institution’s Student Society.
  • Providing leadership training to students.
  • Organizing or facilitating conflict resolution processes when necessary.
  • Sharing ways of alternative methods of governance as students are setting up leadership processes.
  • Assisting the development of constitutions. For an example of a First Nations Student Constitution see Appendix F, p 57.

Financial

  • Provide information and advice for your institution as it sets up systems and processes to record tuition and book sponsorships.
  • Develop and maintain a system within your institution that supports student access to Band funding, other agency funding, and financial aid.
  • Set up systems to facilitate funders’ needs for information.
  • Provide advocacy for students who are having communication or other problems with their funders.
  • Maintain a file of bursaries and scholarships available to First Nations students.
  • Administer and/or participating in the selection process for bursaries and scholarships for First Nations students.
  • Develop New Student Awards. You may have the opportunity to develop new awards for students in your institution. There are a number of steps that you need to go through to set up bursaries and scholarships for students at your institution. The first step is to find a donor or sponsor. This may be very difficult or it might be easy. The trick sometimes is just to be prepared to respond to someone who wants to donate money or wants to honour a person who has passed away or retired. It is very important to establish good relationships with people in your institution’s Foundation. They will help you “be there at the right time” and they carry expertise about how to fundraise, set up endowment funds or one-time-only awards, and administer on-going awards. The process will include:
  • Choose criteria for recipients, such as they have to be engineering students or they need to participate in community activities, or they need to carry a certain grade point average. This is often the decision of the donor.
  • Work with the Foundation to establish an endowment fund and to plan fundraising activities or events to raise money for it.
  • Develop an application form and process.
  • Ensure that students are aware of the award and apply for the award.
  • Choose recipients.
  • Plan awards ceremonies or working with others in the institution to integrate the giving of your new award into existing ceremonies or functions.
  • Thank and in other ways honor the donors and those who participated in fundraising activities.

Cultural

  • Organize feasts or ceremonies, including graduation ceremonies. This may involve ensuring that local protocol is followed; ensuring that there is food available; organizing dancers and speakers; preparing agendas; and providing students’ names and Nations.
  • Invite Elders and other cultural experts to provide cultural teaching for students.
  • Work with your physical resources people to establish processes for students to smudge or perform other ceremonies that involve fire. If this planning doesn’t take place, smoke alarms may be set off and this of course would cause its own difficulties. Anther issue with fire ceremonies is that some people are highly sensitive to smoke. There are ways to meet everybody’s needs but this usually requires planning.
  • Coordinate drumming or other ceremonies that involve noise with certain area’s need for quiet.
  • Teach or providing cultural experts to teach students about local protocols.
  • Maintain contact lists of cultural experts who can provide services to students.
  • Organize peer-counselling workshops.
  • Develop processes for Elders in Residence or Elders Counselling programs and services.
  • Work with your institution to increase its First Nations art collections.
  • Organize events for First Nations artists, writers, and filmmakers to showcase their work.

Practices, Policies, and Systems

Appropriate student support cannot exist in a vacuum. Coordinators play an important role in developing the system environments that promote retention and success. This starts with a good awareness of institutional process.

Institutional Processes

Learn as much as you can about how the institution views itself. What is the mission statement and how important is it in decision making? What is the Strategic Plan and how does it relate to your work? How do members of the institution influence future strategic planning? What kinds of relationships does the institution have with other education providers, with various sectors of the external community, with the Ministry? What kind of advocacy does it respond to? What kind does it ignore? What kinds of students does the institution want to attract? How does it do this? What kinds of policy drive the institution? What kinds of informal practices drive the institution? What is the relationship between the two? How does the institution create policy? How and why does the institution change policy?

Learn as much as you can about how the institution plans for and processes budget. How are priorities set? What are the timelines? Who has influence on and responsibility for decision making? How long does it take to implement a decision? What are the factors that can change a decision? What are the budget factors that provide stability? What are the budget factors that hamper innovation? How does the institution work with new money or soft money or base money? How does it make decisions around budget partnering with external groups?

Learn as much as you can about institutional processes. Who counts students and how? How are academic records recorded and kept? How are tuition-related records recorded and kept? How are students informed about academic processes? How are they informed about money-related processes? Who makes decisions about programs? How are programs approved? What factors lead to them getting cut? What are the institution’s hiring processes? What obligations does it have to what employee groups?

Learn as much as you can about the institution’s approach to students. What factors provide access to students? What barriers keep them out? How does the institution define student success? What does it do about student success? How does it respond when students aren’t being successful? What does it do about human rights, harassment, and racism issues?

This seems like a lot of information gathering. It is. You don’t need to memorize the strategic plan or know how to implement all the institutional practices but it is extremely helpful to know about them. Your job, in so many ways, is to be a change-maker. How can you plan the change you wish to see in an organization that you don’t know?

If you have a good supervisor, the two of you can explore these questions together. Be willing to be taught and then be willing to teach.

Here are a few things regarding policy that Coordinators do in this area:

  • Affect strategic planning.
  • Manage First Nations program and or services budgets.
  • Affect the institution’s ways of collecting, recording, and interpreting information about student numbers.
  • Affect the process of administering sponsorships.
  • Affect policies and practice around racism and other forms of harassment.
  • Affect admissions and retention processes.
  • Affect student success planning and initiatives.
  • Affect institutional approaches to culture and diversity.

Community Relationships

It is often the role of the Coordinator to guide the relationship building between the institution and the community. As Coordinator, you need to create relationships with community if you don’t already have them established.

First Nations/Aboriginal Advisory Council Work

A major component of this is the work that is done with the First Nations Advisory Council. Here are some things that you as a Coordinator may do when working with the First Nations Advisory:

  • Define your role with the Advisory Council.
  • Demonstrate and encourage teamwork within the Advisory Council.
  • If required, take minutes of meetings.
  • If required, organize meetings by contacting advisory committee members, setting the agenda, booking a location, and organizing food and refreshments.
  • Act as a key First Nations representative to the institution and a key institutional representative to the community.
  • Involve the Advisory Council in decision-making around program development, services development, community relations and other issues related to your department or other First Nations initiatives in your institution.
  • Ensure that anything that you do involving program development and services in your institution is approved through the First Nations Advisory Council. The Advisory Council is there to provide support and recommendations when dealing with issues and controversies that arise in your work.
  • Provide written progress reports to the Advisory Council on a quarterly basis or as appropriate.
  • Act on recommendations outlined by the Advisory Council.

The Advisory Council is there to provide you with guidance and support. The work of the committee and its members can be invaluable. Honour them.
Other Community issues:

  • Ensure that the community, beyond the Advisory Council, knows who you are and what you are doing. You must be visible in the community.
  • Keep the community informed about program and service changes within the institution.
  • Work with other education and services providers in the First Nations community to ensure that you are networking for rather than competing for resources. Join community boards and inter-agency groups if possible.
  • Make sure that you eat with community members sometimes. This might be at feasts or it might be at lunch but you need to eat with people to have connection.
  • Attend funerals when you knew the deceased or work closely with his or her family members.
  • Attend at least three major community functions a year. You have to know the community to be able to represent it. You have to have credibility within the community for its people to take you seriously. Also, many believe that if you are known you will be prayed for. If you are prayed for you will be taken care of.
  • Conduct yourself well in public.

If you have good relationships with the community you can facilitate bringing community members to the institution to provide presence and teaching to students and members of the institution. Community members carry many gifts.

Relationship Building within the Institution

We cannot stress enough the importance of building relationships with those in the institution. As we have said a number of times, a major role of the Coordinator is to be a change-maker for the betterment of the students and good relationship building makes this possible over the long term.

Establish ways of making connections with as many layers of the institution as possible. Try to get on the agenda to present information to the Board of Governors, the Education Council, Deans’ Committees, department meetings, student support areas, union meetings, student society meetings – all the places that you might find allies.

At these meetings provide information about the work you are doing. Let them know about numbers of students your area serves, and what these students expect to do with their education. Share knowledge about the strengths of the students as well as the challenges students’ face. Let your potential allies know about the diversity of tribal groups in British Columbia. Share with them what people are talking about when they refer to traditional territories. Share some of our history around education with them. Share what you and they can do together to make things better. Ask for help and you will likely get it. Offer assistance. Someone will take you up on your offer.

Don’t spend too much time trying to convert those who resist you. When you are acting as a change-maker, you have to expect that there will be people who don’t want to change, who view change as threatening, or who do not recognize your voice. It is a good strategy to not judge the institution by these people. If you try to change an entire organization all at once, it will either fight you or ignore you and then you will have to use all your energy combating that instead of pursuing your original goal.

By the same token don’t spend all your time with only those who openly support you. You need these friends and supporters but you also need to travel the institution. There are many, many potential allies out there who just need to hear your voice. Find them.

Once you have a critical mass of supporters you can do amazing things. This includes affecting the systems we talked about earlier in this section. It also includes the opportunity to build programs.

Process for First Nations Program Planning

  • Conduct a needs assessment to guide program planning.
  • Establish a community based and/or industry based program advisory committee to plan and respond to needs assessment. This committee can include faculty, students and community representatives.
  • Ensure that First Nations perspective and voice are part of the program planning process.
  • Present your program idea to the institution’s First Nations Advisory Council.
  • Engage in partnership building or affiliation agreements with other program, courses within your institution or within the industry and the community, (when appropriate.)
  • Look to other institutions and programs for guidance.
  • Generate institutional support by involving senior administrative people and faculty and other colleagues in your planning.
  • Examine articulation issues before getting into the planning stages.
  • Develop a budget.
  • Develop funding proposals for new and current programs (for an excellent guide to proposal writing, see Appendix G, p 69.)
  • Examine facility issues – where will your program be housed and how will rent and services be dealt with if it is off campus?
  • Learn about your institution’s accreditation procedures and follow through with Education Council processes.
  • Submit funding proposals to appropriate sources. If these are successful:
  • Recruit students.
  • Consider who is going to teach in the program and research union contracts and concerns that may affect your program.
  • Hire instructors to teach in the program and staff to support the program and students.
  • Launch the program.
  • Follow up with evaluations and student tracking.

Things to consider when doing program planning:

  • Seek the advice and support of Elders and other community members.
  • Consider resources for students who have disabilities.
  • Be aware of cross-cultural, including intertribal, issues.
  • Be aware of the supports you may need to build in for “high needs” students.
  • Design how the program will recognize student achievements.
  • Consider the need to empower students to take control of their own education.
  • Consider whether or not you need training to do proposal writing.

Some Other Responsibilities that some Coordinators Have or are Considering:

Contract Management

Contract management is the process of delivering programs at cost to community organizations. We recommend that Coordinators work with their institution’s contract training or community education areas when a request or opportunity for a third party contract is provided.

Budget Management

Some coordinators are budget officers and they need to know how to set up a budget. They must also have a clear understanding of actual costs of faculty, staff, facilities, supplies, travel, equipment, and other costs associated with this part of programming and services. Budget officers are responsible for the cash flow in and out of their departments. This enables them to know how First Nations dollars are being used and to participate in budget planning, but such a position does not necessarily provide access to new dollars. This is a subject that coordinators need to discuss with their supervisors or Deans.

Staff Supervision

Many Coordinators are responsible to supervise others. This might include advisors, support staff, work-study students, practicum students, tutors, program managers and faculty.

Learn how to be a supportive and a fair supervisor. Treat people in the way that you want them to treat students.

Follow through with processes such as evaluations and let each one of them know, at least once a week, the things that they are doing well. Also be prepared to provide direction and support about how they might improve their work.

Attributes that benefit Coordinators

  • Excellent advocacy and conflict resolution skills
  • Facilitation skills
  • Approachability
  • Experience working on or with Boards and Councils
  • University Degree
  • Demonstrated research, writing and critical thinking skills
  • Strong knowledge of First Nations issues
  • Experience working in the First Nations community
  • Optimism
  • Proposal writing skills
  • Supervisory experience
  • Knowledge of cross-cultural issues, and ability to facilitate cultural competency training
  • Excellent leadership skills
  • Excellent organizational skills
  • Experience in curriculum/program development
  • Knowledge of the BC post-secondary system
  • Excellent communication skills
  • Knowledge of First Nations cultures and practices.
  • Ability to multi-task
  • Willingness/ability to work hard
  • Advocacy skills
  • Creativity, vision
  • Courage
  • Negotiation skills
  • Perseverance
  • Willingness/ability to take risks
  • Believability
  • Public speaking skills
  • Patience
  • Kindness
  • Strong ethics and professional values
  • Honour
 

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Acknowledgements - Introduction - Advisor's Role - Coordinator's Role - Dual Responsibilities - Resources