Rosebud Sioux Tribe
Report date
March 2017
What has been most instrumental to your progress?
Ability to get input from a wide variety or stakeholders in our community was beneficial to better understand the problem and identify solutions. Also, utilizing a collaboration and team approach we was able to get a strategic approach where multiple people can focus on a variety of tasks to achieve our goals and objectives.
We came together with a broad issue and was able to learn even more about the issue from a multi-disciplined team and therefore was able to better understand and develop a strategy that can help the youth to receive a program that is part of a solution to many problems that they are confronted with within our community.
Key lessons learned
I think that main thing was that we learned how important planning can be to shaping up a project. In many ways we had to take a second look and shape the dream into a plan so that we do not overextend ourselves or take on too much responsibility. Also, it is difficult sometimes to plan for the future as a lot of people are geared up to get things done in the moment.
It is difficult to get everyone together sometimes with personal schedules and weather or community activities but we managed to have webinars which helped tremendously.
The problem that we focused on turns out to be a multi-faceted problem that could be a frightening task for an organization to attempt to promote positive change. But once we was able to clearly identify the problem we could begin to focus on the best strategies to deploy to solve that problem and make a difference in the lives of our youth and community.
Reflections on the community innovation process
Generation of ideas was very helpful because a diverse group of people came together and shared ideas which helped to shape a very well rounded project inclusive of many facets. This would be ideal for our youth and our community who have a tremendous opportunity to learn in many different ways. I think the more ideas generate helped to make the most of the strategic plan, nothing was considered a bad idea.
Progress toward an innovation
To build on the progress made through the Green Reentry Program and address some of its shortcomings, the tribe proposes to develop an aquaponics gardening program. Aquaponics involves the farming of vegetables, herbs and fish in a self-contained eco-system. We believe that aquaponic gardening will create broader learning opportunities for youth in detention and the community, year-round production of produce, and a potential revenue generating enterprise that could help to sustain the program.
What it will take to reach an innovation?
As far as additional progress our additional work are steps are concerned we have a very good foundation of information that we can utilize to expand our current operations and include the innovation of hydroponics. We have been in operation for 10 years and each year we have a gradually increase our capacity as far as gardening operations are concerned. We will most likely continue in the direction of innovation and development of processes to ensure that we can provide a successful well-rounded program to our youth.
What's next?
We will be submitting proposals to funding sources to ensure that we can build the hydroponic gardening system and send staff to training to learn how to operate and teach people about the operations of the hydroponic gardening system. We will most likely be delineating the project into separate phases are making sure that the project is scalable so that it would be capable of being funded locally by the Rosebud Sioux tribe. We would also like to do more planning and making sure that the produce can be distributed locally to elder homeless shelter and youth center. We also plan to further develop the project to make sure that we can impact our facility menu and also reduce the cost of the meals that are prepared within our juvenile detention center.
If you could do it all over again...
I think that we would be better served to have a better strategy to obtain input form the community. We tried to do surveys and we did not have much success given the fact that our area is rural and people in our community are often unwilling to complete a survey. I think we had our most success with the community meetings and we would have more success if we scheduled more of them.