WELFARE REFORM IMPLEMENTATION
IN INDIAN COUNTRY:
A NATIONAL FORUM

sponsored by the National Congress of American Indians
Saturday, February 28, 1998
Grand Hyatt Hotel
Washington, D.C.

TAPE TRANSCRIPTION
C O N T E N T S

Invocation - Frank Chee Willetto, Executive Board Member, National Indian Council on Aging

Welcome - W. Ron Allen, President, National Congress of American Indians

Keynote Address - Olivia Golden, Assistant Secretary, Administration for Children and

Families, Department of Health and Human Services
 

Panel 1 - Tribal TANF Plans

Ray Apodaca, Division of Tribal Services, Department of Health and Human Services

Beth Meyers, Family Services Division Chief, Red Cliff Band of Lake Superior Chippewa

Gerald Heminger, Jr., Council Member, Sisseton-Wahpeton Sioux

Joe Finkbonner, Life Center Director, Lummi Nation

Panel 2 - Job Creation and Job Training Programs

Tom Dowd, Chief, Division of Indian and Native American programs, Department of Labor

Norm DeWeaver, Director, Indian and Native American Employment and Training Coalition

Dr. David Gipp, President, United Tribes Technical College
 
 

Panel 3 - Federal/State/Tribal Government Partnerships

Rhonda Whiting, Attorney

John Meredith, Tribal Welfare Reform Coordinator, State of Montana Division of Child and Family Services

Denis Turner, Executive Director, Southern California Tribal Chairman's Association

Charlene Lewis Meeks, Deputy Director, California Department of Social Services, Office of Community Relations
 

Panel 4 - Children and Family Support Services

Donald Sykes, Director, Office of Community Services, Administration of Children and Families, Department of Health and Human Services

Janet Wise, Chairperson, National Indian Child Care Association

Alex Yazza, Navajo Nation 211

Leila Tulley, Executive Director, Division of Social Services, Navajo Nation
 

Panel 5 - Impact Data Collection Methodologies
 

Dr. Shanta Pandey, Associate Professor, George Warren Brown School of Social Work, Washington University

Rick Anderson, President, Tribal Data Resources

P R O C E E D I N G S

DR. BROWN: If I could have your attention, please. One of the first things that we had talked about was getting started on time, so we're close. And we hope to be pretty -- on a rigorous time schedule this morning.

Let me introduce myself. My name is Eddie Brown, and I have the honor of kind of moderating the program throughout the day, which is a major responsibility. When they were looking for someone to do that, they said, "Well, let's get Ed Brown; he's the former Assistant Secretary. He's used to trying to tell people what to do and have everybody mad at him.

So we're going to stay true, probably, to that form today.

Again, we want to thank NCAI and the Administration on Native Americans and HHS for their support in making this opportunity possible.

Today, we're gathered here to discuss a very, very important topic that will have impact on American Indians' lives for years to come. What we do today and what we do in the next four to five years is going to be critical in looking at how we assist our communities in the area of economic development, job creation, and the well-being of our citizens.

So with that, we want to open with an invocation. We are honored today to have Mr. Frank Chee Willetto from the Navajo Nation, from Crown Point, New Mexico, who is a member of the Navajo tribe as well as the Navajo Code Talkers. I'm sure they need no introduction in regards to Navajo Code Talkers. They are honored in that they have a special display in the Pentagon, recognizing their efforts in World War II and the outstanding role that they played in serving the United States and ensuring no further encroachment upon the United States by outside nations.

So we're delighted for that, and we would like to invite Mr. Frank Chee Willetto down to provide our invocation. Mr. Willetto. If you could all stand, please.

MR. WILLETTO: (Lengthy passage in Navajo.)

Our Heavenly Father, our Creator: I ask for strength, wisdom and courage for each and every one of the people that are here that are Your children. We are Your children. We need Your help. We need Your strength to give us strength and wisdom and courage. Let them, their words be strong and let their words help their people, their responsible people here. And You helped them to be here safely. Please help them to go home to their homes, to their loved ones, to their children, to their homes. Give them strength. Bless them. And we, Heavenly Father, ask for forgiveness, individually, for some of the things that we do, the things we see, without thinking. I ask this and pray to each and every -- for every person that is here. And I say this in the name of Jesus Christ. Amen.

DR. BROWN: Mr. Willetto holds a number of distinguished positions. He is a coucilmember of NICOA, the National Indian Council on Aging. But perhaps his greatest recognition comes from being the father of seven children, 21 grandchildren, and seven great-grandchildren. So we are honored to have him here today.

I want to now turn the time over to the president and the person who needs no introduction and who is here today to open up the meeting and to give his inspiration and guidance as well as to do a very special introduction for a very special guest we have here today who will be presenting.

MR. ALLEN: Well, good morning. I want to express a great deal of gratitude and appreciation to each and every one of you. Getting tribal leaders and policy individuals to come out on a weekend on a Saturday to deal with the issues that we have to deal with every day of our lives is sometimes challenging, because our work is very, very overwhelming and sometimes we just like to have weekends just to have an opportunity to go back and be with our families and rest and relax a little bit and recharge our batteries so we can get back to work early Monday mornings. But a fact of life is that our jobs simply require us to work weekends. It has caused us to have to work that extra eight and ten hours throughout the weekend to get the job done, to take care of our people and take care of our community.

So I really want to express my deepest appreciation to you to have the willingness to be here and to begin to come up with some ideas and thoughts about solutions for the welfare reform legislation and implementation of TANF programs, et cetera.

I also want to express my appreciation to Assistant Secretary Olivia Golden, who has also made adjustments in her own schedule to be here with us, to cause you to know that the administration clearly is with us in terms of finding solutions and making this legislation work for our Indian communities.

We are regularly, as a matter of everyday thought and activity and efforts, trying to make our governments work to serve our communities. And we know that that is a very challenging effort for each and every one of us. It has been challenging throughout our whole careers, it's been challenging for our elders and our predecessor leaders who have tried to cause our governments to become truly governments and full governments to fully serve our communities, from our elders to our families to the children.

Of course, every time we turn around, legislation comes out in terms of what is the will of Congress for the benefit of the people of America. A lot of times -- and quite often, as a matter of fact -- these pieces of legislation always end up dealing with the Indian country as an afterthought policy. So when the legislation is designed, often they do not think about how would it apply to our Indian communities and does it work, does it fit consistently with the rest of America.

We have been sending a message out there that our Indian community, as a general observation, are very different. We do have a number of Indian communities that are in urban settings that have a little different conditions that the majority of our communities which are in rural settings with very weak economies and so our jobs are very, very challenging. So when we try to communicate these efforts to the Congress and do the administration to cause them to understand when they put together pieces of legislation and policy as it will affect the welfare of our communities, they often sort of miss these fundamental points. And I think in the last five years particularly, we've started to make some progress. And the administration and the Congress now are starting to recognize and realize that they need to take into consideration the unique conditions of our communities and our economies. Clearly, the welfare reform legislation has to make a lot of adjustments. The TANF programs and the children's support, family support-type programs, they all have to make some adjustments. I think it's important for us to make sure that we work very closely with the administration and very closely with the Congress because we know what the problems are. Today, our expectation is going to be that we're going to engage in solutions.

We have a lot of people. I see Norm DeWeaver up there, who has been with us. You know, Eddie Brown, we regularly have called in to be with us. John Bushman has been working on this thing since the beginning of the legislation, and then all of the experts throughout our Indian communities.

But to recognize that we have problems, to recognize that this legislation and a lot of the programs don't fit really well with the tribal operations and our communities and our economies, we know that. We have made that statement. We have that collection of facts. So now, really, the issue is regarding what is taking place out there, because it is moving forward. And the fact is, the tribes are trying to work with the states, to try to get the state programs to adjust so that they're more sensitive and more reflective of their obligations to serve our communities and to assist us in making adjustments so that when people are dropping off programs, what are we going to do about that. How are we going to handle those situations or how are we going to assist the families that are off these programs and they need to move into the work force in one form or another. And do they have enough support for the children or support to get them back into schools and elevate their education.

I'm hopeful that this particular program, or this workshop will be one in which we're going to start talking about where are the solutions so we can start communicating with the administration, to the Congress, what needs to be -- what kind of adjustments need to be made to the legislation and come up with the data to make that case, to make that argument why it works or why it doesn't work and what needs to be done in order to fulfill their goals and expectations or the intent of the legislation itself.

So I really do believe that we can come up with it. I am always very proud of the fact that Indian country is a very creative set of communities. We have had many obstacles in front of us throughout our whole lives, and yet we have continued to survive; we have continued to make it work. It has been frustrating, and we always find ways to vent that frustration in our many forums, locally, regionally and nationally. But the issue here is, is how are we going to change the situation for us and for our community so that we can make a difference in the reservations and in our urban settings where we have a lot of our people residing.

So I leave you with my greatest spirits and prayers that I know that we can come up with it. We at the National Council of American Indians, our objective here is to assist in facilitating it. So as we come up with these solutions, whatever they are, whether they are legislative or whether they're congressional or administrative policy issues, we're going to help you advance. But we have to do it together. We have to do it as a team to make it work.

I was reading a little article and I just happened to glance at the top of it. It was referring to the top whiners. Well, quite frankly, we're not whiners. We have rights and we have obligations to our communities and to our people. So what we have to do is very constructively and very progressively and aggressively advance these proposals that we need to advance to the administration and to the Congress so we can fix the problems that we have in front of us so we can serve our communities and make the system work.

And I leave you with one analogy. Dr. Brown, I've always been very impressed with him for many reasons. But one of the things I've always appreciated is his ability to use metaphors and examples to try to get a message across. But I do believe that Indian country represents the eagle. And even though it's turbulent times down below here, but if we fly higher, we'll find the sunshine, we'll rise above the clouds. And in sunshine, we will meet it, and that is what our communities are expecting. So it's a matter of having the will, it's a matter of having the attitude, it's a matter of being focused. And it's a matter of being creative and solution-oriented. That's what we're all about.

So I thank you for your being here. I have to go over to finish off our conference here this morning and I look forward to coming back here and joining in with you to listen in and listen to solutions. Thank you very much. In fact, in conclusion, let me introduce a very special guest we have here, one who has been with us throughout this whole process with this administration. I even lost track of when she was actually finally appointed.

But this person truly understands our problems. We have been talking with her since the beginning regarding some of the concerns that we have, so she clearly understands the frustrations that we have from our small communities to our largest communities and the diversity from Alaska to Florida. So she's very clear about that and very clear that we need to step up and the administration needs to step up to help bridge those gaps, if you will.

But I would appreciate a very warm welcome and deep sense of appreciation for making her time available here on a Saturday. Please join me in welcoming our Assistant Secretary for Children and Welfare Administration, Olivia Golden.

(Applause.)

MS. GOLDEN: I want to say thank you, also, to President Ron Allen; to Dr. Eddie Brown; to the National Congress of American Indians for inviting me to have this chance to speak. It's an honor to be here and I also wanted to tell you that Kevin Thurm (phonetic), the Deputy Secretary of HHS, who I know has been with you before, wanted me to say that he also had wished he could be here and that, for me, it is an honor to represent him and Secretary Shalala in having the chance to speak to you.

I also wanted to introduce to you briefly the other people from the Administration on Children and Families who are here to be with you today; many of them you probably know. From our Division of Tribal Services, John Bushman and Ray Apodaca (phonetic), from our Administration on Native Americans on behalf of the commissioner, Gary Kimball (phonetic), Doug Gudeski (phonetic) is here. And a moment ago, I saw Steve Henigson (phonetic), who is our regional administrator from Seattle. There's Steve. And we very much want to be here and available to be able to provide information and help.

For me, one of the reasons that this is such an opportunity that you invited me to speak with you today is that it's a chance for me to report on what's happened since I spoke with many of you at the forum convened by HHS and NCAI in Seattle in October of 1996. At that forum, where welfare reform had just been implemented and we talked about it and the tribal leaders worked on a statement, at that forum I made a commitment to you that we would seek to implement welfare reform in a way consistent with the United States trust responsibility to our country's tribal nations and also consistent with our government-to-government relationship with the tribes.

And today is a chance for me to report to you on our accomplishments since that time, as well, I hope, as a chance to talk about where we go from here.

So what I wanted to do in keynoting this forum today was really three things: The first is to offer you an overview of TANF, the Temporary Assistance to Needy Families or welfare reform provisions, an overview of what I see happening across the country as well as in Indian country specifically.

Second, I'd like to report to you on what we've done to carry out the commitments we've made to you, and third, I wanted to leave you with some ideas for reflection as you go through this forum today on the opportunities and challenges that lie ahead for all of you.

To start with the overview of what I think has been happening in welfare reform, I wanted to start with some of the central themes, and the way that always works best for me is to think about stories. So I want to start by telling you two stories, one about a family and one about a tribal community program that I was just hearing more about this morning.

The family is not from the tribal community, but a mother that I just spoke to in New Hampshire about a week ago. I've been traveling a lot to try to have a chance to talk to parents and talk to people engaged in welfare reform. And she was a former welfare recipient; very recent former welfare recipient. She had just gotten a job in November. And she had gotten a clerical job after finishing a clerical skills course. And she told me it was her first job in six or seven years, since before the birth of her youngest child. And she said to me, she said, "I was jumping up and down. I told my children about the job, they were jumping up and down. I was on Cloud 9 for a week." What really came through most of all in her story was just the joy that came with the dignity of having work to support her family.

The second thing that came through in her story were the kinds of supports she needed to get there. She needed child care. Her youngest at the time I talked with her was 4 or 5, and she needed child care. It was very important to her that she had a regular child support check coming in from the children's father, because that made it possible for her to make ends meet. And she clearly had also needed the support of other people in coming to the belief that she could take a next step and take a job.

The second story is about the Silletts (phonetic) tribe and confederated tribes in Oregon, which I had heard a little bit about last week and was just hearing more about that program. That's an integrated program, bringing together lots of different pieces to enable families to move to work. And the pieces I was just hearing about were focused on life skills and readiness for the job, a focus on child care, real flexibility so that whatever families need could be there; and again, the importance of child support once someone takes a job as a way of making sure that they could keep that job.

What I think is in common between those two stories and the many other stories I've been hearing as I travel the country is several themes. The first theme is work. It really is central to the welfare reform legislation; that is legislation that it's about work, about people's ability to move from welfare to a setting where they can support themselves through work. A second theme which is in both those stories -- and again, I think it's nationwide -- is the theme of the kind of supports that families need in order to find work and to succeed in it, because staying in work, having earnings increase, being successful on the job is really what we want for families -- for all families in tribal communities and not in tribal communities.

Third, I think there are some very specific supports for families that are turning out to be especially important in many places: Child care, good settings for young children to be in while parents work, child support, because for many of the parents on welfare it's going to take a job plus some support from the parent who is not living with the family in order for the family to make it. Those two are so critical that they're also addressed in the legislation itself.

And there are others, of course: health care, lots of other kinds of -- transportation, lots of other supports that families may need to find jobs and to succeed in them. So, work, supports for work and for success on the job, child care and child support in particular.

The fourth theme, I think, is the theme that no one approach is going to work across the whole country, that the idea behind the legislation is that states and tribes need to be free to be creative and flexible in how they design their programs in a way that works for their communities. And the fifth theme is that the legislation does provide for some important new tribal roles; provides for child care resources that go directly to the tribe, it provides for a choice for whether a tribe chooses to implement the TANF, the welfare reform provisions or work with the state on those provisions, and it provides, also, for a choice in relation to child support.

So whether or not a tribe chooses to implement the TANF provisions itself, there's an important new role for tribal communities in relation to states in putting the pieces together for families.

So those are, I think, the big picture themes from the legislation. Let me just tell you about a few other features of the legislation and then try to give you a little bit of an overview of how I think it's working in practice at this point. I said that the legislation has a central focus on work, and that shows up in a number of ways, shows up in requirements for individuals to work, and also in requirements that are imposed on states and if the tribe chooses to implement TANF itself, requirements that are also imposed on tribes.

The most one particular one is the participation rate requirement that a percent of families are engaged in a variety of work activities. The legislation specifies those requirements for states for tribes; it says that the Secretary will determine them, and as we've been working through tribal plans with those tribes that are carrying out TANF, we've been working on what those percentages should be. So that the legislation puts front and center the idea that people should be working, should be engaging in different kinds of work activities and should be moving into the work force, and that that's central for welfare reform.

The legislation has also called temporary assistance for needy families and focuses on the idea that welfare assistance should be temporary and a transition to access to the work force, so the legislation has a time limit for federal assistance; in the case of states of five years of support with federal resources with 20 percent of the caseload possibly exempted from that. In the case of tribes that choose to operate TANF again, that's subject to a specific discussion with the Secretary, a specific decision by the Secretary of HHS, that again, the idea is that it's temporary assistance that provides support for a family over a period of time.

Other key elements of the legislation in addition to the TANF provisions, it does have a title and a whole section on child support with the idea that tough enforcement of child support is really critical to a family's ability to succeed, and it has a whole section on child care. And finally, as I said in relation to the tribes, it has a provision for child care resources to flow to the tribes. The Secretary made the choice to pick the maximum set-aside in the law of 2 percent of the dollars going to tribal communities. In TANF, it provides for a tribal choice and in child support for a choice.

Overall, I think the one other key theme that I think emerges from the legislation for tribal communities is the critical nature of the conversations between the tribe and the state in designing plans that will work for families whether or not a tribe chooses to operate TANF on its own. Because in all cases, tribes have something critical to bring the to the table. The state can't afford to ignore tribes because tribes are bringing some of the key child care resources and some of the key knowledge of families to the table. So whether or not a tribe is operating its own program, it's critical for families that there be effective conversations going on.

When I get to reporting on what we've done, one of the roles that the tribal leaders asked us to play after that Seattle conference was to attempt to do everything we could to make sure states would come to the table, and I want to report to you on some of the things that have happened in that arena.

But before I do that, let me spend a few moments on an overview of welfare reform and what I see as I travel in terms of what's been going on nationally, and then just a little bit on the tribal plans and on what's been going on in tribal communities. Later on, you'll hear from Ray Apodaca and John Bushman in more detail on that.

Nationally, if you look across the country at the year and a half since welfare reform was implemented, the national big picture is that we've had the chance to implement it in a time of an extraordinarily strong economy. And so we've clearly seen people going to work, some people going to work and continuing to receive additional supplements from welfare; other people going to work and leaving welfare. But we've seen from the evidence we've got changes in the employment of people on welfare and people who have left it.

We don't know a lot beyond that yet about the effect on recipients. And there is some national research going on. Dr. Brown is doing some research specifically in tribal communities. Over time, we're going to know more. But right now, what we know about families, as I said, that more people are working, that people who are leaving welfare, some have income increases; that's often the people who are working. Some people have income decreases. We haven't seen, yet, the substantial hardships that many people had expected. We haven't seen evidence, for example, of children being placed in foster care or of homelessness, but we also have early and scattered information. So we haven't seen that yet.

And we have seen that when families go to work, they still need other kinds of supports in order to be able to make it. So that's kind of what we know about families. What we know about state choices, state policy and funding choices -- and these are really important, I think, in terms of the effects on tribal communities of state choices -- we have not seen evidence of some of the really bad things that people were predicting. People were predicting at the beginning that there would be "a race to the bottom" -- that is, that states would take this flexibility and choose to sharply reduce benefit levels to families and take other actions that would be designed to really cut assistance available to families. That has not in general happened. States have mostly not changed benefit levels; they've mostly focused on policies that are about work. For example, states have increased the flexibility of their policies in letting families keep some of their welfare resources to supplement a paycheck, and that's called an "earnings disregard."

States have made some investments, but it's a challenge. We've been challenging them to make more investments. Let me explain that. As you know, welfare caseloads have gone down dramatically across the nation. They've gone down about 30 percent since this administration came into office. That means that states have extra resources; they have money that they're not spending on cash benefits for families.

We've been challenging states. The President has been challenging them to reinvest that money. It's resource --

(End side 1, tape 1.)

-- work. The key issues that I'm seeing around the country that are remaining issues we have to address -- and I want to highlight these because some of them may apply in your communities -- transportation is an issue in many places that there are jobs and there are families, but they're not in the same place. Housing is an issue in lots of different ways, but, for example, that people do get work but they still can't afford housing on the salary or the hours that they have. Health care and child care are issues.

All those are areas where some states, but not all, are choosing to invest resources to solve the problem. Investment remains a message that we have to keep giving to the states because some of them are choosing to use the additional resources partly to solve other problems rather than focusing on low-income families.

We've also been really challenging states to invest in all families, not to invest only in some geographic areas or in families who might be easier to move to work. There are also a lot of issues, and I think these may feel familiar in tribal communities, about rural areas or inner-city areas that may have a lack of jobs even when the economy as a whole is really doing very well.

Finally, I'm hearing a lot about issues of job retention, of people getting a job, but then of the need for continued investment and support after people get that first job so that they can continue and progress. And those are all things that there are some resources out there to address and that we've really been pushing states to do.

Finally, just a couple of words on welfare reform in Indian country. At this point, we've received a relatively small number of plans for tribes to operate their own tribal TANF programs. We've received 11 plans and approved 10; that is the up-to-date number. Since we are still in the process of developing the regulations, which I'll talk to you about in a moment, that have the overview of the participation rate and time limit issues among others, we've worked through -- John Bushman and Division of Tribal Services have worked through in each of those tribal conversations individual time limits and participation rates and strategies for those tribes.

There are some extraordinarily creative things going on. This morning before I was talking, before I had the chance to speak here, I also, in addition to hearing about the Silletts plan, heard about the Red Cliff tribe and their plan. And my sense of what's going on in the tribal plans, which I know you'll hear more about during the course of the day, is that people are taking the opportunity to put strategies together that are very tailored to their own needs.

We've also done a lot of work to try to make sure of the financial viability of those plans to work with states, that they'll make an investment; the law doesn't require them to. We're really pleased, for example, that the latest tribal plan that we've approved from California, that the state is making a full match to the tribal resources. And we think -- and I want to come to this in a moment, that some policies that we've put out affecting the states have encouraged them and pushed them to make some of those investments.

Many tribal communities or the families in many tribal communities are being served through state TANF programs. It's early yet, and so we don't know a lot yet about how tribal families are faring within those state programs. But again, we have a sense that in some places, there are some creative conversations going on, and Dr. Brown's research, as it moves ahead, will give us a sense in one state, in Arizona, of both how families are faring in tribal programs and those who are served through the state programs.

That's a very quick overview of what's going on nationally. Now, let me say a little bit about what we've done in HHS to carry out our commitments. At the national meeting, the meeting that I mentioned to you in October in Seattle, tribal leaders prepared a tribal leaders' statement -- many of you were probably part of that -- which set forth ways that the federal government should act to support tribes in relation to the legislation. It had many helpful suggestions that have really focused on thinking, have focused a lot on providing information on technical assistance, on ways in which we might assist tribal leaders in determining what your options were and in carrying those out. And we've done a number of things to act on those suggestions.

First, let me tell you about one overall thing we've done, and then some specific commitments. One of the most important things we've done overall is in February of 1997, in recognition of our trust responsibility and of our government-to-government relationship with tribes, we created an office whose primary job is to carry out the tribal specific provisions of this legislation in Indian country and to assist you in making informed decisions about welfare reform. It's a division of tribal services located within our Office of Community Services, and John Bushman, who many of you know, directs that office. Many of you probably know him from his work with the United States Senate Indian Affairs Committee and the Department of the Interior. And John has really done an extraordinary job working with tribal governments, working where necessary with state and federal agencies and trying to make sure that we were providing information, carrying out regulations and guidance and in general doing what we need to do to support your implementation of the law.

Let me tell you about a few other things we've done that we think are important, and I want to report to you both so you have a sense of what we are proud of, but also so you can tell us what we haven't done and what we need to do next; I think that will be useful if that's one of the things that happens today.

The first of the commitments that has shaped what we're doing is a commitment to provide you with information early as you are making key choices. In particular, the choice about whether or not to operate the TANF program. The Division of Tribal Services has been a key part of that, and so has some work we've done through the administration for Native Americans under the leadership of Commissioner Gary Kimball. There, we've put some resources into providing tribes and Native American communities with the tools that you need to make sure that your decisions on welfare reform fit your community-based goals and objectives.

We've awarded five competitive grants and one contract that are intended to provide tribes and Native American communities with the information and the opportunity to make your own decisions. The grants have gone to the Catawba Nation, the Alaska Cook Inlet Tribal Council, the Northwest U.S. Portland Area Indian Health Board, Oklahomans for Indian Opportunity, and the Californian Indian Manpower Consortium. And in addition, we've made a commitment, investment working with NCAI to assist with this conference and with other consultations.

What we've been finding from this information dissemination is that we've been able to put together forums and opportunities for tribal, state and community leaders to talk about mutual concerns and share information in order to make good decisions. So we're hopeful for more feedback today, but our sense is that that's been an important strategy. If you hadn't pushed us on it, we probably would never have made that resource commitment to make sure it happened.

A second commitment -- the first was about early information provision as you're making decisions -- the second is to assist and support you as you implement your choices across welfare reform or TANF, child care and child support. And I just want to note several things that we've done. One way, obviously, of supporting your work is the work that the Division of Tribal Services has done in negotiating around plans and providing specific tribe-by-tribe guidance as well as broader guidance.

In the child care arena, I want to highlight a couple of things because I'm very excited. I mentioned to you that in terms of resources, the Secretary made the maximum choice for the resources going out to Indian communities representing an increase in dollars from '96 to '97 and then again from '97 to '98.

The other thing we've just done in child care is we've just let a three-year contract to a Native American contractor to strengthen child care services in tribal communities for Native American children and families across the country. There is going to be a lot of information available to you as you shape your child care programs. There will be a toll-free information and referral line, a database of promising tribal models, a tribal child care home page for people who would like to get their information through the computer, a newsletter, a tribal conference, and also on-site technical assistance. It will really improve our ability to have an expert get out there and work with you as you're trying to resolve child care issues.

And finally, we're also trying to look in the rest of what we do and see where there are opportunities to make linkages. I think you're going to hear from Don Sykes later today; he heads our Office of Community Services, and he's looking for ways that Office of Community Service programs could help you to spur economic development and create jobs and put those pieces together with the welfare strategies.

The third commitment -- I said early information, assistance and implementation -- a third critical commitment is clearly to broad consultation with all of you as tribal leaders. We made a substantial commitment to that in developing the tribal TANF regulations. We did a broad consultation strategy before we drafted. We're now at the stage where draft regulations are being reviewed within the federal government and we're aiming for publishing them in draft late this spring. When they get published, that means you get another chance to comment, and then we take those comments into account in doing a final regulation.

The Office of Child Support Enforcement is also about to begin consultations as they try to draft regulations that will carry out the new choices around child support enforcement. So you should be looking for that opportunity to comment.

And finally -- and this is, I think, really the fourth commitment that's shaped our strategies -- in the tribal leaders' document from the meeting in Seattle, all of you suggested very forcefully to us that it was important for us to play a role -- I think the words of the document were "as a facilitator and mediator" -- to make sure or to do what we could to influence the nature of state participation in state tribal conversations, to try to do what we could do to bring key people to the table.

The biggest single thing we've done -- and we've done a variety of policy steps -- but the biggest single thing we've done was to issue a policy announcement which told states that if they put resources into tribal TANF programs, they could count it as "maintenance of effort." What that means -- you don't need to know the technical details, but it basically means the states could take credit for that money. The law tells them they have to spend some money on maintenance of effort, and we made the decision that they could take credit for money they invested in tribal programs as maintenance of effort. That's been a big incentive to some states.

I understand that California and Washington State and I think now Alaska have expressed a commitment to put resources into tribal TANF programs, and we're hearing that it's at least in part as a result of that policy choice. So we're very glad that that had the impact we wanted it to have.

Let me close by saying a few things that I hope will frame your own deliberations for the rest of this session. The agenda looks to me like an extraordinarily rich one, and I really think that President Allen's words, that "Indian country is a very creative set of communities," certainly reflects everything I've seen when I've had the opportunity to visit tribal communities and see the ways in which you have a history and an experience of putting programs together in ways that work.

I guess what I want to highlight is that I feel our responsibility to you very strongly, I take it very seriously. At the same time, of course, I know that you feel your own responsibility to the families and the children in your communities even more seriously and it will take all of us to make this actually work.

I would actually ask you to reflect on three opportunities and challenges as you go through the remainder of today's session on welfare reform. The first -- and this really builds on President Allen's point about the creativity -- is that this is an opportunity for you to cross boundaries within your tribal services to link up and connect programs that may not have been connected in the past and to design services in what might be a totally new way that's going to be effective for families.

What I've been hearing about both the tribal TANF programs and those state programs that are effective is that they really involve starting from the children and families and from what families need to move to work and to succeed in work, and then building backwards to think about the kinds of services. And that probably means connecting up with child care, early child care, education services in a way that you may not have been doing before. It probably means connecting with the economic development side of the world. It may mean all kinds of things that I can't even predict or think of. But I would just encourage you to seize the opportunity to be as creative as you think will work for families.

Second -- and this is probably something that goes without saying, but it just may be something you will be interested in reflecting on today -- I would urge you to insist on being at the table for state decision-making, whether you're running a separate program or not. Because either way -- and I'm seeing nods over there; there's probably a great story behind that in Oregon -- either way, for this to work, for these programs to work for families, it's going to be critical that the state makes its decisions in a way that supports families' needs for child care and child support and job services, and that state decisions and tribal decisions fit effectively in ways that work for families.

I guess what I just want to highlight is that you're bringing a lot to the table. The law does give you some things that you're bringing to the table in the way of child care resources, in the way -- in terms of what families are going to need from you and the way that will need to be linked up with what they need from the state, and the way we judge and assess states is going to give them some pressure to talk with you about what's happening in tribal communities. So I just want to urge you to insist on being at the table in ways that I know many of you have a long history of doing and to let us know if there are ways we can assist in it.

Third -- and again, this is something that probably everybody here has already made by being willing to be here on a Saturday morning -- I would just urge all of the key members of tribal leadership who are here to maintain a personal commitment and investment to welfare reform strategies. I've certainly been learning myself that welfare reform is one of those far-reaching changes that I can't oversee by delegating; I have to be out there, I have to be visiting, I have to be talking to families. I think I've been in six states in the last three weeks trying to make sure I was really understanding at a very local level what was happening.

I'm really hoping to get, soon, out to see a tribal program right at the beginning of TANF. Just before, I was in the Salt River tribal community in Arizona and had the chance to talk with families from a tribal jobs program who talked with me about -- one mother in particular talked to me about the enormous power of now having a GED and being able to talk to her 15-year-old son about education in a way she had never been able to do before. And I'm very eager to now get a chance to visit some communities and see what's happening and where the creative ideas are and what's working and not working for families.

But I guess I just want to highlight that it seems to me that those of you who are here who have made the commitment to your time on a Saturday morning have already done this, but I just want to underline for you that this is centrally important for families, and the more personal investment and involvement you and your colleagues as key elected leadership are able to make, I think the better in terms of success for families.

So I guess I just want to close by again saying that I appreciate your inviting me to speak and having the opportunity. It's a real honor. That I also appreciate your commitment, your history of the kinds of work you've done for families and for tribal communities. The kind of creativity that I've seen in your communities is just extraordinary, and I think Ron Allen is right to highlight that as a huge asset.

I want to pledge to you on behalf of President Clinton, Secretary Shalala, and myself that we at the federal level are committed to assisting tribal children and families. We want to do what we can to support you in making sure that welfare reform achieves its promise, and we want to ensure that the trust responsibility of the United States to our country's tribal nations is fulfilled, and that the government-to-government relationship that we are committed to having with you is carried out fully and effectively.

So I guess I want to say thank you for your own history and experience of extraordinary commitment, and I want to wish you the best of luck as you go through what looks to me like an extremely demanding and valuable day. Good luck, and thank you. (Applause.)

DR. BROWN: Assistant Secretary Golden, we again want to thank you for your time and for your interest. We know that you have a very busy schedule and will have to move forward on some other assignments and tasks you have today, but we want to again thank you for taking the time to be with us here today.

MS. GOLDEN: Thank you very much.

Panel 1- Tribal TANF Plans

DR. BROWN: We're now going to move ahead. We're going to call those members of the first panel to come forward. And as they're coming forward, we're going to talk a little about the ground rules today. So if those panel members can come forward of Panel 1 and please be seated up here. Is Leland here in the audience?

Because we have such a packed agenda here today, we want to make sure that it's an agenda where people have a chance to not only listen -- this is not an opportunity to just be spoon-fed here this morning, but also an opportunity to react. So we've asked each of the panelists to keep their comments brief in looking at just what some of their experiences have been in doing some very creative kind of positive things, as well as what they see as challenges and maybe some of the concerns that they may have to share with you.

We've asked each of them to keep their comments under five minutes and we will be watching that very closely, so I ask: Be patient with me if we tend to push you a little bit in keeping to that time. Then after that, we would ask them to have some kind of interaction between themselves a short period of time, and then we're going to have this microphone and another microphone out in the audience and we're going to do a "Jerry Springer" kind of discussion here. (Laughter.)

DR. BROWN: So we don't want -- we do have a couple of bodyguards out here to keep any fights down to a minimum, but we do want as you're listening here to develop your questions. Now, there are several things, as pointed out by the Assistant Secretary. We know that every state will be different and that every tribe is different. Some of the things you hear may not relate directly to your tribe at that point of time, but I assure you as we move through the day, we will get to some of those variations of some of those questions.
 

Again, we have some very distinguished panel members here that we really want to take use of their valuable time and asking questions and making sure that we get every bit of information that we can from them.

I'm not going to do justice here on introductions as well because of time. I'm going to keep this very limited. We all understand that to be a member of this panel, you've got to have extensive experience, in-depth knowledge and really know everything there is to know about your particular subject. So with that in mind, let me just -- you're on the hook today.

With that in mind, let me just briefly introduce individuals. We have first of all Mr. Ray Apodaca, who is here representing the Division of Tribal Services. Mr. Bushman, is John -- okay, we're delighted to have John here. As many of you may be aware, John was injured, had an accident a number of weeks ago, was severely injured, by the way, and we're quite surprised to see him here today, but he has a very strong interest in the program, and I think he came here to watch over Ray and listen to his comments here this morning.

So Ray is going to be talking from his vast experience and knowledge at various levels of government over the past few years. He will be followed by Beth Meyers, who is the Family Service Division Chief of the Red Cliff Band of Lake Superior Chipewa. You know, Wisconsin has had the best-kept secret for the last 15 or so years, because no one knew that up in Wisconsin, they have been subcontracting from the state running their own AFDC, Food Stamp, Medicaid eligibility programs for the last 15 years. So as when welfare reform came about, the tribe was well-positioned and is moving forward in taking over their TANF program and have now said, "we want the Food Stamps, we want Medicaid eligibility, let's have it." So we're delighted to have her here today.

The next individual will be Gerald Heminger, Jr., a councilmember from The Sisseton-Wahpeton Sioux. And what you will notice that each representative here are from a slightly different kind of a tribe or different situation. Sisseton-Wahpeton has the extreme honor of being from that notorious state of South Dakota. And so we've all heard rumors of South Dakota and welfare reform; now we're going to hear the real story. They are a very interesting tribe in that they have gone TANF in a state which does not have an historical working relationship with tribes. So it will be interesting to hear their situation.

That will be followed by Mr. Joe Finkbonner, the Life Center Director from the Lummi Nation from Washington who is a tribe that has not done TANF, but has looked at some other ways of looking at working with the state. Part of what we call -- I think Tony referred to as "those pondering tribes," is that right, Tony? I think most of the tribes that are considering it are pondering whether to TANF or not to TANF are a part of that area.

So we have a good selection here. We're going to kick it off with Mr. Apodaca and again, we'll keep you down to the five minutes. If you could share with you the experience, give a little information and then be ready for questions.

MR. APODACA: Thank you. Good morning. I thought I was going to have the opportunity for the first time to get up and say "I'm John Bushman, you can have anything you want," but he showed up, so I can't do that.

(Laughter.)

MR. APODACA: He decided to come over and watch me.

Let me just very quickly go through some points that I think are important to look at, starting with -- the Assistant Secretary mentioned earlier that there are currently nine tribes and one consortium who have approved plans. There is also an eleventh plan that is currently pending final approval for a May 1 start-up date. And we are aware of either by conversation or by actual exchange of paperwork and notices and so on of at least nine other tribes and regional consortia that are in different stages of consideration and planning on TANF plans.

We expect this to increase quite a bit as the tribes are beginning to look at themselves and understand their capacities and also become more comfortable with the concept of TANF. In terms of plans, I'm glad that we have the selection in the panel here and that you will have the opportunity to talk to different people, because the plans vary; and rightfully so according to the particular needs of the populations they're going to serve according to the particular tribe's geography, economies, your particular relationships with the non-Indian communities and everything -- all the other factors that affect the welfare of your people. And they should vary.

That has basically been the underlying theme or the underlying direction that we would like to take and, hopefully, to help the tribes to take -- is that there is no magic little box that you fit into, but that you have to be creative, you have to be innovative. You have to really look at what works for you -- not what works for somebody else; what works for you and for your people.

I'm going to concentrate most of what I'm going to talk about because of the time limitation on the NPRM, the Notice of Proposed Rule Making. We currently have been -- we have finished the NPRM and we have chosen to go to NPRM and not to an interim final which we could have done because of the time frame involved, because we do want a full opportunity for comment for the tribes. We want to really understand what you want to see in this, and have, through John's leadership and direction made a total commitment to as great a flexibility as we can within the perimeters of the law, of course, itself, which we are bound by.

The NPRM is in the Department right now for clearance. In fact, I was just talking to John earlier about the fact that next week we are going to be doing a departmental briefing. We hope to get it out as quickly as possible and then, of course, we have to deal with the OMB process which can take up to 90 days before actual publication.

However, we have made a commitment that as soon as we have a concrete idea of date, of any time frame, we will immediately let NCI know so that they can in turn help us let you know and be prepared for the publication of the NPRM, so that we can get your input and we can proceed with coming up with final regulations.

The philosophy with which we approach the NPRM and the regs is to set out general rules incorporating the provisions of the law into regulation while maintaining as much flexibility as absolutely possible. We did not seek in any way to augment statutory definitions, but rather to standardize some of the basic definitions and set the basic perimeters to insure compliance with the intent of the law. In doing this, we've allowed for maximum flexibility. Let me give you some examples of what I'm talking about.

In being flexible --

(End side 2, tape 1.)

-- in defining service population, in defining Indian family, for example, the tribes will be able to define family in such a way as to better reflect your traditional family structures and relationships, not those of the average American in New York City or someplace else that you're not familiar with. We're also, in defining it, allowing in defining a service population to define who you choose to serve, both in terms of area and in terms of actual population. We're going to let -- a tribe can choose, for example, to define -- to serve enrolled members and their families only; all Indians in your service area or reservation.

Indians and non-Indian families. You can even, through agreements with the state, serve populations outside of your traditional reservation boundaries or traditional service areas -- again, with negotiation and concurrence with your states. Because it's a block grant, we're also making allowance for the tribe to provide services under TANF that are not commonly or normally considered public assistance. In this light, for example, we're proposing that such things as child care, work subsidies, transportation services, subsidies and allowances that cover living expenses, education and training can be included in the definition of assistance, which is something that states are not doing in most cases.

We're allowing flexibility in participation rates, and you tailoring your participation rates, to meet your needs. We're allowing flexibility in the establishment of time limitations. And, in fact, when you read the NPRM, you're even going to find that you can even set varying rates, varying time limits for different parts of your service area to reflect economic needs and situations and so on.

In addition to the NPRM, we've completed work on the TANF guidance document of which there were copies at the table and I hope everybody got one. If you read the guidance document, you basically are getting a preview of the NPRM, because we're not substantially going beyond that, other than adding on reporting requirements and data collection items.

Finally, we are committed to eliminating unnecessary data collection, unnecessary reporting to simplify as much as possible and give you the benefit of giving priority to serving people and not to bureaucratic processes.

I notice from Dr. Brown that he's waving his hand over there and telling me that I need to conclude. The only thing else that I would add is that we would urge, we would hope that as tribal leaders, as program leaders, that the discussion of TANF becomes, if it's not already, a priority item on your agenda, and that it become an integral and ongoing priority item in your human services programs.

DR. BROWN: Mr. Apodaca, what I understand, then, you're talking about some regulations that are going to come out that are going to be very flexible. You're not talking about letter-of-the-law kind of very intricate kinds of regulations. Is that correct?

MR. APODACA: That's correct. Our flexibility obviously in no way is intended to circumvent the law itself; we have the law that we're all bound by. But within the perimeters of that law, we are being as absolutely flexible as possible in allowing the tribes to be creative and to come up with what addresses their needs and not what we think should be their needs.

DR. BROWN: Any surprises that we can expect?

MR. APODACA: I don't think so. I think to some people in the department, our flexibility is a little surprising, but --

DR. BROWN: Okay.

MR. APODACA: -- but in terms of the tribes, I think you'll like what we've done. And, certainly, you have the opportunity to come back and comment on it.

DR. BROWN: Great. Thank you. Next, we have Beth Meyers, with state of Wisconsin Red Cliff. Please.

MS. MEYERS: Well, I wasn't at the planning meeting last night, so I didn't realize we only had five minutes, so I'll talk very fast. There are some important things that I want to share with you. The Red Cliff Tribe of Wisconsin is very unique. As Mr. Brown said earlier, we administered the AFDC program for over 20 years with a state contract. We are one of five tribes in the nation to do that. Stockbridge Muncie of Wisconsin was another tribe, and I believe the Vice Chairman is sitting up here in the audience, who may have some important information to share later.

In taking on TANF, it was a natural progression for us to do that. We actually received more money taking on the federal program than we would have continuing to contract with the state of Wisconsin, even without the state match. So when you're negotiating your TANF program and when you're thinking about it during the planning process, you want to look at how much money the state is spending on your population today versus how much money they spent in 1994 and see if that matching fund is a moot issue or not. For us in Red Cliff, it was a moot issue.

A little background on Red Cliff. In addition to operating the TANF program since October of 1997, we also administer the Medical Assistance and Food Stamps programs with the state contract. We have the state and federal child care programs. We operate the BIA general assistance program. We have an Indian Child Welfare Department. We have a cooperative agreement with the county in our area to do our child support enforcement and all the money collected goes directly to the family.

Without a doubt, one of the deciding factors in operating the TANF program was that we had the basic support of services to help tribal members in need of temporary assistance, and that's real important -- temporary assistance; that's what it's all about today.

Coordinating tribal TANF with other social programs is critical to helping tribal members become self-sufficient. And when you're talking about the social supportive services, it's important to keep in mind that those should include: education and training, mental health and AODA services -- in Wisconsin, we call it AODA, Alcohol and Other Drug Abuse. I'm going to do this very quickly.

I am an ex-welfare recipient. I know what it's like to wait for the welfare check that will maybe make it 20 days out of a 30-day month. I know what it's like to wait for the food stamps that will come that will buy 20 days' worth of food in a 30-day month. I'm committed to helping tribal members with a better life, to get past that.

When I was on welfare, no one at the state agency offered any supportive services. They offered me child care in my last year of college, but by then my kids were in grade school, so I didn't need it. No one ever offered me assistance with mental health or AODA issues. Going through the trauma of a divorce -- anyone in the room -- I'm sure some of us have also gone through that and you know what it's like.

So hold your state to it. As Olivia said earlier, states have a decrease in their caseload. Their funding was based on '95 or '94 funding, whichever was in their best interest to accept. Make sure that the resources that they have are going to provide supportive services to your tribal members. And we have to continue to work with Congress. Invite your senators and your representatives to your home. Introduce them to your struggling families. I think that goes a lot farther than us continuing to send the letters in.

One of the things we're doing in Red Cliff that I'm very excited to share every time I talk to a group of people is, in January, we did a mental health assessment of our TANF and general assistance population. We assessed their mental health needs and their AODA needs. From the information that we gathered, we're going to develop a 12-month curriculum, and then we will address those needs during our monthly meetings. That is very exciting.

We're not to the point yet where we're creating jobs for this population because we're still trying to get the population job-ready. Maybe in the second or third year, we'll be working on the job creation. Initial summaries from this mental health and AODA assessment show that suicide and alcohol and drug abuse are still a very serious issue for tribal members. When Congress passed PL104193, I believe it was their sense, of the Congress, that tribes have access to all the funding available to agencies to administer these welfare programs, and tribes must demand a level playing field and be given access to the same funding sources that states have.

The 60-month limit means that we have to get our tribal members into the work force as soon as possible, and we're going to have to prepare them for that. And how often have tribal leaders heard, when we don't have access to the same funding that states have, "Oh, that was an oversight." We can no longer accept that, because we're in this to help and we want to have access to everything everyone else has.

One of the examples is, states have an evaluation component to their TANF programs. Red Cliff has asked Secretary Shalala repeatedly for an evaluation program, and repeatedly, she has said "Gaween" (phonetic) to us, "no." Tribal governments are mature contracting agencies that deserve the bonuses that other governmental agencies receive. Unfortunately, we don't have those.

States have access to TANF and Welfare to Work performances bonuses; tribes do not. And I'm excited to tell you today in Red Cliff, our TANF population, we are exceeding our work requirements. We have 100 percent of our two-parent families in a work component, and we will not receive a bonus for doing that. We have proof that we can do as good, if not a better job than the state in providing these services, and we should be rewarded for that. And who knows our families better than we do? You know your families and you know what they need.

I have been fortunate to come to some of your homelands and work with your staff, and I just want to share with you -- and I'm sure you already know

this -- that your staff is working very, very hard on this issue. It's a difficult process and it does not have immediate results. I'm sure they could use a word of encouragement from you when you get back home and that would help them to continue to work on this issue.

Part of the difficulty with the process of negotiating welfare reform programs is that we're up against the written word. And an example is -- I have it here -- Eddie is walking around and I'm getting a little nervous.

MR. APODACA: Keep looking away from him. That's what we do in South Dakota.

MS. MEYERS: Good. The BIA sent this out. It is their Indian Affairs Strategic Plan. And in here it states that, "the BIA meets 87 percent of the tribal members' basic need defined as food, clothing and shelter." If that was a true statement, we wouldn't be here today. So, please, I'll leave this copy with NCAI. Take a look at it and call everyone at the BIA and call the President and cite this example and say, "No, we're not going to put up with this anymore." If you're going to write this, then let's hold them to it.

The maximum amount here in Red Cliff for GA is $240, and that's not anywhere near 87 percent. Am I out of time, Eddie? Dang. Okay, thank you very much. (Applause.)

DR. BROWN: Please remember you'll have a chance to ask questions.

MS. MEYERS: Oh, good.

(Laughter.)

DR. BROWN: Beth, but let me ask: Does the tribe continue to contract food stamps and Medicaid eligibility from the state of Wisconsin?

MS. MEYERS: Yes, we do.

DR. BROWN: So you are actually running those programs as well through a special subcontract through the state?

MS. MEYERS: Right.

DR. BROWN: Okay. Good. Next, we have Mr. Heminger from Sisseton-Wahpeton. Please.

MR. HEMINGER: Good morning. Thank you, Eddie. I'd like to say good morning to each and every one of you here and I'd like to thank you for being here. I believe I leaned back and asked Norm, "Have we had this many tribal people at any of our forums on welfare reform," and I don't believe we have. This is a pretty good outcome.

We at Sisseton had a course of about seven meetings over the last two years and we came to Washington quite a few times, been to the state of Washington, to every meeting that was put on -- myself and Richard Cable (phonetic), our program manager, most of you probably know him. And on our decision to administer TANF is, we feel we have a young council back home; I'm 39 and I'm right in the center of them -- we've got three older than me and three younger than me. We have a seven-member council. And we feel that we can do just as good as anybody else can to serve our own people.

So that's why we've taken on TANF and it's been a good thing for our participants. We have integrated 477, the work opportunities and TANF into one program. When you walk into the office, it's about as big as this area here is, square. We have seven offices in there plus the program manager. So when they walk in the door, we sort of lock them in and we don't let them out until we help them. We get them the services that they need.

(Laughter.)

MR. HEMINGER: But some of the problems that we've run into with TANF is that we don't have enough money for economic development. We have reduced our caseload from 225 down to 165 participants. We need to create some more jobs. As a councilman, I also chair the reservation planning back home and I've been on the council now for six years. We're looking at expanding our Dakota Western Bag Factory. We doubled in size last year and we didn't build it big enough, so we're looking at expanding that again.

We did build a new Dakota Magic Casino, like a lot of the tribes did, and we put up an interim casino. Right now we're looking at getting financing. Next week, we meet on that in Minneapolis, and we hope to create there up to about 700 jobs. Currently, we have 312 in the interim facility, so we're going to have plenty of jobs available, but not everybody can go to work in a casino. Myself, I would hate to go to work in a casino.

We are looking at a day care-child care facility, building a new one. Currently, with the plans that we have drawn up, it's going to cost us $1 million-plus, because that's one of the big concerns from our participants is that we need child care services and we need transportation; that is our second biggest problem.

Those are our two biggest problems that we've run into is child care and transportation. With integration of TANF into our other programs, we did have -- our community college did hire a TANF person, and one thing that the states haven't done that we have been able to do is to allow our participants to go to school and get a GED or get their high school diploma, get them into a one-year course, because we are on a 60-month period, so we have done that ourselves there at the tribe.

And I have a question for John Bushman, but I'll save that until we ask the questions. So that's pretty much what we have done. And we serve three counties. Our tribe is a little over 10,000 members and we have about a little over 6,500 living on the reservation. I guess from our side, we would encourage any of you tribes that are looking at it to take a serious look at it. Mr. Brown did say we have the honor of having Senator Daschle on our side; legislation was sponsored last year by him and we did get $1 million for the South Dakota tribes that have their own approved TANF tribe, and so far we are the only ones. So we're looking at $1 million being available to ourselves.

(Laughter.)

MR. HEMINGER: With that, I would like to thank you. Being a Sioux from South Dakota, what I would like to do is continue to look this way, and when Mr. Brown goes out the room, I'll turn around and we'll all continue to talk.

(Laughter.)

MR. HEMINGER: Thank you.

DR. BROWN: Thank you. Beth and Gerald, are either of you receiving state match?

MR. HEMINGER: We are not. We did get some services from the state. They did help out with transitional funds just to get the program going.

DR. BROWN: Okay, Beth?

MS. MEYERS: As I stated, we are not receiving matching funds, but if we would have continued to contract with the state of Wisconsin, the tribe would have received less money even without the matching funds.

DR. BROWN: Gerald, you mentioned one thing and we keep hearing 477. What has that meant to your tribe? You indicated you are a 477 tribe. Just very briefly, what does that do for you?

MR. HEMINGER: That allowed us to integrate all our services into one area, one administration, public law. So it came out a couple of years ago. It's been real good for our services. It's been a benefit more to our participants than anything. We can have one person administer everything and it allowed that, and integration of other services that were there. So it's been great.

DR. BROWN: So you put all of your dollars into one kind of pot with one audit, one single reporting agency, rather than reporting to the Department of Labor, HHS and the BIA you just go where, through the BIA?

MR. HEMINGER: We just do it ourselves, yes. We didn't tell them that. That's the new secret today. (Laughter.)

DR. BROWN: Great. Let's now turn to the Lummi Nation in Washington, please.

MR. FINKBONNER: Like I said earlier, my name is Joe Finkbonner. I'm the health and social services director for the Lummi tribe. Last night when we had our briefing, they told us we had a three- to five-minute spiel we could give, so I threw mine out the window since it was longer than three to five minutes, so I'll try to go off some of the bullets and some of the process we went through in deciding to do what we did.

Currently, we're just one of those hedging on the fence of whether we should do TANF or not. Our tribal council right now is pretty risk-aversive, because we, in August '97 closed our casino; and, hence, we didn't help our job market any at all. Not to mention the financial debt that went along with that. Our tribe is very hesitant about taking on risk without fully knowing what that risk is. That was part of the problem, that the data that was there -- we had kind of a sense of what it was, but we also had our own experiences with our GA program of knowing that when it was what the BIA there was a caseload of 23, and then once we took it over, it went up to 115.

So we know that it's the old Field of Dreams scenario, you build it and they will come. We feel that that will go true as well for any TANF programs that we start offering, is that that's when we'll truly see what our caseload will be. There's lots of data on the state level about Native Americans with access to Medicaid or MAA services, and consistently, Native Americans, if you look at our poverty level and eligibility, access service is at a far lower rate than the general population.

So just using -- extrapolating that logic further, we figure that with TANF services, the caseload that is proposed by the local CSO, we figure that it's going to go up -- probably considerably if we start operating our own TANF program. So the common factor and common thread in all of that was that if we brought the services to our tribe, that way the tribal members and Native Americans of Wahkiakum County would start accessing the services out on the reservation, rather than having to go through the different culture of local CSO in Bellingham. So that's what we've chosen to do.

We've been working with the employment security department and DSHS in Bellingham, which is very close to our reservation, but it's still a huge barrier for our tribal members because of the transportation issue. To establish the Work First Services -- Work First is the TANF state activities with regard to TANF -- out at the Lummi reservation. We're still in the draft form in two -- in both those contracts, but we're very close to having those complete.

What we plan on doing is consolidating a lot of our programs that we already have together, at least under one roof, and still maintaining their integrity behind the scenes. But as far as the client who comes in the door, our plan and theory is that they not know who it is, whether it's a state employee or a tribal employee that's greeting them and intaking their information.

That should all be benign to them; they shouldn't have any idea of what is going on behind the scenes, and it should just work in a seamless environment and that's what we're trying to do by consolidating our -- we're formerly a jobs program, now we're NEW. We have JTPA; we operate general assistancew where I said. We also have a training program which is for our LIBC employees, but we plan on expanding that further to the community members overall, and we also are going to work our human resources, TARO, and we've got a dislocated workers' federal grant as well, which all of these programs are going to be housed together because they're largely employment-related. So that's where we're moving towards. And the big issues and big concerns for us are jobs, transportation and child care.

DR. BROWN: Thank you. Let me ask, then: What are your future plans? Are you going to TANF or not TANF?

MR. FINKBONNER: We're approaching this with the premise there of operating TANF. But what we're trying to do is remove the risk factor, and that first to accurately identify what our caseload is going to be. In '94, we were operating casinos so we had 200 tribal members that were working that are not working now. So we know that the '94 data will be somewhat off, compared to what it is now.

DR. BROWN: Okay, excellent. We have two microphones, one at this end and one at this end. What we would ask for you to do if you have a question, to ask your question. If you have a brief statement, please make the brief statement. As you raise your hand, we'll deliver the mike, not in your control, but to you.

QUESTION: Good morning. I have a quick question with regards to some of the problems you stated -- child care and transportation. It seems like economic development, we have to start focusing on harboring money into developing child care -- you know, whether privately, tribally or whatever. But that is a big problem for all the nations. Thank you.

DR. BROWN: Any comment to that?

MR. HEMINGER: I think it's very important that when you look at TANF that you not look at TANF in isolation and do exactly what they're doing, is look at the whole picture. Because TANF by itself is not going to work unless you've got all the support services. When you're taking that mother out of the household and making her work 15 hours, 20 hours a week, in addition to the time she might have already been doing to get an education to better herself or anything she might have been doing to take care of the children and the elders and all of the problems you have anyway, unless you have those other support services, you may get her a job, but in the process you injure the family, you begin to affect the whole structure of the family. So you have to take it in the broad sense. Child care, obviously, is a very important factor, but we cannot forget elder care, either.

As you know, back home that's a really important thing. And that's not something that's being looked at in most state plans, by the way.

DR. BROWN: Okay. Please, when you respond, the panel members, please speak into the microphone so we make sure it gets recorded. Please, we have a question over there.

QUESTION: I have a question and a statement, and I guess I'll make my statement first, is that welfare reform really is about jobs, and we need to shift our focus in a lot of ways to economic development and take a look at the federal legislation for next year in Department of Labor and in Department of Transportation and see how we can get sewer and water and infrastructure built on reservations to attract business to start creating jobs, so that we have an opportunity to be successful in the future.

I think that's the biggest barrier that we're going to face is long-term success. My question is around the service delivery description, and this is for Ray, I guess. In the food stamps waivers that went through the description for a service delivery area was based on an old criminal code, from what I understand. And that's not consistent with the message that you gave on your NPRM. Is there going to be a way to make those definitions consistent so that you can design programs that are going to be -- if you do food stamps, are you going to be able to use the same service delivery area as you would for the rest of your program?

MR. APODACA: Basically, the service area is the reservation boundaries or BIA-defined service areas. But like I said, you can go outside of those areas through a negotiation with the state. You can reach an agreement with the state to service your population outside, or on or near populations.

But it would require working with the state on that simply because you're going into their service areas and you want to ensure that you're not duplicating services and getting into problems that way. But there is an opportunity for negotiation of an area different than the BIA-defined or the reservation.

DR. BROWN: Thank you. We have a question here.

MR. BOWMAN: My name is Frank Bowman (phonetic). I'm Vice Chairman of the Stockbridge Muncie tribe in Wisconsin and we were one of the first to implement the TANF program. But prior to that, there was a numerous amount of planning that needed to be done. That is: identify your resources externally-internally. Unify all your resources to a one-stop center, such as we have done with the use of the JEPA (phonetic) education and day care monies that are available both federally and state. And I would urge that all tribes look at this, because this program could be your way of working with your people instead of the state working with your people.

Thirdly, I guess that some of the problems I've seen so far is there's a mention of child support enforcement. I have yet to see the dollars for that to come through. I have yet to see the mechanism to access that. We do have a tribal court system. And the other problems that I've seen were DOL, Welfare to Work. If you are with a state that had a jobs program funded by the state, your count was not taken into consideration for the rewards of dollars that DOL would give out to those who had tribal jobs.

I have talked yesterday, in reference to this in hope to have these allocations put more in line at this time. All in all, I think prior to TANF and with the TANF being used by Stockbridge Muncie, we have reduced our caseloads in half. We have trained our people. We are the largest employer in Shawano County. We employ our people, we employ surrounding communities. I think that's one way to foster, one way to grow and one way to learn. Thank you.

DR. BROWN: We have a -- please.

MR. WHITEFOOT: Good morning to everybody. My name is Bobby Whitefoot. I'm the tribal chairman of the Red Lake Band of Chippewa Indians in Minnesota. I want to make a comment, and I regret that I wasn't able to address the Assistant Secretary on the matter of the federal responsibility based on treaties that the United States has with respect to Indian tribes. I think one of the statements she left out is, early on, tribal leaders conveyed to the department and the administration this is purely a federal responsibility of the welfare reform program.

There are instances that haven't been talked about yet, but there have been some adversarial relationships with respect to the tribes and the states. And these forced relationships has created somewhat of a mixed type of reaction, a mixed type of programs. I want to pose a question to anyone here with respect to what's happened in Minnesota. I'm confused as to what the thoughts are or what the intentions are.

But in Minnesota, of course, they've enacted legislation that would allow tribes to enter into their own TANF programs. Now, I think there is only one tribe that's going to do that. However, aside from that, the state of Minnesota has enacted policy about a month ago that said that if your unemployed rate is over 50 percent, you're exempt from the time limit. And there are five reservations in the state of Minnesota that were exempt, Red Lake being one of them. We're a little bit concerned about this time limit being misconstrued as --

(End side 3, tape 2.)

-- I guess I'm kind of confused there as to exactly what this is all about. And, mind you, this policy was issued without consultation of tribes. Within the last month, I have talked with them about turning this into an opportunity, if nothing else to buy some time.

On our particular reservation, all our land is held in trust, and so we have a difficult time attracting business to the reservation. And as you other gentlemen said, we are the largest employer in our county, just by the tribal government. So I want to ask anyone here, panel or anyone in the audience: Has any state offered to forego the time limit if your unemployed rate is above 50 percent, because I --

DR. BROWN: Let's see if we can have some responses to that. We know -- and what this gentleman is addressing, that this summer in the amendments to the welfare reform, it indicated that any tribe that had 50 percent or more unemployment would be exempt from the five-year lifetime limit. And they took away the 1,000 population so that any tribe -- the question is that in states, whose population statistics are going to be used to determine the unemployment over 50 percent? A number of the states have chosen to go with BIA labor force statistics of the potential unemployment, which sometimes tends to be even more liberal than the unemployment statistics, so that there are a number of things that are happening there.

It has also been interpreted that while it's a blessing in that it gives tribes that have high unemployment time, it is also viewed in some ways as a curse that, well, gee, if we have no limits, then people can stay on it forever. I would be interested to have some reactions of anyone -- the panel or the audience -- in regards to that.

We have a hand in the back there. And again, we'd like to ask you to keep your comments or statements brief or your questions brief so that we can get as many people in as possible.

MR. GRANT: I don't do anything brief.

(Laughter.)

MR. GRANT: As people who know me will tell that. Tony Peterson will tell you that. I'm John Grant. I'm with the Klamath tribes in Oregon. We were the first TANF award in Indian country. One of the things that we were working with on TANF had to do with that 50 percent issue. As far as the TANF plan goes, we did use BIA labor statistics, labor force statistics, and we are exempt. But we are not acting in our plan as if we're going to give our clients exemption forever, so to speak, or for the 24-month or the five-year or 60-month limits.

What we've done in our plan, we've done -- actually, in our plan, we followed what was called "the Oregon option," where, in actuality, you can only receive 24 months of TANF payments or services within an 84-month period of time. But there were a number of exceptions written into our plan so as that -- for example, if a client were just participating and making progress in their TANF plan, they would not have the 24-month limit. Now, that's not the exact language of it, but we can keep a client on as long as we've determined that they're making progress.

Even if you have a TANF plan that you have time limits on your work -- my mind is half fried, I only got four hours of sleep last night -- I'm still on Pacific time -- even if you have a plan that you're exempted from the five-year total limits -- yes, I see a smile back there -- the time limits -- you can still, in your regulations, the way you implement your programs, still keep pushing people into the program still requiring them to do work activities, you can continue to require them to do all those things that would get them work-ready.

When you write your plans and you submit your plans, you submit them in such a way as to make it advantageous to the tribes so you will not face all those penalties. But at the same time in your terms of your implementation, you implement your plan as if you had these time limits available. So with that, I'll give it back the microphone.

DR. BROWN: Because of time, we have time for two quick questions before we go to commercial break here.

MR. WOLF: Hi. I'm Dale Wolf, and I'm with Great Lakes Intertribal Council in Wisconsin. I'd like Beth to perhaps talk about the process of working with the state and what Wisconsin did for the last two and a half years because I think that was critical to the success that tribes had in either acquiring TANF programs or working effectively with state TANF programs.

MS. MEYERS: Well, Dale, I think you could probably answer your own question better than I could. As the Deputy Director of Great Lakes Intertribal Council, Dale has been working with the Welfare Reform Task Force for the tribes in Wisconsin. We have met at a minimum of quarterly. We had state staff there with us. The state initially was shocked and I think their feelings were a little hurt that we would have went with the federal TANF program. But we were taking care of our own needs and it was definitely in Red Cliff's best interest to go with the TANF program.

We worked through some of those hurt feeling issues. The state, I'm happy that the tribes in Wisconsin have as good of a relationship as we do with the state of Wisconsin. I hear other horror stories of how states won't even talk to tribes. So we were very fortunate, and Great Lakes Intertribal Council was very instrumental in helping foster that relationship and keep us all on line.

DR. BROWN: We had one more question here.

MR. HONGA: A comment, statement. My name is Waylon Honga (phonetic), I'm from Walapai in Northwest Arizona. And through my tribe's experience, borrowed millions of dollars to give our economy a shot in the arm. I was at the forefront of that because of my status as a council member and because of in my job. But I developed a presentation to explain economic development and I guarantee I can show anybody what it is. And to practitioners and people who know economic development, I'll bore you to death, but there are a lot of people out there that don't get it. And I just wanted to say, it's 15-page presentation and I have a couple of copies with me I'd be glad to share with anybody who is interested.

DR. BROWN: Thank you. In closing of this, I want to give each of you a 30-second response to the question: Given all the -- while we see the pluses and minuses of TANF and all of the concerns and the fact that regulations aren't out yet and the fact that we have only, what, 11 tribes that have submitted or been approved of plans and probably only nine actually in operation right now, which means by far, the mass majority of tribal governments have not decided at this point in time or have not submitted formal application to TANF. If I were to give each of you 30 seconds, you tell me why tribes should TANF or go for TANF.

Please, let's start with Ray and move on down 30 seconds only.

MR. APODACA: Some people will look at the fact that there's not a mass of tribes doing TANF as a negative. I think it's a positive. I think it's a good sign that tribes are taking the time to examine the thing, really study it and really understand, like in their case, before they jump into the thing. The other thing is, why should you do TANF? Because nobody -- the state and the federal government, no bureaucrat sitting anywhere else in the world can tell you what's best for your people and knows how to deal with your people like you do at the ground level. You're there, you're in touch, you're the best to do the job. And as tepid as it is in some cases, you're still the best one to do that job.

DR. BROWN: Okay, Beth?

MS. MEYERS: I agree with Ray. Take on the TANF program if you are ready to help tribal members foster their self-sufficiency skills, boost their self-esteem, address their AODA and mental health issues and make sure that there is job creation going on at the same time and job development. We know our tribal members better than anyone else. We know their needs. We know how to do it.

DR. BROWN: Thank you. Gerald.

MR. HEMINGER: Yes. I guess back in South Dakota we probably have the most redneck governor out of all 50 of them.

(Laughter.)

MR. HEMINGER: And by taking on TANF, we're helping our own people and we're strengthening our own sovereignty. And that's one whole thing behind it all. Our tribe is a treaty tribe, and that's one of the reasons that we took it. We figure, like these other panelists have said, we can help our own people better than anybody else can because we know them, we live with them, we see them, and we're there every day.

DR. BROWN: Okay, Joe, who is kind of part of the pondering tribes at this point in time. (Laughter.)

MR. FINKBONNER: I see the major advantage in a tribe operating its own TANF program, as reflected in some of the comments already stated. But also, that nobody is going to have the dedication to your people like your own tribe will.

DR. BROWN: Okay. There you have it. We have the panel. Please give them a hand.

(Applause.)

DR. BROWN: While panel number two is coming to take their place, you know we don't have breaks here, so we're going to ask you to just not all get up at the same time, but as you need to, to please take care of whatever you need to take care of. And we're going to try to move forward with the panels. So we will have the next panel begin to take their place and we will expect everyone to come back shortly.

(A brief recess was taken.)

DR. BROWN: One of the things about welfare reform -- and it's been said a number of times, but I don't think it will hurt repeating, is that in order for welfare reform to be effective, it really involves three major elements. And that is, you've got to have training and education. You cannot put people to work unless people have an education and skills and training. But in the same essence, if people have training and education, they have to have jobs to be able to go to. So you need those two components working closely together.

Tied to that, however, because you're working with welfare recipients, you've got to also talk about support services of how do you help bridge that individual going from welfare to work, and that is you've got to have support services such as day care, transportation, health care, et cetera.

Today, as you see our outline, we are addressing all of those. Welfare reform, in order to bring that together, says that states have to have a plan or that tribes must submit a plan. We've just talked with the panel about concerns and issues as well as exciting things that have been happening for those tribes that have submitted plans or thinking about submitting plans.

Panel 2 - Job Creation and Job Training
 

Our next panel is going to address that critical and crucial element of training and employment. We've often heard that there is a major what they call an "employment gap in the United States." They say that when you look at the number of people that are on welfare that are going to need jobs and you look at the number of jobs -- because here, we're not talking about rocket scientists here, we're talking principally of entry-level jobs -- that is there enough jobs for the individuals to go into.

Then, when you add that -- when you're looking at reservations, Indian communities or Indian nations and you understand the unemployment factor there, we are then challenged with the idea: How does one create not only the education and training in those areas, but also the jobs to go with that -- the education.

So we're saying that some of the greatest challenges will be in the area of economic development, employment and training and those kinds of aspects. So today we have, again, another very distinguished panel of individuals to address that. We're going to go by the same rules that we followed on our earlier panel.

We have Mr. Tom Dowd, who is Chief of the Division of Indian and Native American programs with the Department of Labor. Now, I think this is important to mention because we have predominantly been talking about health and human services. But this summer, through a special appropriation bill, a Welfare to Work program was added to the JTPA which now becomes a major component of welfare reform. So Tom is here to represent that aspect of it.

We then have Mr. Norm DeWeaver, Director of Indian and Native American Employment and Training Coalition. Many of you are probably most familiar with his newsletter that comes out -- very succinctly written and direct and to the point and has been a real leader in working with Indian communities to focus in on what those employment and training issues are, what those positive elements are and how do you go about bringing all of that together.

Next, tied very closely to that, has been the question: What is the role of higher education? Now, we've got tribally-controlled community colleges out there that have been doing a very interesting and excellent job in really creating an emphasis for education for those individuals that are living and working in the community and have met a very great need in the community. But the question also says: What is the role of higher education -- tribally-controlled community colleges as well as the other surrounding universities and colleges in welfare reform, and how does the tribe work with that and coordinate?

So today, we hope to touch a little on all of those, so we will begin by talking with, or having Tom talk with us in regards to the Department of Labor, welfare reform and anything else that goes with that.

MR. DOWD: Thank you, Dr. Brown. And I want to thank NCI for the opportunity to be here with you this morning. I just want to share one important thing for you to put a little perspective on the Department of Labor's involvement with Welfare to Work and how it touches on welfare reform in general. And that is that within the Department of Labor, Division of Indian Native American Programs, we have, under Title IVA and 2B, the total sum of about $60 million.

That's the total amount of Indian money in the Department of Labor in a department that has well over $1 billion-plus money in employment training. So we make up a very, very small, less than a fraction of all the money in the Department, as accustomed with your knowledge with the Bureau of Indian Health Service and other agencies that have substantially more money in dealing with Indian issues.

So I want to share with you in terms of our relative size in the department -- and now Welfare to Work provides an additional $30 million -- but this still makes us a very, very small player in the whole area of employment training within the department, and I say this because I want to share with you that Secretary Herman has taken an extraordinary interest in the Indian program and in Indian country. And we thank her very much for that by virtue of the fact, again, that we are a very, very small portion of the overall Department of Labor budget. And she is to be applauded for her strong interest.

She's the first Secretary of Labor, to my knowledge, who has ever told the department, "I want to meet with tribal leaders and I will do that." And so January 13th, she met with the tribal leaders of Arizona in a formal meeting to discuss their concerns with regards to Welfare to Work and welfare reform in general. And she listened and came back, and I was fortunate to accompany her and hear directly myself, and she's instructed her staff as well as the Employment Training Administration to address the things we heard to the degree that the law permits and we have authority to do so.

Obviously, she heard the things that many of you are concerned with -- with the fact that there's a lack of jobs, that when you try to implement welfare reform in general, the need for child care and transportation. She heard from Indian country, from the leaders, themselves, that Indian country is best suited to develop the delivery strategies for serving Indian people, as we've heard this morning.

She strongly heard the need for an Indian policy in the Department of Labor, and so I will share with you without trying to scoop her, that we're very, very close to adopting a Department of Labor Indian Policy, the first in the history of the department. I would also share with you that she is working hard to try and increase the funding for the Indian programs through the administration. And she acknowledged the fact that she thinks it's critically important that her administration at the Department of Labor respect the government-to-government relationship in a way that perhaps has never been acknowledged before at the Department. So I want to say that as a background to give some context with regards to the size of the program and where the Department of Labor is with respect to Welfare to Work.

Let me give you a couple of quick dot points that I think are important. We have received 79 Welfare to Work plans. We have reviewed and approved about 25 of those. The remaining 50 or so have been reviewed initially and are pending additional information and some corrections. None of these are major and they will move forward.

Since Secretary Euhaldi (phonetic) attended NCAI earlier this week and announced that the Department will begin grants as early as next week, I will share with you also that the director of the department, the Welfare to Work program was implemented. I should say, never took one step prior to implementation without consulting the tribes. We've brought together representatives from 12 different tribes throughout the country to ensure that the implementation process would, in fact, be based on consultation with tribes and a commitment to tribal initiative and strategies with how they would see this program work best for them. And we're very pleased to know that this program reflects that.

We also worked with our partners at the Department of Health and Human Services, and particularly the Division of Tribal Services in trying to coordinate. Our implementation, therefore, is with their TANF responsibilities and Native Employment Works Program. We thank Mr. Bushman and his staff for the cooperation and the cooperation we've all received and worked together.

One last thing and then a couple quick more comments. We do have a home page, it's updated continually. It provides all the basic background information you may have with respect to this particular program. And I'd like to announce that as of this week and Monday, we have added two additional Indian staff to the Indian and Native American Welfare to Work Program. Mr. Jim Henry, Ms. Charley Archambault (phonetic), two individuals that come from Indian country with extensive background experience in welfare reform as well as employment training programs. We applaud the department for allowing us the authority to go forward and bring more Indian people into the department. We have more Indian people now in the department working in the Indian Division than we've ever had in the history of the department's interaction with tribes.

Let me just, then, use up my last minute here, I guess, to say that, yes, we agree with you that employment and training is fundamental to Welfare to Work. We also recognize that having jobs to place people in are fundamental. We realize that Welfare to Work does allow for job creation and we have tried to be as flexible as we can as permissible by law to ensure that tribes can describe how they want to, in fact, utilize the allowable activities to perhaps do that -- create jobs wherever appropriate.

And most importantly, that we are continuing on -- we don't see this as the end of the process now that we have regulations up, reporting forums -- we see this as a continuing process to work with the tribes in improving and distilling what we hope will be a program that is successful for the tribes. So I'll leave it there and then we've got other folks, and we'll take questions and see where you want to go with this.

DR. BROWN: Tom, before we leave you, let me just ask: We've heard about this Welfare to Work; now we heard, also, the new jobs program and the number of tribes that have new jobs and a number of the tribes that are also working JTPA programs. What does this Welfare to Work do that's different from any of the others? What does it add, or is it only for certain things? If you could just briefly describe that.

MR. DOWD: Yes, I'll be happy to do that as sort of basic 101. The employment training programs have always been, historically been predicated on providing employment training. The very opposite of the coin for Welfare to Work is put people to work, not train them. And so that is the opposite side of that coin, that is very different than what we've always been responsible for administering and working with tribes on. So that caused us all to think how best to use the resources we have. We have over 187 tribes and Indian organizations that have employment training programs currently. Many of them, of the 79, will be also administering the Welfare to Work program.

They have to now begin to look at their plans; how do we do employment training and utilize those resources, at the same time utilize our Welfare to Work resources for the eligible TANF recipients. The Welfare to Work program as you, again, probably already know, is targeted toward a specific slice of the TANF population. And so it is there, it's additional money, it's $30 million over two years that we didn't have before in Indian country, but it does have its narrow window of opportunity and we think it's an important one, and we're going to be working with tribes to help them to sort of sort through in their strategies how best to put those TANF recipients that are eligible into work.

DR. BROWN: Now, those programs are not for everybody. The new jobs certainly was only for those jobs that had continuing job programs. The Welfare to Work is only for those TANF tribes and those tribes that had new jobs programs. What about -- is there any opportunity in the future for those tribes that had not specifically developed employment programs, but may be considering to move in that direction, that they could be eligible for any of these programs?

MR. DOWD: Let me share that if a tribe has a TANF-approved plan, they're eligible. If they have a former Jobs Now Native Employment Works Program, they're eligible. Any tribe that does not meet those two criteria, though, still have an opportunity into what we call "substantial services." They can come forward and work with the department and negotiate, hopefully through providing this information, to substantiate that they have provided, through some form of employment training services, services to at least 20 percent of that population that -- or former AFDC or public recipient-eligible clients, as well as have served at least 50 in terms of total number.

So it's a combination of both. I want to make sure that we don't end up with programs that are extremely tiny, that the amount of money would be so negligible it wouldn't be much help. And we have a number of tribes who have come forward who have met that criteria and others we're still negotiating with -- trying to clarify what is their material and their data that, yes, you don't necessarily have to just be a TANF or new tribe to be eligible for the program.

DR. BROWN: Suppose I decide to be a TANF tribe next month, but did not meet any of those time frames for Welfare to Work? Can I still be eligible for the Welfare to Work program?

MR. DOWD: You can in FY '99.

DR. BROWN: Okay.

MR. DOWD: We've already met the deadline for '98. The issue here is in order to run the program on a formula, we have to be able to establish what is the total number of tribes that are going to be involved and have a cutoff.

DR. BROWN: Okay. Mr. Norm DeWeaver.

MR. DEWEAVER: Thank you very much, Dr. Brown. In the course of the last four years, I've been extremely privileged to be able to travel throughout Indian country and to listen, and listen in terms of what people are saying, what tribal leaders are saying, what participants are saying, what program staff people are saying.

On Monday of this week, I was in one of the farther reaches of Alaska and heard a story which really summed up for me a good deal of what the subject of this forum is and a good deal of the discussion over the last four years about welfare reform in Indian country. The story concerns a tribal organization in that part of the state had a board meeting, was considering what to do about welfare reform, what role to take with respect to TANF, with respect to helping people with cash assistance.

In the course of that, one of the Inupiat board members of the tribal organization said, quite simply: "Whatever we do, I think the role of our organization should be to get people off welfare, not to keep them on welfare." I think that really crystallizes, at least for me, a lot of where we need to go. And in terms of helping people to reduce their dependence on public assistance and address the conditions of poverty in reservation areas, we look at the fact and it's been said again and again in this day and many other discussions, that employment is central. It may not be the only answer; child support enforcement is also extremely important. But employment is clearly the key for most people if they're going to be able to feed their families without resort to public assistance.

That is, of course, true no matter what the tribe decides to do about TANF. If a tribe decides to go into TANF, the first question is, what are we going to do to be able to move people into work, and what role can the tribal employment services play in that process. If the tribe is not going to undertake TANF at least in the short run, the same question is there. In order to assist tribal families that are on assistance, what can a tribe do to help move them into work? So employment is central no matter what.

There are resources available. They are not many; the funds are limited, all too limited. They're scattered, there are discontinuities in one program to another as Dr. Brown pointed out in terms of what tribes have money under what programs. But there are some resources out there available to most every tribe. But the employment resources available to the tribes will not attain their maximum effectiveness as stand-alone programs. The money from any individual program is too small, and the difficulty in being able to help people piecemeal, those difficulties are too great. The message is and the message you've heard from the panel before, from some of the speakers before, is that the services need to be integrated.

There is one way to do that. It is not appropriate in the case of all tribes, but it is appropriate in the case of a number where, legally, the money can actually be rolled into one pot, run as a single program under a single budget, under authority that passed -- legislation that passed the Congress in 1992, commonly referred to as Public Law as 102477.

I don't think it's a coincidence that of the 10 TANF tribes, two of them are running their TANF programs through 477, and the 11th plan that's pending is also a 477 tribe. It enables that kind of integration where people can be served, as Councilman Heminger put it, by coming into one room and getting services before they walk out of that room without the tribe having to worry about how do we account for the money, program by program.

We've talked about the need for job creation, and that's a very serious need. The issue about infrastructure is a real one. The issue about financing for tribal enterprises and other Indian enterprises is a real one. But I would submit there is a glimmer of hope. There are some things that can be done within existing tribal employment and training programs. We have, under all the programs, entrepreneurial training and microenterprise development as an allowable activity now under all of the tribal employment and training programs I'm familiar with. I can't speak for the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

Under Welfare to work, we've achieved a breakthrough. We now have legislation which says specifically that you can subsidize wages in the private sector without limitation, without limitation under Welfare to Work money. We also have in Welfare to Work the opportunity to address the job retention issue that Assistant Secretary Golden talked about and provide post-employment services. These are options we did not have in the former programs. I think we're moving in the right direction. We've got a long way to go, but there is some potential for job creation-oriented services within what we have, particularly in Welfare to Work.

State resources are also essential in expanding tribal resources. And in those cases where states can work with tribes to develop tribal state agreements for the coordination of services, it is possible to increase the amount of services available to tribal members, even in some cases when the tribe itself is not delivering those services. I would point to the Tribal State Agreement in North Dakota as a very good example of that constructive collaboration; in that particular case, centered heavily upon employment resources and child care resources.

I would submit, in winding down, that the moral of the story that I heard on Monday is an important one. The first issue is really not so much how do we make TANF work -- I mean, Heaven knows, tribes didn't ask to solve that particular problem -- but the issue is how to move tribal people off welfare, how to make tribal families economically self-sufficient. Employment resources are a key part of that solution. Thank you.

DR. BROWN: Thank you. Next, we are pleased --

(End side 4, tape 2.)

DR. GIPP: -- which is up in North Dakota. We've been kind of practicing what I call -- what we now call welfare reform. We've been doing it for about 29 years, and we kind of focus on American Indian families and children. We have two day care centers and our own K through 8 elementary school. And so what we really try to do is practice the issue of training and vocational education and even higher ed training with the whole family. And we're very, I suppose, unique in that sense, but we also have a very good opportunity because we are campus-based.

Our colleague tribal colleges around the country don't always have that same fortune because many of them are in their infant stages throughout the United States. And some of you may have a tribal college in your own home area. And if you do, you're very fortunate to have one in the sense that it can help you address issues of welfare reform, particularly when we talk about issues of training and higher education.

We serve about 40 different tribes annually at our place at United Tribes. And all of the issues that relate back to Indian country and to rural reservation life are some of the things that each of our children and our adult families face when they come to our campus; they bring some of those social and behavioral and other learning skills issues. So those are some real critical issues that really still need to be addressed with respect to welfare reform.

If there's any major flaw in the welfare reform law, it's what has been pointed out. It's a work type of law. It does not really adequately account for issues of training, of skills-learning, of literacy and of the long-term issue of getting our population up to a level -- educational level where they can successfully compete with respect to economies. So I guess that's the major obstacle as I would look at it with respect to the current law.

In regard to our tribal colleges, welfare reform and what's happening there I think are impacting on the 30-plus colleges that we have in the United States, tribal colleges that we have in the United States, in a twofold manner. One is that enrollments are going to, or have begun to increase from anywhere from 20 percent to 150 percent, depending on what particular reservation or tribal government you're talking about and where there is a tribal college. Ft. Peck Community College, for example, has seen a tremendous growth that it will probably be about 160 percent in terms of increases of numbers that they will serve through some of their training programs.

Likewise, they are working with the TANF program to do a lot of the different kinds of orientation and other kinds of skills development that are necessary for some of those people that will be or that are on the TANF programs. At United Tribes, we're serving 60 additional slots for child care in our child care centers for TANF recipients, and providing additional support services so that some of those people can meet some of the work requirements, they can participate in things like cooperative education, additional classroom training, do their volunteer training requirements, develop their own social and job skills and goals, and do that both in terms of the day programs as well as the evening programs, because time is short with respect to TANF recipients.

Those are some of the things that are happening to some of Indian country where there are tribal colleges. And we have them in 13 different states.

I should add there is another significant piece of policy information that is happening, or is now in place. We have the White House Executive Order on Tribal Colleges and Universities. And, Dr. Brown, I'd like to briefly introduce our new director who just came on board with us on February 9th, and that's Ms. Kerry Billie (phonetic.) If she would stand and be acknowledged. She's here in Washington, D.C.

This White House Executive Order on Tribal Colleges and Universities is significant to Indian country for a number of reasons which I won't go into all of them, but the point is is that this is the last executive order with respect to first Americans. The historically black colleges and universities have had one for almost 20 years, the Hispanics have had, the territories have had an executive order for their institutions; and we are the last to receive that designation. But fortunately, I think it will bring great, great success for Indian country and a lot of other kinds of implications for the rest of the tribes who do not necessarily have a tribal college of their own at this time.

DR. BROWN: Okay. Great. Thank you. Do we look forward with great expectation to the new individual appointed to that position. You all should get her phone number and make sure that she's working for us, and which I'm sure she will.

But let me ask, Dr. Gipp: We're talking about probably, when we talk about our tribal populations on TANF, probably the hardest to place and the hardest to work with population group. We're talking to people who predominantly -- and I don't know what percent you might have, but in some of the other tribes, over 50 percent who lack GEDs, who have no education or little education or their reading levels are far below the average who have no work experience, et cetera. What can higher education do? What can a tribally-controlled community college do to support a group like that who aren't ready to enter a college?

DR. GIPP: Well, as I say, we have been doing that. I think we need to expand our services, for one thing, and one of the issues that I mention when we talk about the increase in loads that are coming on the tribal colleges is that they're doing that with no really great increase in their existing appropriations. But we can and we have provided a lot of that skills development, and it's very, very critical for any of our folks going through these programs to be able, as I said, to successfully compete. I think it's very important that we coordinate our activities. And that's what we've begun to do in North Dakota among the tribal colleges in that region, but also coordinate with programs like the JTPA programs that Chief Dowd mentioned here.

MR. ALLEN: Okay, yes?

QUESTION: I'd like to add just one word on that. There is a very important role for assessment, including educational assessment in all of this, both in terms of the development of family self-sufficiency plans under TANF, in terms of identifying some of the barriers that are required to enable one to participate in Welfare to Work programs, and I think the tribal colleges have a very unique role to play because their capability in taking on those assessment services as well as the educational services that follow.

DR. BROWN: Well, let me ask before we open it up for questions, one last question. I'm concerned, because we have a 24-month time limit. When I look at those TANF tribes that have submitted, most of those, the majority of them have stuck to that 24-month time limit; they haven't negotiated a longer time limit. If we're working with such hard-to-place individuals, how realistically -- and I'll ask for anybody to respond -- is that 24-month time limit in putting people to work, given the population that we're working with? Is it realistic? Anyone?

QUESTION: Well, I'd just like to add to the issue of the federal law, and I'm not an expert on it, but I think Norman, Chief Dowd, could probably clarify it. One of the problems we have is the 12-month rule with respect to training. Even though tribes do have some limited flexibility, we really need to see the federal requirements change so that we have more adequate time to spend with trainees or students, however you identify them with respect to some of the issues that we've pointed out, whether it's literacy or whether it's a vocational type of field. We need more time with these folks is what we need, and if we're going to get them up to the level where they can successfully compete.

So we've got to look at that federal policy, is the way I look at it.

DR. BROWN: Tom, welfare to work doesn't really address training and education; it addresses how do you keep people in a job. Is that going to be sufficient?

MR. DOWD: Well, that's correct. But one thing, going back to your initial question, nothing is ever absolute, so in 24 months for some people it will work, but for all people, probably not. And those tribal leaders and those who are implementing the service delivery systems will have to look at whether or not they need an amendment to make that more realistic.

But I would add that even though welfare to work is predicated on putting people to work, my colleague, Mr. Gipp here, his tribal college and the other tribal colleges in the system can work with the tribes, they can work together with the tribal colleges as a part of post-employment services. And that is, if you're able to get a welfare to work recipient who is TANF eligible into a job, that person may also be enrolled in any of the tribal colleges as part of the post-employment. Part of the idea is to upgrade their skills so they can keep that job and advance and move on to other things.

So there is that part of it that the department, I think, has taken a very bold step in interpreting the law to say that that's allowable, because initially it was felt that there really was no provision at all for training, but there is some that has to be post-employment.

QUESTION: Norm, people -- I've heard some of the statistics of the TANF tribes and other tribes under 477 a dramatic kind of reduction in putting people to work. Is that actually real? Is that happening out there?

MR. DEWEAVER: There have been caseload reductions. I think Councilman Heminger mentioned the figures for Sisseton-Wahpeton whose economic circumstances are perhaps not quite as good as some of the other tribes. I think one of the interesting things to me is that, yes, in fact, welfare reform has resulted in a number of people that are working, who have also a number of people who have gotten badly hurt by welfare reform, particularly state-administered programs, but that there is an added stimulus, and there are services available, including increased child care services, a variety of other services that people can take advantage of. It's a matter of getting them up to the point where they can do that.

In terms of your question on work activities, I would like to say a good word for the Division of Tribal Services in terms of their work with tribes negotiating TANF plans on being willing to negotiate what work activity is. I think that's a very important step. I was very surprised they took it because it does go a bit beyond the edge of the law, so to speak, pushing the envelope; but that there's a spectrum of activities available, from very sheltered activities where people in community service positions can get a lot of support, all the way up to a completely competitive workplace environment. So that in looking at work, it's a somewhat more complicated issue; it is not simply a matter of identifying a 9 to 5, full-time, year-round paying job that the work activities under welfare reform can include a variety of things that are less than that to be able to move people toward an attachment to the labor force, which is what's really at the bottom of it.

DR. BROWN: So tribes that are developing their TANF plan should be aware that there is some flexibility in negotiation, that they really -- that a lot of these things, the time limits, the work requirements, service population, these things --

MR. DEWEAVER: And the definition of work activities -- and the definition of work activities.

DR. BROWN: So those things are important. Let's open it up now for some questions and comments. I'm going to start it right over here, and we've got a microphone here. Again, I ask you to keep your question or your statement brief so that we'll have time to get everybody before we have to break.

A PARTICIPANT: I just wanted to follow up on a statement that Norm just made. When you go in to look at the NPRM, the proposed rules that we're going to be publishing, one of the areas you need to look at is that -- exactly that in terms of definitions. Because we have, in fact, as Norm said, chosen to push the envelope, whereas in state TANF programs, education is not considered related work activity and does not count toward your participation rates and is not a basic element in eligibility.

We are proposing greater flexibility in allowing education activities related to work development preparation to be allowed, and that is going one step beyond, and tribes really need to look at that real closely and make that an element of your planning and your negotiation.

A PARTICIPANT: Thank you, Dr. Brown. You know, one of the problems that I see out there in welfare reform is economic development dollars. In the state of Montana, a good example is the town of Havre, Montana, that sits in the middle of two reservations. The population of Havre is probably 15,000 people. The two tribes stick probably $50 million into the economy of Havre, Montana. There's probably four Indians working in that town. And that's probably all they're going to allow to work in that town.

With our sovereign immunity issues we've taken, industry doesn't want to come into the reservations because they're nervous of our court systems. And so all that leaves us there is to try to go out and bring in economic development dollars and create our own industry. But nobody's ever talking economic development dollars. Nobody's putting money over there where we need it. We can train them all we want; if we don't have a job, what good are they?

DR. BROWN: It's a message that Congress needs to hear, and hear loudly.

MR. DOWD: And I would also share with you that we certainly -- the Secretary and I heard that message and we understand it. On the business end of trying to administer programs, we don't actually deal with legislation. But let me just say that within Welfare to Work, the tribes do have the flexibility which you do not have under the employment training programs, JTPA, to create jobs and provide a wage subsidy.

To me, that's a tremendous opportunity for tribes that otherwise have been sort of cut out of that sort of option under JTPA. And so to the degree that you're able to create some jobs and provide the wage subsidy, both private and public, that, I think, will be of some benefit to tribes.

DR. BROWN: Have we heard any creative kinds of thoughts about new legislation or additional money for economic development? Because I think everybody's kind of thinking very similar to this last comment economic development is crucial. There have been a number of initiatives tried to stimulate economic development on reservation, but when we look at it, it hasn't been all that successful in the long run.

What are some creative things that are happening that we can maybe pin our hopes on here in the near future that will allow us to marry that economic development with welfare reform?

A PARTICIPANT: With some trepidation, I'll take a shot at that. I have not heard -- I mean, I have not heard any major legislative proposals on the table, and maybe there are some congressional staff in the room that can speak to that perhaps better than I can. I do think that people do have to kind of look at the options that are there, particularly in terms of entrepreneurial type of activity, which might be more appropriate in a rural area in any event. The wage subsidy option that Tom mentioned, I don't think the picture is entirely bleak.

I think it's particularly important to get a dialogue going between the economic development community which by and large has not paid much attention to the welfare population and people interested in social welfare that, by and large, have not paid much attention to economic development. This is particularly crucial because we're talking about a population that is largely female, and by definition has children. So that that particular target group is not a traditional target group for the economic development community, and that that dialogue is crucial and is necessary for a start, but that's not to say that money isn't essential, you're absolutely right; where that money is going to come from is not terribly clear.

QUESTION: Dr. Brown, I had one other addition to that, and I really think that President Clinton's statement here on recognition of Indian tribes -- it's the memoranda -- I'm not sure if it's an actual executive order. But in any case, that was made, but several years ago. It really needs to be taken seriously by the administration, because what we've found with respect to the tribal college White House executive order -- and we're just now at the point where we've got a director who can help implement that -- is that -- and I'm saying nothing new, really, that everyone probably doesn't know -- that every one of the various federal agencies that we have, have to be coordinated and they have to be told to pull together. And that's the value of things like an executive order.

Now, the President has issued a statement on recognition of Indian tribes, tribal sovereignty and so forth; but there is no methodology to put that whole map together if we're going to talk about a coordinated effort with respect to economic development and developing tribal economies.

We do have specific efforts, whether it's SBA or EDA and even the bureau's economic development programs. All of those kinds of resources are there. But unless there is a coordinated effort, just as we're talking welfare reform for the nation, we really need that Marshall Plan for Indian country put together, so that then tribes can effectively access some of those not only federal resources, but those private resources, because they are there. But it hasn't been done in any kind of coordinated, collaborative, directed fashion. And that's, to me, what really needs to happen, outside of looking at specific forms of legislation.

DR. BROWN: I want to try to go to the questions. We've got some microphones here. We'll try to get them to you as quickly as possible. Let's go here and then we'll go right over to the next microphone.

QUESTION: I'm wondering what the tribal strategies being used to create jobs are and how they relate to the integration, actual integration going on at the reservation level working with the individual in terms of the training, in terms of assessing what their abilities, skills, interests are. What are the relationships that are being established with the job creation?

A PARTICIPANT: Well, I'm probably in the worst position to speak for tribes and I wouldn't dare to begin with. But let me just say that I think that as you've heard from Ray Apodaca and from myself that certainly at the federal level within the programs that are dealing with employment and training, welfare reform, Welfare to Work, we're trying to provide through a consulting process with our travel partners as much flexibility as we can to push the envelope, to do all the things permissible by law and make them aware of what those opportunities are with regards to their own plans and what they want to do.

And I think that's an important step in federal tribal relations and -- but that's how I see it in terms of what we're trying to do at the federal side.

DR. BROWN: Please, let's go ahead. I want to make sure we have enough good questions so -- I'll bounce it back here and you can take that up. Please, who has the microphone? Please?

MS. DAVIS: Hello. My name is Tanya Davis, and I'm the policy director with First Nations Development Institute. And on the issue of economic development and what can be done in communities and some of the different options, I wanted to bring up the concept of IDAs, which are individual development accounts. They're leveraged savings accounts that allow people to save with an incentive -- usually a one-to-one match -- towards things like education, homeownership, business development.

We're issuing an RFP; we just issued it yesterday to do a demonstration on that issue. We're including a wider range of issues, such as saving for subsistence activities so that we can supplement things in a more culturally appropriate way to look at other issues that might be there, whether it's the need for transportation.

We're also looking at some of the options that are out in Congress. IDAs are allowed underneath welfare reform. Twenty-five states have IDA programs. I don't know if the tribes are looking at it; the ones that I've talked to have not. It's also allowed under welfare to work. There is legislation in Congress, S-12555 HR2849 that is legislation to create a $100-million IDA demonstration program.

In typical oversight fashion, tribes aren't currently included, but they will be, I am assured, when the bill does hopefully make it to committee. But there are options out there.

Another thing I wanted to address was the issue of land and banking and getting money to do economic development there. It is possible to do that; unfortunately, it takes a lot of work. In the Northwest, they've been a little bit more successful with getting their banks to work with the issues of trust land to get the boilerplate language out to say, look, it's not that confusing, it's not that scary, you can do this.

I hope that -- I do have a few more copies of the RFP with me. I'd like to give them to people. I'd love to talk to you about this. And I know Jerry Reynolds, who is another person in our office -- he works on banking -- would love to talk to folks about issues related to that as well.

DR. BROWN: Okay, great, thank you.

QUESTION: Do you have --

(Laughter.)

DR. BROWN: They're trying to see -- can you see what that is?

QUESTION: No, because I want to get an RFP.

DR. BROWN: Okay. There is this lady over here that needs to see -- can I take another question over here for Mr. Homer?

MR. HOMER: I'm Pete Homer and I'm with the National Indian Business Association. This past Tuesday, we had a Hub Zones Act of 1997 Symposium at the Russell Senate Office Building and we discussed the plans for the HUB zones program, which means the historically underutilized business zones. Indian reservations are HUB zones. This is a job creation/welfare reform incentive. And what we feel is that right now we're developing and helping the Small Business Administration develop the rules and regulations for the Indian portion of that program.

We're very optimistic about this program because we feel that jobs are very important on Indian reservations. We will know more at the end of April around -- we're trying to implement the program on June 2nd of this year. We feel that it's a bipartisan program, it passed December 2nd. The federal agencies are putting that in motion. Its 10 agencies are going to mandate one percent of all of the contract dollars to go to this program, which is $7 billion to $8 billion.

Small businesses are -- any business under 500 employees are considered a small business. This is going to be a shot in the arm for the existing 8A companies that are out there, the graduated 8A programs that are out there, new programs, bringing non-Indian businesses to Indian reservations as partners with the Indian tribes or other individual Indian businesses.

To me, it seems like a very, very good program. It's up to the Indian businessmen to come together and help write those rules and regulations and see that the program is implemented, and we're involved in that very much. So I think that --

DR. BROWN: Mr. Homer, is there a process that's going to bring these Indian businessmen and people together to help write those regulations?

MR. HOMER: Yes, there is. We're planning another symposium to do that, and we're just in the planning stages right now. We want to have two more meetings. We talked to the different agencies that could help us do that. That would be the Administration for Native Americans, of course, and then the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

The Bureau of Indian Affairs fits into this because they certify which reservations are HUB zones. And they give all the statistics to the Small Business Administration for implementing that program. The statistics would be based on unemployment, underemployment and economically disadvantaged people.

DR. BROWN: Thank you very much. I'll have high expectation, and you heard him; we expect something to come out of that. Let's make sure we're getting all of the questions, so please keep your questions and responses as brief as possible.

DR. GIPP: For those that weren't aware of it, NAHASDA, the Native American Housing Assistance Self-Determination Act is a block grant system now that's going to replace the old housing system, and that program is also being forced to work with Welfare to Work. So the little money they're providing for us is also sort of saddling that and strapping that responsibility on the housing entities now.

However, with regards to that, I'd like to know from the panel or anybody here how people are anticipating working with Welfare to Work, School to Work and enterprise zones. So I'd like to see what's been developed with regards to that, because I haven't heard anybody mention School to Work or enterprise zones. I'm glad Mr. Homer mentioned the HUB zones. The other thing is, as far as creativity, last night we were speaking to a gentleman from Oklahoma.

One of the things they're doing is they're using their elders to surf the Net to find opportunities. He says -- and the elders really feel good because they feel like they're contributing and they have time.

So they've been going through the Net and finding opportunities. As a result of that, they've been able to generate some money.

DR. BROWN: Let's have a response from the panel. What about those programs he mentioned and how they're working together. Particularly, this is the first time we've heard of the School to Work, which has certainly been active out there in the community, but we've yet to hear in regards to employment or training.

A PARTICIPANT: We'll let Norm answer that.

MR. DOWD: There is a very small amount of money for the Indian set-aside for schoolwork and there are a number of awards. I don't believe there are more than 20 at this point. So it just depends on those who have gotten the grant awards in terms of how they're working through their tribe to coordinate those at the local service delivery area. There's no mandate by the department that has to be done, but certainly it is desirable; but it's up to them to develop that strategy.

DR. BROWN: Norm?

MR. DEWEAVER: Just very briefly, it's an interesting example of how these programs are all in different compartments. Somebody pointed out to me when Welfare to Work started that, given its target population, which is people that have been on assistance for 30 months or more, going back into AFDC, that almost by definition excludes teen parents. So by definition, of "excludes," the younger people that might be affected by that who might be the target population for School to Work.

To me, it's another argument for integration and for a tribe's ability, inside or outside of 477, to be able to have an overall master design for what can be done to marshal a number of resources, both tribal resources and resources that are available in the non-Indian community, to be able to work in some kind of together way to make these things work, because if you look at the things program by program, you've got formidable barriers in terms of the reach of any one program.

DR. BROWN: Okay, we have time for probably two more questions. We're going to take here and then here and then we were going to ask for a summation here in just a minute.

QUESTION: My question is kind of twofold, and I think Mr. DeWeaver, you can answer me. Under the HASTA (phonetic), you said that the tribes are being forced to help Welfare to Work people. Does that include subsidizing their housing that was taken away from a lot of the housing? And my second question is, with Section 8, we're losing one of our Section 8, which is going to create a big problem for a lot of our clients, because they've been on Section 8 like for five years. Their rents are $500 to $800, and they're going to lose that and the other Section 8 isn't going to pick them up.

What is going to happen to these TANF people?

MR. DEWEAVER: The employment programs are probably not the answer to that one. It is possible, I think, to define at least temporary housing assistance, particularly if people have got to move in the course of finding a job, to define temporary housing assistance as a supportive service cause, which then becomes eligible under Welfare to Work, which can support supportive services unless they are otherwise available. We have a number of other programs that can also provide supportive services costs, but as a solution for that gap, that hole, no, the employment programs are not; only there is a temporary fix under certain limited circumstances.

DR. BROWN: One question here?

MS. BIG POND: I'm Phyllis Big Pond with the Inner Tribal Council of Arizona. I don't really have a question; I just wanted to mention some information about School to Work. You know, it's really an effort to coordinate with schools, businesses and communities and the states all have School to Work programs, so it's another opportunity, I think, to coordinate with states. They're each doing it differently, so I guess I don't know how it works in all states, but in Arizona it's a statewide plan.

Also, I wanted to mention that in April, April 26th thorough the 28th, we are having a National American Indian School to Work Conference. And the intent is to bring together programs from around the country to look at models for Indian communities. Certainly, School to Work doesn't apply solely to TANF recipients. But I see it also as a way of preventing some of the kinds of experiences that might exist, and I think it's a good opportunity for people who are interested in that, and if you're interested I can give you some more information.

DR. BROWN: When is that being held?

MS. BIG POND: It's April 26th through the 28th in Phoenix.

DR. BROWN: In Phoenix. Nice time to be in Phoenix.

QUESTION: Leland has a statement on housing that he would like to make.

LELAND: Just in discussing with the new Deputy Assistant Secretary, Jackie Johnson at HUD, on the native programs, she has given somewhat of an oral commitment to attend our April forum that will be in Portland, Oregon the day after the National Indian Child Welfare Association Conference. That forum will focus primarily on all of our temporary service needs, whether they be child care, child support enforcement, housing, transportation, food stamps, anything that it takes to move these people out of their homes, allow them to move out of their homes and

(End side 5, tape 3.)

DR. BROWN: -- a suggestion, but like anything else, there doesn't seem to be. We've got a lot of little things happening there. Those little things coming together could create big things. It just seems like we have a real need out there for these economic development ventures in Indian country to come together in some way, both in Washington and both out at the tribal level. So that may be something we want to consider as we think in longer range of how do we bring these economic ideas and creations together, because they're going to be critical in the future of meeting work needs in Indian country.

Right now as we're started, we've got jobs. There are a few jobs out there, but as we go into year two and three and begin to place people more, start running out of jobs and haven't planned for the future for five years down the road, then we could run into some very serious problems. So it's an ideal time.

Now, let me ask you, then, the three panel members in summation, what -- if you had to say one of the most -- one creative thing that a tribe could do in tying employment and economic development together, what would it be? What would be one of the first things tribes should be doing or focusing in that regard? And let me start with Tom and move on down.

MR. DOWD: I wish I had a good answer, but one thing I can share with you I think is critically important, it will be to simply be able to have a clear understanding about all of the programs that are available currently and how you can mix and match and, as Norm DeWeaver has stated publicly for years, integrate them in a way that best develops the service delivery for you in your community.

I still think that the 102477 program is an excellent program by law that allows tribes to consolidate their employment training programs. But beyond that, it's much bigger now than just employment training programs; it's about your entire community and the people that are being affected by welfare reform in general. Tribes need to look at all of these resources in a comprehensive manner.

Given the flexibility, I think the federal partners are trying to support and provide to make sure those resources are being utilized effectively, and then try to match up with whatever kind of economic development efforts you're going to make. I still think there is a lot of work to be done, a lot of spade work to be done with tribes being able to really have a clear understanding and view how best to apply the current federal resources in a way that doesn't stumble over each other, that there are opportunities to do things, but I'm not sure everybody's quite clear about how to do that yet.

DR. BROWN: That's a tall order, given tribal governments are busy just keeping -- fighting with alligators and trying to then determine that. I think there is a real role that the federal government will have to play in helping bringing that to the tribes as well as others. Norm?

MR. DEWEAVER: The one word I guess that comes to mind is "packaging." In the economic development business, it is common to be able to line up a bunch of incentives to talk to potential entrepreneurs or investors that are interested in starting up a business. I think more could be done in that respect.

I'm very impressed at what happened on the Ft. Berthall (phonetic) reservation and three affiliated tribes when they put their resources together to help UNIBAND expand in a very small community on the reservation that had no jobs. They were able to bring that thing together. You've got to be able to package those resources. At the tribal level, to some extent I confess I fear federal initiatives. Tribes can generally do it better.

DR. BROWN: Okay, Dr. Gipp.

DR. GIPP: I think, really, tribes need to take a hard look at matching up human resources to this issue of economic development. If we don't do that, then we tend to respond to carrot and stick approaches. In other words, the first thing that's out there or the first thing that we're forced to do. And we really need to take a look at that. And that's why I emphasize that critical issue of literacy, curriculum development at the local level, what we need to do in terms of changing the requisites of welfare reform that fit us more appropriately, and a third, of really doing the collaborations that I talked about earlier. And we need to begin to do that at the local level and then we need to make sure that it happens at the national level.

DR. BROWN: Okay. That's a lot of work. I think in looking at that, this is not something we're just kind of bringing those topics to the surface right now. We know that there are going to be two other conferences, three other conferences. And, Leland, tell us a little about what the prizes are for those who attend.

(Laughter.)

LELAND: Well, as I mentioned, we will have the Portland forum in April on the 23rd, a Thursday, to address temporary services. Our third forum, national in scope, to address all of these issues of welfare will focus primarily on job training, job creation, economic development, infrastructure, adult and vocational education -- all of the components necessary to literally move untrained individuals into the work force.

That forum will be in June, it will be Sunday, June 14th. It will be part of our NCAI mid-year conference in Green Bay, Wisconsin. And then our final forum for 1998 that is planned at this point will be in conjunction with our 55th annual session in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina in October. That date is October 18th on a Sunday. And, by the way, all of this information is in your written material packets.

That forum will be what we hope to be a true working forum. We need to craft our agenda to go before Congress and the administration. This forum is the beginning of that process. But we realize that we need to have that thing crafted by the 106th Congress. We cannot wait until the 106th Congress convenes and then begin to craft the agenda. So we hope that the forum in October initiates that process amongst many of you here in this room. It's going to take all of our work together to get that agenda, to get to the tribal leaders, to get their approval of it so that we can go before the 106th Congress and the next administration on changes.

DR. BROWN: Now, people, let's talk about this afternoon. I know many of you probably have been to many, many meetings, but I don't want to underplay what's going to happen this afternoon. In fact, we have brought in an extra pair of bodyguards as we talk about state tribal and federal relationships here.

But I think it's a very important topic, and there are very varying issues as to how states and tribes have worked together that I think will be a major benefit in your planning and the kind of questions and negotiation you need to be prepared to in working with states and how states have reacted in some very positive and creative ways in working with tribes. I think we can all benefit from that.

We're also going to talk about children and family issues as well as data and data information collection. So we want to welcome you all back. We're going to start promptly at 1 p.m. We do have one last announcement by Eldridge Cochisey, if he would just talk to that briefly.

MR. COCHISEY: Just a comment and a recommendation. I'm Judge Eldridge Cochisey. I've been recently retired from the tribal court bench. And the issues that you're talking about -- TANF program, child services, job creation and back to work issues and housing -- all include your basic judicial process on the reservation level, yet they're not being included. And I've addressed this to tribal leaders before. We're talking about sovereignty, sovereign immunity issues and now we're talking up some federal programs, and still your basic component that's going to deal with a lot of these issues that you're bringing on the reservations need to be included in this whole process.

My recommendation is twofold. One is, we're talking about welfare reform, but we're only addressing 193. The Balanced Budget Act the year later in August 5, '97, passed a number of amendments that changed drastically some of those 193 under that act. And I have yet to hear and, in fact, I've heard in national forums that you're leaving out 10533, especially in child support that drastically turned it to the positive note for the tribes.

Those of you who -- and some of you are here -- who have TA contracts, you need to look at the updated law and give the tribes that correct and updated information, because there have been some drastic changes in that amendment process. In looking at this whole children's issues, it needs to be given to the tribes in some concise effort and not fragmentated. It's nice we have what you can do with 477, but at the federal level, it's still fragmented and our tribes are still -- "well, where do we go?" And something needs to be done, and maybe that's where NCAI needs to push and say, "federal agencies: you need to gather and do the same thing under 477 so that the tribes are not trying to figure out where do we go for these type of programs.

DR. BROWN: Great. Thank you very much. We'll see everybody at 1:00 p.m.

(Whereupon, a lunch recess was taken.)

A F T E R N O O N S E S S I O N

Panel 3- Federal/State/Tribal Government Partnerships

DR. BROWN: If I had indicated 15, 20 years ago that we have a program that would require strong coordination and working together of tribe and state, what do you think the response I would have gotten? Response would have been strongly: "Hey, tribal governments have a direct federal Indian relationship; we don't want to be working with the tribes or in any way interfering with working with states. We don't in any way want states interfering with that relationship. But I think there has been significant changes in the last few years that have clearly defined tribes as tribal governments, as separate, distinct political entities with certain sovereign powers, and it has been clear, then, as states and tribes have started to work together that they have been creative in many situations of developing intergovernmental agreements on a government-to-government relationship that protected both the states and tribe sovereignty.

So there have been some unique things that have happened in the last 10 or 15 years that have brought states and tribes together in some unique kind of creative ways, but at the same time, recognizing them as distinct political entities with their powers and jurisdiction. That's not to say everything is nice and calm because we know now the debate isn't so much on whether a tribe is a government or not; the debate is predominantly on who is going to have jurisdiction on what. So that debate will continue into probably to years to come.

But the question is, is that tribal governments are indeed governments and can develop intergovernmental agreements with the state without lessening their powers as tribal governments. So it's opened up a unique way. Also, it's opened up the idea that the more that states understand an economic development and tribes that understand an economic development, that the best interests of the state and tribes is in the area of cooperation rather than in continual confrontation or in the court system.

So there have been emphasis on both sides of how do we work together in more cooperative manners. And with the welfare reform, this hits right to the point, because people are saying in order for this to work, the state and tribes have got to sit down together and begin talking. So we have opened up, I think, under this welfare reform, a new era in tribal-state relationships that are going to move us, hopefully, into the 21st century in establishing ourselves as governments.

Several administrations have said that the 21st century will be a time when tribal governments will begin to take their rightful place in the family of governments that make up America. And I think this is true. And I think as we begin to establish our role, it will be very significant, and this through the welfare reform may be the beginning of some of that element that has been discussed, or maybe not.

What we have here is a group of very distinguished panel members, again who have come to us from various -- two different states, the state of Montana and the state of California. We have a substitute in place of Anna Whiting Sorrel; we have Rhonda Whiting, who is the sister and very much involved in historically, as an attorney, working in consultation with tribe, as well as working at very broad political, issues regarding state and at the national level. So we're delighted to have her here with us.

We also have Mr. John Meredith, who is the tribal welfare reform coordinator for the state of Montana and who is, I guess, also a practicing attorney, but has, slowly over the years, has been pulled into social services. So it's one of those situations where we've actually taken an attorney and given him a heart.

(Laughter.)

DR. BROWN: Next, we have from the state of California Denis Turner, who is the Executive Director of the Southern California Tribal Chairmen Association, and I think everybody is familiar with Denis and the work that he's done in Southern California and his representation throughout the years of both not only on the state scene, but on the national scene as well.

We're also honored to have Charlene Lewis Meeks, who is the Deputy Director of the California Department of Social Services out of the office of community relations. Now, when you understand how big California is and you understand the kind of roles that a liaison person has to play with various governments, and then you throw in all of the many tribal governments in California, you understand the kind of job and role this individual plays; so we're delighted to have her with us here today. She has served under a number of California governors in a number of high-level appointed positions within the state, and so she comes with us with a background of politics and of working with various governmental agencies and governments within state boundaries.

So with that, what we want to do is begin and we want to again remind you we have a five-minute limit, and we're going to try to stick to that, but we would like for you to give us your ideas and concerns as well as creative kinds of things that may be on your mind today, given your experience. So let us begin with Rhonda.

Rhonda, if you would, please.

MS. WHITING: I think it would be more effective to give a little bit of a history of what's taken place in the state of Montana, and John's got a better overview of that, so if he could start, I want to just start out by saying that when they talked to us about doing the presentation here from Montana with the Confederated Salish and Kutenai tribes, they wanted to do it because we had a good working relationship with the state.

Well, I want to make it perfectly clear, after working in the tribal legal department with Flathead and working with the state that we don't in every area have a wonderful working relationship. There have certainly been some difficulties down the road. This is one area where we did, and so John can give you a little bit of a history why that's worked well in Montana and what we've done to make this a unique situation and for once, the tribes in Montana got a gem when he got John Meredith, because he's doing an excellent job.

So, John, if you could give them a history on the monies legislatively that were given out to tribes in your position and explain that, then I'll go on from there.

MR. MEREDITH: Gee, after that buildup, I don't know if I can meet everybody's expectations. I had a handout that I laid on the table this morning that says "Welfare Reform and Tribal State Issues" at the top, and it's a little bit of a history about what's gone on in Montana. Montana had its own welfare reform package before the August bill was passed. In fact, we started implementation in February of 1996. And all of the tribes, with the exception of two tribes that are located on one reservation were excluded from involvement in that program because they had tribal jobs programs.

The Assiniboin and Groveon (phonetic) at Ft. Belknap were involved because they did not have a tribal jobs program. But then in, as I said, in 1996, along came what we call (inaudible), and it made the tribes consider two choices at that point: either go with the state or file your own tribal family assistance plan.

Most of the tribes, at least in Montana at that time, decided that they would not go on their own, and that was because of a lack of any kind of demographic information and because they knew that the state or felt that the state probably wouldn't continue with the state chair. That is true to some degree, given the legislature that we have, but at least they did -- we meet biennially, so there was an allocation through June of 1999, and we are going to continue to provide that to any tribes that decide to file their own plan.

We've talked about MOE this morning. I think Olivia mentioned that. But as far as the state of Montana and the tribes are concerned, the strings that are attached to the MOE, counting that as MOE are too great and not something I think that the tribes want to be involved in.

The state plan, although most communities took advantage of the opportunities to listen to our spiel about our state plan when we put it together, it was way over almost everybody's head. We did make an effort. We went out and we visited 15 communities to talk about our state plan. But it was something I think most people really missed, and there was a lot of emotion involved with welfare reform at that point, anyway.

By the way, the state had been out conducting meetings with tribes. I think I, personally, conducted about 35 meetings with tribes between the fall of 1994 and the fall of 1997. But again, there was a lack of understanding and people were not being forced to be involved at that point. So when the state plan was implemented on the reservations, the experiences were not particularly pleasant. We had a lot of people who were being sanctioned, we had a lot of people who just didn't understand what was going on. It was totally foreign to them as far as a concept was concerned. And so what we did during the 1997 legislature was asked for some tribal transitional dollars. And we did get those monies from the legislature, they were disguised as supportive services monies, but we used them the way we saw fit as a department.

That's working quite well on most reservations; on some it's not, but, for instance, with the Salish and Kutenai, it's working extremely well. They understand the whole situation well enough to be preparing to file their own plan.

What we did with these monies was, we asked that people consider what they were going to do. And we have what we call community advisory councils in the state of Montana, so the community advisory councils on the reservations, we asked that they go ahead and think about doing that at the reservation level. And that's what's happening. And they're looking at, shall we go ahead and file our own state plans, or shall we do something maybe as an interim step, which we call "community operating plans." Just as the Salish and Kutenai are filing their own plan, I met earlier this week with the Chippewa Cree at Rocky Boy Reservation, and they're going to file their own community operating plan which is different from that which the counties have filed and is more appropriate and meets the needs of the people there much better.

We talked about the 50 percent situation this morning and five of the seven reservations in Montana meet that 50 percent exception. But what most people are telling me there at the reservation level is that they are going to use that as much-needed time to bring them to readiness to implement welfare reform and to set time limits. So most of those people are setting the time limits. They may be longer, but they're setting them.

Then the only other thing -- I see Eddie's giving me the high sign there -- what I wanted to say is that on the back of the sheet that I passed out is the state plan as it was implemented in Montana, and this flow chart was suggested to me by Chet Eagleman on the Crow Reservation and has an instrument that we use with all of our welfare recipients; it's been a Godsend. And then one specific thing that I want to mention there is that Montana does have a post-secondary education option. We had that available to us in our original plan, we grandfathered it in, so post-secondary education in Montana is and will remain to be an allowable work activity. Thanks.

MS. WHITING: I hope the clock didn't start ticking on my time for my introduction.

MR. BROWN: It has. You have three minutes.

MS. WHITING: Okay. I can tell you where I came on board and what we've done as a tribe to this point in trying to put this plan together and where we're at. I came on board as part of the transitional money that came from the state of Montana. Our tribe got a chunk of money to hire or to do what they -- they wrote a plan on how they would spend the money and what they did is they needed someone to come in and be able to come in and help a key staff person who is my sister, and we had an attorney that was assigned to this particular project at that time to put together information for our tribal council so they could make the decision whether or not they wanted to proceed or how they wanted to proceed with this.

The council agreed to pursue looking at this on December 2nd, '97, sent a letter of intent to the governor on December 12, '97, and to start looking at different plans and decide how we were going to proceed. I came on board in January and, looking at how we would collect data, meeting with a core group of tribal programs to get them involved from the onset and which roles they would play, so they would take ownership of this whole new concept and what we would do.

We put together our Welfare to Work plan and had that in by January 30th. We talked earlier, there was discussion about those particular plans. One thing that we did and I think is real important for tribes to do that is somewhat innovative and we don't take advantage of it is that our tribe has many vendors. We don't use those vendors in a political way at times in telling them that they need to support us on different issues. We also don't require that these vendors hire tribal people.

We don't require in our school systems, for instance, in the Ronan (phonetic) school system on our reservation, there is over 50 percent Indian kids in the school out of 292 employees, including not just the professionals, but the bus drivers, the cooks, things like that, we only had two Indian employees in there until last year. We're not requiring those school districts to hire tribal people, and we need to push in all of those different areas.

In libraries, we put a tremendous amount of money in the county in those, and we don't want anything back. We don't get any bang for our buck, and we need to start doing that as tribal people, and this Welfare to Work is where we can start doing that. That's one thing that we put in is to put a little political pressure on our own vendors, insurance people and people like that.

We had, when they hired me, I got a little surprise. When they had me come on, they gave me the contract that said that we had to have our plan -- the draft done by April 1st, and as we looked at the regs that, come to find out, it was March 1st, and so we kind of lost 30 days, but we have moved ahead, and because of some of the work we've already done with the state and one thing that we did do that was very, very valuable is we took advantage of the expertise out of OIO and had them come down and meet with us and the state people and all of the other reservation state transitional people to open up a dialogue with the state, to identify problems and to look at areas where we were going to have to work with the state in moving ahead.

Since we're one of the first tribes in Montana, the further we get ahead on this, we kind of pave the way for the other tribes in Montana. So we identified at that meeting; it was a very productive meeting. Dr. Brown did an excellent job at that meeting. We appreciated it because we did come out with some products that are now very functional.

We looked at setting up areas where we were going to have to set up memorandum of agreements, and we set up in the financial areas technical systems, which is going to be one of the more difficult areas. Child support is a place that's going to be a difficult area. Child care retrocession; if a problem occurs, some other general issues that we always deal with, with torts, indemnity and things like that, the transferring the programs, how we can do that in a fashion that's going to be best for the clients. And so we were able to identify that.

We also determined at that meeting that we needed to set up a negotiation team which we've done with our tribe. Our negotiation team is our chair, vice chair and two other council people, plus our technical staff. We came to the conclusion that we needed to identify who our population was going to be and on what area. That was decided at our council meeting on Thursday. It's going to be within the exterior boundaries of the reservation and it is going to be caretakers, adult caretakers who are tribal members.

So we've moved ahead. We could now get our '94 numbers, and I guess that meeting allowed us to be able to provide to our tribal council the information that we specifically needed to get. We were totally overwhelmed, and I think most tribes are. My sister, being the program analyst and likes to make charts and lists and is excellent at that put together for our council -- and this isn't a good survey, but what it does is takes the core programs, the tribal programs, the federal programs and those that have dual eligibility and put it in one package, and she did it with overheads and was able to do the core tribal programs, do the second list with those other ones that will be connected.

We think that in the long run, that geographically, to make the mindset different of people that will be recipients and the people that will be administering the programs, we may have to geographically move and put them all in one building to change that whole concept across the board. So that's where we're at right now, we're moving ahead. I think we've cut down and we didn't have to have that in by March 1st because of the dialogue before, so we are moving ahead with our program.

DR. BROWN: Great. Thank you. You know, it seems to me that you've explained something that, particularly, a state that has a large population -- what is the percentage of TANF clients in the state of Montana that are American Indian on the roles? Do they make up 30, 40 percent of the state roles?

MR. MEREDITH: Well, interestingly enough, when we started the project, 24.8 percent of the roles or of the participant roles were tribal members, and then -- or reservation inhabitants, and as of the last statistics I have in January, that's up to 38.8 percent, despite the fact that we've dropped our overall roles in Montana by 40 percent. What that says to me is that we're not being as effective as we need to be on the reservations.

DR. BROWN: The other thing that I think we need to bear in mind, they've explained an interesting process where the state and the tribe have been active participants. The state, having your title as tribal welfare reform coordinator, so your job is --

(End side 6, tape 3.)

-- begin to negotiation. So I guess when we talk, take a look at -- it's not only tribes that must make an effort, but some of the states must begin to plan and organize.

I understand also the state of Montana made available dollars for planning for the tribes. What is that?

MR. MEREDITH: Those are the transitional dollars that I was talking about. We made approximately $40,000 available to each tribe to do that with and it's available each year of the biennium. DR. BROWN: Why did you do that?

MR. MEREDITH: We saw -- just because of what I told you before. What we saw was that things were not working as well as they should there, and that people needed a lot more information, that there needed to be some demographic studies done, and that whatever happened on the reservation, at least in my view, needed to be culturally appropriate, which the overall FAME program didn't necessarily fill that bill.

DR. BROWN: What has been your tribes's experience of working with the state and having done that? Has that made difference, significant difference in your planning, or no difference at all?

MS. WHITING: We just know we have to be double prepared anytime we work with the state. And for the first time, like I said, we got gem. We couldn't get a compact for quite sometime. We're going into litigation on gaming issues, fish and wildlife agreement took a lot of time.

DR. BROWN: Okay, thank you. We're going to now focus on the state of California, and Denis, why don't you lead us out on that?

MR. TURNER: Thank you. First of all, I'm not a really deep expert into the issues of welfare and welfare reform, except that in the past, I've tried to work on amending Title XX so that we could get to this point some years ago. But beyond that, during my youth period, I actually was a welfare recipient through my family, so I had a lot of experience that way, but I'm sure many of you have. Unfortunately, in California, as you know, it's a Public Law 280 state, and I need to tell you a little bit of that history, though, so you can kind of understand our project.

As you know, California never did, as Mr. Inouye mentioned yesterday if you were here, our treaties are still sitting in the treaty room of the Senate offices over here across the street some ways. And basically, since that period when social services money was going to be available for Indian people in California, it was diverted because the state of California gave a bill to the federal government for the cost of the bounties on Indians in California, and so we'd lost the social services money for that period.

I'm going to leap ahead in great -- in decades, but I think it's really important to know how we have advanced from those periods when, actually, treaty money and social services money moved from paying the bounties of California Native Americans to the day when our treaties weren't signed because that was bungled between the state of California and the Bureau of Indian Affairs or the War Department, that period of time.

I know not many of you know that, and I think it's really important to know the history of California and why we're still in the situation we are. I think we've made a long -- in a big jump to current days, even though you know what the gaming issues are in California, the compacting water issues. They're as important as the issues of social services and welfare reform.

But I wanted to remind you of that, because I think a lot of people don't really know what has happened to the California people. And what has happened, though, through the tribes that I work with and for have made a commitment to have some welfare reform. And I'm certainly glad to it, and what had happened is they took their own money, investment money, with some of the gaming tribes and donated it to our organization to try to pursue how can we get our people in to work.

And so with that kind of thing happening, we basically went to the state legislature, developed the relationship of the county of San Diego and other counties in California and basically orientated them to the history, to where we're at, and through those -- through about a three-year process with help from many of the tribal leaders in Southern California, both leaders from the health field, from the field of tribal governments and administrators, to try and pursue this effort and also developing that relationship all the way to the governor's office, because this requires a compact in some sense.

As I mentioned, we need to go beyond just the compacting for the water, social services, child welfare services. And the commitment that the tribes basically made there at the beginning was, is each of the tribes to develop a children's code. And from that, it began to develop other things that we're going to be able to attach to services provided to our children, and I think that from that point on, we've got to understand how the state is operating, what we needed to do with the state in order to organize with them on our goals in terms of the issues of welfare reform.

It didn't look like that three years ago. Of course, that was something that was still in the talking stage, as I mentioned, in terms of amending Title XX. So in terms of getting up to date today, is we basically went to the legislature, they agreed to put some language into a bill called AB1542 which authorizes what they call "Cal Works in California," and from then on, we had our input into the committee that did allow language specifically so that tribes could obtain a match from the state of California to develop their TANF and Welfare to Work programs.

Certainly to our advantage, it wasn't really a high-profile kind of issue that you have like with gaming and water and land; land is probably our second-biggest issue in California, but beyond that, we did get through this and we are lucky that we developed a relationship with the Director of Social Services in California and we got the staff support.

So I think that one of the things that -- and I certainly know it's tougher in other areas of the country -- it's easy for me to say because we've done it. We do have an agreement with the state to develop our Welfare to Work, and/or TANF programs. And that's not easy because tribes need some kind of safety net because they don't have surpluses of money. But I think some of that safety net has to include -- and the states can help you if you develop that relationship and they know where the money is. Sometimes they don't tell us, but I think that we need to work that with them. I think that's how it best works.

DR. BROWN: Denis, you know, it's one thing to have a tribe that's of major size. In California, particularly in Southern California, you have a lot of small tribes. How do small tribes come together to make a difference, and how are small tribes going to deliver TANF services, if at all?

MR. TURNER: Right. In our situation, in California, there's 103 recognized tribes, some that don't have any land at all; they just operate their tribal government, as I mentioned. From the days when the Indians in California had bounties, it was very tough to have any kind of relationship or get any kind of benefits. But what we decided to do is basically develop a consortium and have each tribe develop a learning center kind of concept for Welfare to Work, jobs opportunity and learning, and then in terms of TANF, we established some field offices through about a 45-mile corridor from one end to the other in which we had some developments going on.

One of the really fortunate things that I mentioned earlier, some of the gaming tribes have diversified and they're going into other businesses, knowing that the window may close someday. So we knew where we were going to have jobs at, and where we could really take some time, think out what would be the best-possible jobs in the future. So we got the agreements of basically nine tribes, which is -- resolutions on this issue from the tribe are very, very difficult.

We have probably, in the last three years, I'm seeing roughly 36 meetings with tribal -- the same tribal -- 9 tribal councils going over and over, and then you have -- sometimes you would have a turnover of the tribal government so it even becomes more difficult.

And then also, ourselves doing our own capacity-building in terms of really understanding what is welfare reform, what is -- you know, in terms of Welfare to Work, child care, I think that's a big issue we still need to deal with. Child care is not very well looked at and we really need to study this in terms of the welfare reform issue, because this is an issue that really affects 80 percent of the mother that this attack is against -- women. So we need to look at -- and then how do we help their children.

DR. BROWN: Okay, thank you. Denis, your coalition of tribes -- we have talked about tribes submitting TANF plans; we have yet to talk about a coalition of small tribes or a coalition of tribes submitting a plan. Has Southern California done that, or intends to do some kind of a coalition plan?

MR. TURNER: Well, we've talked to the people of Northern California. As someone has mentioned, many of you may not know, but California has thought about developing three different state -- the state of Northern, Central and Southern California. It's hard to grasp unless you really have spent years and years in California to understand the geographics, the distance between each other.

We in Southern California would like to move on and help Central and Northern California, and they are capable of running the Welfare to Work TANF program in terms of all of the ramifications of welfare reform. But the geographics of it just kills us. So what we are trying to do is get some success models going in Central and Northern California, but you've got to remember, we want to do something that is really going to be beneficial, long-term, for people who have been on public assistance for generations.

DR. BROWN: But again, has Southern California submitted a plan or plans to submit a TANF plan?

MR. TURNER: We have a provisionally approved TANF plan currently, and we have agreements with the counties, because as you know, the counties, each of the counties, depending on the makeup of the state, but have to put a portion of county funds into the project in terms of whatever agreement you make. And so we've convinced a few counties in Southern California to do that.

The state of California has agreed to match the federal grant, so we have a 50-50 match, and there is a cost to the tribes in terms of they invested some years ago, as I mentioned, by the help of the gaming tribes, literally giving us cash dollars to go out and research this and do the groundwork that needed to get to the point that we are --we are going to, Monday, open our first doors and give out our first TANF application to a tribal member of one of the nine consortium tribes in our project.

DR. BROWN: Do you know if you're the first TANF coalition of tribes to be approved?

MR. TURNER: Yes, we are, in the country.

DR. BROWN: For those of you that may be from smaller tribes who are thinking about a coalition of tribes, I think it's important to understand that we do have now an approved TANF plan for a coalition of tribes that you may want to address. Want to move quickly now to the state of California representative and to see what the thinking is of the state of California in regards to what is happening.

MS. WHITING: As Denis mentioned, we have come a very long way in California in terms of the relationship between our tribes in the Indian country and the state of California. Specifically, the Department of Social Services and our Directress, Eloise Anderson, formed an Indian advisory committee, because we had heard from our community outreach and the office of community relations where I'm the Deputy Director that the state as a whole, state government as a whole had not been providing quality services to the tribes. There was no dialogue going on, the relationship was rather severed, if I can use that term loosely.

So what we did was to form an advisory committee to get input from the tribes. We developed a mission statement, which is: "To promote and achieve meaningful tribal involvement in the development, implementation and review of the California Department of Social Services programs and services that address the needs of Indian children and their family."

Everyone agreed on that mission statement. And from that, we developed four goals, which are always evolving because you can set goals and reach goals and then you have to be flexible enough to change them. But I do want to take a few minutes to share those with you. The first is: "To achieve meaningful involvement of the Indian Advisory Committee members appointed, designated -- that were appointed and designated by tribal leaders to represent their organizations in developing and establishing priorities related to social service issues of concern for Indian children and their families."

The reason this is important is because we have, at least my data tells me, 104 federally recognized tribes in California, and with that number, we have a lot of people who are able to travel to Sacramento to meet with government officials, to meet with directors of departments, a lot of people who can't. A lot of people who don't know what's going on outside of the reservation or the rancheria, would like to know, have a need to know, but there was no outreach being performed.

Our advisory committee's goal was to help us with input, but also help us give information in Indian country. The second goal is: "To promote and provide and opportunity for the California Department of Social Services to provide technical assistance and support to Indian communities and their families." And this is an important one.

The technical assistance came about in coordinating community information forums -- not only about welfare reform, which was the talk of the day, but about child care issues, about issues on employment and training -- things that -- these issues that were far more reaching than the umbrella of the Department of Social Services, but it gave us the opportunity to share with other state departments the issues that they had not been hearing because they didn't have an advisory group. So it really put us in a position to disseminate information to other state departments so that we could get some action on them.

The third goal was: "To encourage collaboration and coordination between the counties and the Indian tribes in providing social services to Indian communities and families." We have 58 counties in California. I've talked to other states that have more counties, but not as large or huge geographic area as we have on the West Coast. You have only to look at your TV tonight to see how El Nino is hitting the north, central, south, to see how big California is, and the impact of nature.

I think what we wanted to be able to accomplish with the technical assistance to the 58 counties is to help them in terms of training and development and working with tribal members. We're not where we want to be at this point in terms of that relationship. We are working in providing training sessions for county staff so that they are more sensitive to the needs of our tribes in California.

We also are providing training to our own staff so that they are more sensitive to the history of California and the relationship between the tribes because it wasn't common knowledge, at least not in state government, and certainly not in our department, as to why there was so much distrust between government and our tribal members.

The fourth goal is: "To continue to strengthen the relationship with Indian communities to enable Indian tribes to fully implement the intent of the Indian Child Welfare Act and most recently -- as I said, goals always evolve -- tribal TANF. We know that all of our tribes are not going to be able to implement tribal TANF; we know that. And even though we know that we are still committed to provide outreach and information to those tribes so that they can make that decision themselves. It has to be a decision that's made by the tribal government that we can't do this, we can't do it now but we want to do it later, or we want to do some parts of it.

So our follow-up activities are: forming partnerships with state government agencies that have programs that fully impact Indian country. The Department of Social Services, certainly, the Employment Development Department because that is going to be the funding stream for Welfare to Work. The Department of Community Services and Development and the Department of Health Services, just to name four that we've formed in terms of a collaborative in getting information out to our tribal members, but also receiving input as to what kind of work we're doing in California.

The federal partnerships are very important, too. And as you know, federal and state government -- well, you know and federal and state government. And so, it's like an obstacle course, it's almost like a gauntlet. You kind of go this way and you go that way and you try to find people that are sensitive, that care, and that are committed to taking the extra step, going the extra mile to make things work. And I'd be the first one to tell you that isn't always possible, to be quite honest with you. But when you do get someone who is willing to say, "well, I think we can do that," "well, let me look into that," "let's see if we can change that," we're not talking about keeping government status quo.

When welfare reform came about and the states were given the autonomy to develop their own plans, that was free-for-all -- to be innovative and creative and to work with the people in the communities within the state to see how they wanted to implement welfare reform. So this is an ongoing process and it's evolving.

We've also partnershipped with the CIMC and tribal leaders and of course, with this organization to try and get the word out about what needs to be done, but more important on our side is what you need us to do to help you get over the hurdles, and how you're going to work the funding, how are you going to provide services in terms of child care development when you've got 80 percent of the families needing child care and you don't have a child care center within sight. How do you develop that and how do you train people so that they become instant entrepreneurs in providing child care to the rest of the community.

The other thing would be transportation. How do you get past that and the fact that our plan tells us that if it takes more than two hours to get to your job, you're exempt. Now, that's a problem. And so what we want to do is to develop ways of transportation so that we can overcome those obstacles. There are a lot of barriers that we face, and we can all agree on that. But I think the commitment has to be that we want to change welfare as we know it not just for ourselves and for the adults, but everyone agrees we want to change it for our children, and that's the future.

DR. BROWN: Okay, thank you. Now, we're going to open it up for questions. But one of the things as you're thinking here of questions, please raise your hand and we'll get a microphone to you. We have time for a few questions. We're going to have to move here because we got to a late start.

But one of the things that we need to think about is, many times, states deliver services to Indian people because of the ruralness of it or the lack of employment and so forth, states have requested or have presented waivers not to -- to not have to provide services to Indian people and in a way, it took the obligation off, but also it left no incentive to do anything with the population beyond that.

So one of the things that we're really talking about is while we want the state to be able to work with the tribes, we also, the expectation is, that rather than just requesting a waiver to exclude tribes from certain things, what can the state and tribe do in innovative ways to continue to have some expectation and development there. But we need to think of that.

Let's have some questions. John Bushman, could you please stand? No, I'm joking.

(Laughter.)

MR. BUSHMAN: I owe you big time, man. This is a question that I want to ask John Meredith and Rhonda Whiting. It's a question that I will get answered eventually when the Salish and Kutenai Tribes' TANF plan comes to my office for review and approval. But it's an issue that I want everybody in this room and discussion to hear about. John, you mentioned that the state of Montana has provided what you call "transitional monies" to the tribes in the state and that, I assume, I think I heard you say was for the tribes to plan and determine whether or not TANF, assuming the TANF operation was going to be feasible for them.

I commend the state legislature for doing that, and I know a little bit of the background on how you were able to get that done. So maybe I shouldn't give all the credit to the legislature. But I want to ask: Is the state of Montana going to provide the state match to those tribes in Montana who assume TANF responsibilities? Because, as everyone in this room can imagine, without that state money, tribal TANF is really an illusion for just about every tribe without its own resources to put into it. And the number of tribes that have that capability are few and far between.

So I guess the question would be for you and for Rhonda representing the Salish and Kutenai tribe, what is the state's position on the state match, and then I'd be interested in hearing what the tribe thought about that.

MR. MEREDITH: The state's position right now, John, is that we will provide the match through June 30th of 1999, and that's because of the allocation that the '97 legislature made. And as I said, we have biennial sessions, so there is no -- luckily, there's no legislature in town right now.

Beyond that, I'm a little bit skeptical because I know that we didn't believe that there could possibly be a more conservative legislature in Montana than the 1995 legislature, and sure enough there was in '97, and so we're expecting something similar to happen in '99.

Luckily, there are some members of the Republican Party in our state who are a little bit more forward-thinking and understand the advantages to the state economically for encouraging tribes to file their own tribal family assistance plans. And we think we may be able to use that economic interest to get them to go ahead and allow the match to continue past that point.

QUESTION: Let me just, as a follow-up to that, I don't know if everyone can hear me. When a tribe submits a TANF plan to the proposed tribal TANF plan, they proposed a plan for three years.

DR. BROWN: In the case of Salish and Kutenai, you would have state commitment for matching funds for at least one year of the plan. Is it the idea, then, if I'm reading between the lines or hearing between the lines, the idea to try to demonstrate to the legislature that this is a successful kind of thing, because I know one of the interests of the states is that they want some accountability for these funds, and legislators that I've talked to throughout the states have said to me repeatedly how can we be assured that tribal programs will spend this in a way that it's intended to be spent.

So I guess the question, then, becomes for you, Rhonda, in a tribe, are you willing to submit a three-year plan to us knowing that you're only going to have one year of state funding, a commitment, and then sort of bet the come line, if you will, that an additional two years is funding -- state match will be there?

MS. WHITING: I hate to put all our cards in the table, especially in front of state people that -- we believe that if no tribe put in with that 30 percent match, that they were more apt to lose that 30 percent match from the legislature. If we are able to put it in and we have been successful as far as being a self-governance tribe and feel like we have the capabilities, then we pave the way and it's going to be much harder for them to take that money away and to reallocate, so that's why we kind of have this, hurry, get moving, let's get the plan in by the deadline to get up and running by July 1, and so that's the reason why we've pushed ahead on this.

DR. BROWN: Okay, thank you. We want to move on to some other questions. We realize there are some others, but we've got other people we want to address. And, John, hold that; if we have some time, we'll get back.

We have a gentleman in the back here? Yes.

MR. TARBELL: Thank you very much. My name is Harold Tarbell, a Mohawk from New York. Just a clarification for Mr. Meredith, and then I have a general question for the panel. In the paper on welfare reform and tribal state issues, there is a quote that says, "meeting, work, activity, participation rates may become only an exercise in assigning family investment agreement activities which may or may not lead toward deployment." Can I just get some clarification on that?

MR. TURNER: That's our commentary on the HR2015, which talks about the 50 percent exemption. And what we've seen as far as some of the tribes are concerned, they see the five-year time limitation exemption as being a Godsend, where then it becomes just a matter of going through the motions of doing whatever is necessary as far as participation rates and passing whatever audits the federal government should like to impose on us later on.

I think, though, that that attitude has become the minority. And as I said earlier, I think most people are now seeing that more as just an extended time to give the tribes a chance that where there's a complete dearth of education and resources, to get their feet on the ground and then go ahead and do establish a time limitation.

So the impetus is there for going to work and achieving some degree of self-sufficiency.

DR. BROWN: Okay, thank you. We want to move to get to a number of other questions here.

MR. BLUE: First off, I'm not sure whether I want to introduce myself, because I kind of feel responsible for John Bushman's gimpy leg. He was supposed to be presenting at our forum for -- I'm with the Catawba Indian Nation -- I'm Randy Blue, and John was supposed to be presenting at our -- I can't even think of what it's called --

(End side 7, tape 4.)

-- and it increased to 38.8. Knowing that with tribes it's usually, you know, we take care of our own and different things like that -- that's one of the reasons I think that that probably increased, because so many people were coming out and wanting to help from the tribes.

But what can be done to -- working with the state -- what can be done to keep the -- out or the dollars there to help with those people?

(Inaudible.)

MR. MEREDITH: What I would say in response to that is, what really happened is, we had about a 12,000 caseload in the state of Montana. That became -- today, it's about 6,600. And the 2200 to 2500 cases that were native in the state have stayed at that very same level. As far as funding is concerned, the funding is there right now to go ahead and take care of those cases with our FAME program, or the state of Montana's program.

But as we said before, if the tribes choose to go on their own, then it's incumbent upon all of us, I think, to make sure that that funding continues to be available and we're not talking just about TANF dollars, we're talking about child care dollars, child support enforcement dollars, housing dollars, the whole gamut.

DR. BROWN: We have time for two more quick questions. I don't think, Mr. Meredith, that may be just a matter of interpretation where you said when the tribal numbers went to 24 percent to 38 percent, even though your welfare roles were cut by 40 percent overall -- that may be a matter of interpretation, or maybe that the opportunities on the reservation -- this is just reality, that the opportunities -- were never there, because there really hasn't been an increase, it's just been reality --

MR. MEREDITH: No, there really hasn't been an increase. As I said, it's the same level number -- larger percentage of the --

A PARTICIPANT: I think the statement was that so we're not doing our job out there. Well, maybe this is just reality that those -- aren't there and that 38 percent is more of a realistic number and that also, to -- no, I'm sorry, Anna. My question is -- Rhonda, okay, I'm sorry. Being from Oklahoma and just kind of back to what Mr. Bushman was saying, there is no incentive. In Oklahoma, we've got this term called self-government -- types you're familiar with out there, and it's opened their eyes to a lot of things, and this relates a lot to that -- welfare reform and -- TANF and so forth.

What is the incentive for an Indian tribe to administer TANF -- like in Oklahoma, we kind of did an analysis. I never had a problem with the tribe doing AFDC or the state doing AFDC or tribal members, so why all of a sudden should there be an incentive for me to take TANF? Now, I can see like in South Dakota where there has been a study done and nowhere has a disproportionate number of Indian people being taken off the TANF roles as compared to the white people, why a tribe would want to do that in order to take their tribal members, but why, if we don't have a problem, what's the incentive for Indian tribes to administer it, other than to create more bureaucracy?

MS. WHITING: Well, I think when we had our meeting Dr. Brown facilitated, there was a discussion by some people whether or not it was worth it for the tribe to do that or to participate in it. The fact is that the whole new concept of welfare reform is out there. It is going to change. It's not the same. Even if you're happy with some particular programs, there is going to be some changes across the board.

Tribes have no choice, or tribal members. They're going to have to participate in the new federal program. You have the option as a tribe in how they are going to participate, the individuals. And so if there is an incentive in there to make it more culturally relevant, that is one of them out there, because it is going to change across the board and membership needs to have, I guess the best interest of the clientele of the particular services as a concern.

QUESTION: Could I just add on to that?

DR. BROWN: Just real quick.

QUESTION: One of the really big things and the reason that the tribes put up the money is because, number one, we think we can take better care of our young people and our older people than anybody. We can cut the bureaucracy, a one-stop, when they come for everything and not be there for months and drug out on that.

DR. BROWN: I'm going to ask in conclusion if each of you would just take 30 seconds and tell what you think is the most critical things in building or establishing state tribal relations that has been most important to you in your work. And let's start over here with Rhonda.

MS. WHITING: Well, I think the dialogue that's taken place -- and it was interesting at lunch today, because my sister thinks very highly of John and has worked well and some of the things we've come up with, but he announced to me that they have had their conflicts and have butted heads more than once, so I think just particularly going through that process and I think sitting down face to face has been a real advantage for us, and now coming up for a model and looking out for the other tribes within our state in how they can work with the state programs.

DR. BROWN: Okay, Charlene.

MS. MEEKS: I think the key is developing a meaningful partnership which starts with respect and understanding. I think what other states can do, as California has done, is to realize that our officials, our staff don't know everything and don't have a great sense of education about the history of California and the tribes.

So the first thing, first, foremost, would be to provide that training of cultural sensitivity. The other thing I didn't get to mention -- I have to say this -- is that every tribe should be thinking about the community service part of welfare reform. Even if you don't implement TANF, you're going to have someone implementing and someone telling people they have to have some type of work experience. That work experience can be right in Indian country, and if you don't speak with the counties or the government about it, your people will be passed over and going to some other part of the community when they could be painting and building and doing things where you live.

DR. BROWN: Denis, she took your 30 seconds.

MR. TURNER: Well, let me take another 30. I think what it is, is, we've been talking in this conference about sovereignty. And this is an exercise in sovereignty. The best advantage that you can give your tribal members is what you offer them first at home. And I think this TANF and Welfare to Work, which is a big part in California so, is really an advantage. And not only that, we can go on to compact the other things that we need, as Mr. Inouye said yesterday. We need to work with the states. And I really believe what he had to say, and this is an opportunity to continue that beyond, as I mentioned, our second biggest issue -- and it will become a national issue and will affect every tribe in this country, and that California is going out to get back some of their land -- one way or the other.

DR. BROWN: Okay, John. Thirty seconds.

MR. BUSHMAN: I won't take long, Eddie. Patience, respect and true understanding.

DR. BROWN: Okay. Good. Gentlemen and ladies, thank you very much for your participation.

MR. BUSHMAN: Thank you. Thank you, audience. (Applause.)

DR. BROWN: If you want, we would like for the other panel to come on down. We don't want anybody to leave because we want to keep -- we're running just a little behind time We want to be true to get you out here on the time we said we're going to get you out, so please bear with us as we move through here.
 

Panel 4- Children and Family Support Services

If we could have the Children and Family Support Services panel come forward. That we talked about is we've been concentrating principally on training and education and then having jobs and economic development. But as we talked about earlier, what about supporting individuals moving from welfare to work -- if, in fact, we have clientele who do not have the support, it's not uncommon on many of your reservations, particularly your more rural, that many of the people do not have phones, automobiles, child care is only a dream that is thought of as most of you have your grandparents or aunt and uncle or relatives living close by, and then we start talking about how do we literally move a person and support a person, what kind of services are necessary and need to be in place for such a thing to work.

Again, we have a very distinguished panel. We're going to do something just a little different, however, at the end of the panel that I would like to do. But let me introduce the people that we have here today. We have Donald Sykes, and I think all of you and probably at one time or another have listened to this gentleman who has been out really at the forefront of welfare reform and has appeared at many different conferences and meetings.

He is the Director of the Office of Community Services for the Administration of Children and Families at the Department of Health and Human Services. We have Ms. Janet Wise, who is chairperson of the National Indian Child Care Association who is with us here today, and then we have Mrs. Leila Tulley, who is the executive director of the Division of Social Services with the Navajo nation. And then we have Mr. Alex Yazza (phonetic), who is also with the Navajo nation.

We're going to do something a little different at the end, because all of you may have heard that the Navajo nation has taken a little different approach in regards to 638. At the end of this discussion, we're going to want Ms. Tulley to talk a little bit about how -- what that process is and where we are in that process and what that looks like as reality or not reality or whatever.

So, given that it's unique and given that there has been a lot of interest in Indian country, we wanted to take a moment on that. Let's begin now to hear from Mr. Donald Sykes. If you would, please.

MR. SYKES: Okay. You started off talking about the kind of support services. I want to mention some of the programs that we have at the Administration of Children and Families, and particularly in all of the community services. But I really want to end up talking a little bit more about community development models that we try and push out of our office, and the focus on community development or economic development is something that I really want to talk about relative to its importance to tribal TANF. And I think importance toward moving people not just from welfare to work, but out of poverty in general.

But in the Office of Community Services, we have a number of programs that really do focus on trying to move people out of poverty. Many of you are already familiar with the fact that our office operates the Community Services Block Grant Funds which fund some of you directly or through community action agencies in your communities, the Low-Income Energy Assistance program, and I will mention these simply because I want to just lay out this litany of programs, and community and -- not community, but domestic and family violence.

On all three, the Energy Assistance CSBG and Family Violence, there is a set-aside for tribes. And those all three come out of our particular office, as does the Social Services Block Grant of Title XX which goes to the states. And, of course, John Bushman's division, which is also in our office, the tribal TANF program.

The importance of those programs, I think, is that those along with some programs that are discretionary, we have the jobs for low-income individuals, or JOLI, as we call it, and the Rural and Urban Community Economic Development and Community Food and Nutrition. Those three are discretionary programs that are given out on a highly competitive basis. But what we've tried to do with the JOLI program for the last five years is to look at the kinds of things that really are important to moving people out of poverty or off of welfare.

Post-employment support is in a very crucial one. I think there's been a lot of focus in welfare reform on getting people jobs, but getting a job is one thing; maintaining a job is equally important and, often times, more difficult. So what we have been working on with JOLI is also looking into the whole issue of microbusiness development.

Our focus on community-based solutions, though, is then out of a belief that many communities have strengths. And oftentimes in our whole discussion of human services, we focus in only on the problems as opposed to looking at the strengths in communities and building off of that. We have been trying to center a lot of what we do around the issues of transportation and moving people from where they live to where we think the jobs are.

But we are also interested in focusing in on economic development activities in communities where people live. And I think this is going to become increasingly more important when we move those people that we want to move off of welfare who have had no experience in employment, who have had very little education, people who may have substance abuse and some other kinds of problems, it's going to be hard to move them out of their communities into competitive environments with other folks. The best potential may well be in the communities, whether we're talking about inner-city communities, rural areas or reservations.

So one of the things that we think about is that education, job training, child care, transportation, legal assistance to clean up bad paper that people may have are all crucial and important items, but I consider them to be the ante to just get in the game. I think it's also, one of the previous discussions were talking, it's interesting to me, some of the preliminary findings that we are seeing is that some people are not moving off welfare; some groups are not moving off welfare as fast as some others. And I think we need to come to grips with the issue of discrimination, and I think that that is also impacting on who is getting employed and who is not.

Also, another spur for why economic employment is, I think, a very important element. To me, placed employment, placed economic development should be particularly of interest in tribal --in Indian country because land is tied to that whole issue. And so it seems to me that looking at how to create and develop those kinds of comprehensive approaches that not only provide the social service support you want, but also begin to start looking at coming up with a strategic plan for your community, similar to what the goal was for what empowerment zone and enterprise communities were -- to sit down, look at what the problems are as you see it and what is a comprehensive plan that brings together education, social services. But this is a capitalist society and looks at those kinds of things as well.

DR. BROWN: Thank you.

MR. SYKES: I want to draw attention to the fact, though, Eddie, that what I brought along with me and which I didn't talk about, which I figure you can read, is a fact sheet on the programs that come out of our office and most important, and most recent, Federal Register, which we went to something different. We used to issue a program announcement for every program in this fact sheet. We've gone to a combined document that does not have the whole program announcement; it simply gives a paragraph on what the program is, what it tries to do and the dates when applications are due in. And I left these outside. I think Cleveland's put them outside on the desk out there and I'll be glad to answer any questions.

DR. BROWN: Donald, it's interesting, because you've mentioned some very important programs that have made a significant difference in tribal communities. Have you worked on any -- the possible models, given welfare reform and these programs that you mentioned, of how tribes can cram all of that together and redesign their systems? Have you thought about creating any incentive for tribes that would develop creative models, bringing all of those programs together in some kind of a unified effort?

MR. SYKES: There is no existing model that I'm familiar. The best one, I think, as we've been talking about trying to establish the kind of dialogue to do that. For most of these programs, it's necessary to have a nonprofit corporation. That does two things. One, it's just eligible for the kinds of programs we have, because our focus is in on really high-risk communities and providing high-risk capital.

But the second is, it's important to protect the other corporate assets so that, again, in this risky business, you can protect other assets that the tribe may have. So we are looking for models, and one of the things we would like to do is to explore and find out wehre there are interesting and successful models. We want to pick those things up because that's one of the tasks that we'd like to take -- identify models and share that information to others so that they don't have to reinvent the wheel.

DR. BROWN: One of the things you may consider is some incentive to -- in demonstrations of how tribes might or those tribes that are moving as just a thought that might be considered to help spur that kind of thought and creativity.

Let's go next to -- let's see, I'm having trouble without my glasses here. Janet, thank you.

MS. WISE: All right. Well, I find it really interesting right now that welfare reform has put child care in the spotlight, so to speak. What I'd like to say is, why is child care important? Child care is important for two reasons, and that is because we all need safe and nurturing environments to be while we're at work or going to school. We also realize that because of brain research, the most important time of child development is between those years of zero to three, so it's very important that we find adequate, safe quality places for our children to be while we're working.

What I want to talk about briefly is that the authorization of the Child Care and Development Block Grant in 1990 afforded tribes the availability of dollars, federal dollars to provide comprehensive child care services. We've been able to increase the availability in a majority of areas of Indian country for services for children. Reauthorization in 1995 afforded us other funding resources that we didn't have previously.

There had been six major child care sources that the states were able to enjoy, but the tribes were not. So as of 1995, they put those sources together and created the Child Care Development Funds. What we're looking at, though, is that that is not enough money. There is a one- to two-percent set-aside within welfare reform for child care services. Previously, with the 1990 authorization, we had 3 percent set-aside. Even though the monies increased because of the funding sources, the number of tribes applying for child care services also increase. So although the pot rose, it also decreased with the increased number of participants and tribes.

So the President has come recently in January and announced A $21.9-billion program for child care. What we're looking at there is the only money set aside for Indian tribes is within the child care and development block grant. So we're seeking help for those resources within his initiative. That is for after-school programs, early learning fund, a standards enforcement fund and child care provider scholarship fund.

The problem that we have in Indian country is, training is not available for child care providers. Child care providers are probably paid the least amount of money of anyone. They're paid minimum wages with no hope of increases, because of child care dollars and the cost of quality child care. So it's ludicrous to think that our most important resource is our children; however, the people providing the care and education for those children are not adequately trained and not adequately compensated for the work they do.

What we are also asking for is to support a three percent set-aside for tribal child care. One problem that we have with TANF is that TANF does not recognize higher education as a work requirement. So that's not conducive to proper family, parenting education in those formative years. If a mother is going to go to college, like we ask, or a father and they're going to school for 20 hours a week and then they also have to work 20 hours a week, they don't have time to bond with their child and properly take care of their families. So we're also asking that we look at some legislative changes, if possible, in that area to provide families the choice of whether they need to continue education or they need to work. The most important thing is that they have adequate time to spend with their children.

Things that we're also looking at is there are several major child care proposals right now in the Senate and in the House. We're seeking assistance from the tribes on those as far as lobbying or advocating for more funds. There are no tribal set-asides in any of these bills. The first one is, of course, the President's proposal. The second is the -- it's called SID-Care Act, Senate Bill 1037. This bill uses the Tax Code to address affordability issues, but there's no direct subsidies for child care in that.

The Early Childhood Development Act of 1997, it's Senate Bill 1309. It increases the child care block grant by $3.75 billion within five years, and that does have a tribal set-aside, but it's still at that lower percentage of 2 percent.

The Healthy and Smoke-Free Children's Act, Senate Bill 1492, that's sponsored by Senator Kennedy, and that is to increase money to pay for child care services for low-income families by increasing cigarette taxes. There is a Caring for America's Children, Senate Bill 1577, and a Senate Bill 1610, which is called the Child Care Access. So we're really seeking some assistance in getting these bills passed throughout the Senate and to also make sure that there is an adequate tribal set-aside for those funds.

DR. BROWN: You know, Janet, it's really nice to know that there is some future hope out there for some additional services. But let's concentrate a little on the 2 percent of money that was set aside in addition to discretionary dollars that the Secretary's set aside. How is the tribes? Have we been utilizing that money? Is that money being spent, or is it not being spent?

MS. WISE: We did a survey on that about three months ago, checked with the tribes to see how they were doing. It is being spent; it is needed money. The smaller tribes didn't have a lot of money to work with in the first place, and that additional money wasn't a great deal of money.

When we all first started with the Child Care and Development Block Grant, there was about 142 grantees. Now, there's 237 with the possibility of almost 400. So as you see that one pot of money cannot -- it cannot provide the kinds of services that the children need for all the tribes.

DR. BROWN: Some of the concern that we had heard because some of the tribes had decided to do construction, that the amount of time that it has taken to actually get a construction project under way and the red tape that has to go through at tribal level, that that money was not being perhaps spent in a timely manner, and that there was some concern that the secretaries could, at one time, decide not to designate a full 2 percent. Is there any concern on that? Anything that we need to be aware of in relationship to that?

MS. WISE: It's not a mandatory 2 percent; it's at her discretion, 1 or 2 percent. We did advocate very heavily for that 2 percent and was able to get that. However, at any time, she can decide that if the money is not spent, that she can go back to one percent because we haven't used it. Construction is a problem and I think that a lot of the tribes are going to have to ask for some kind of waivers, because it's not been the tribe's problem, it's been actually the bureaucracy of the Child Care Bureau and not being able to get those plans approved in a timely manner.

So those kinds of things, those issues, policies even within the new welfare reform for child care still have not been sent out. They're still working on some of those components to child care, so we haven't been able to do a lot of things that we had intended to and, of course, this first year is the ticking clock where our money needs to be spent.

One thing that I wanted to add, too, is that child care services is not just putting children in a room and watching them all day long. There's comprehensive services as far as social services programs to the families that are involved. A lot of tribes have their own health and safety standards and their own licensing and monitoring units and go out and check those facilities to make sure that they're all safe, including grandparents.

We also have provider training. We go out and train those individuals that we are licensing to provide care. We have resource and referral, which is a component of consumer education so that we can inform parents what they need to search for when they're looking for child care, what is a safe environment, are the children happy in those facilities.

We also have certificate systems where we're paying subsidies for people to attend other child care programs. So the tribes are really working hard and we've been going out to do reviews in the last couple of months, and tribal child care is a good situation for our children. I don't think that the federal government realizes that yet, but we do have a lot of quality programs.

DR. BROWN: Mr. Alex Yazza, Navajo nation. The Navajo nation, I know, has been very much involved. You have a unique situation. You have three different states. You have, I guess, one central region that you report to. You're working with -- where most tribes have to deal just with one state, you're dealing with three different states, three different programs, trying to develop three different state tribal agreements, looking at services that range across the largest reservation in the nation. Give us your feedback or experience in regards to try to coordinate these services.

MR. YAZZA: Thank you, Ed. (Inaudible) from the Navajo nation. The Navajo nation has developed a plan. What we did is started out with a Navajo Nation Welfare Reform Advisory Committee which was established by President Hale to address the welfare issue. And one of the immediate issues that we had to face with was that issue of the complexity of working with three different states: Arizona, New Mexico and Utah. And each state differs in regards to the services that are provided to our Navajo people and respectively to other Indian tribes in the three state areas.

What Navajo has that probably not many other tribes have is the experience in operating and the administration of several key programs that would make a TANF program very successful, at least within the Indian tribal program. One of the areas I want to touch on since we're talking about family support services and child care programs, what we administer at this point are several programs that already are outlined within the requirements of the law and the titles that you see within Section 412, also the titles that we have in the law itself, but above and beyond that, we also have a number of other programs that are state as well as federally funded which we operate.

Just as an example in child care services, we provide services under the Child Care Development Block Grant Programs, which provides day care services, in-home care programs and before and after school programs for the Navajo kids. We also have Child Protective Services, which is funded under our Title XXVIII programs from the states of Arizona and New Mexico. From these 638-funded programs, we have child welfare assistance programs which provides youth home services, children in need of services and other specialized services for our children.

With the Child Nutrition Program, we operate Women, Infant and Children program, the WIC programs, as well as a child nutrition program within the Head Start programs. One of the big items that we have and is very much of interest to everybody in the three states as well as across Indian country is the Child Enforcement Support Program.

Currently, the Navajo Nation has a joint powers agreement with the state of New Mexico. We do have two state offices that we're working with -- one's in Crown Point and one's in Ship Rock, New Mexico which, in itself, has a unit that's already been established with the state Health and Human Services Department in regards to the child support issue.

We just recently signed with the state of Arizona a JPA to begin the --

(End side 8, tape 4.)

A PARTICIPANT: Yes, please.

MS. BACCA: Hello. My name is Rebecca Bacca (phonetic). I'm with the National Indian Council on Aging. I'm a consultant specifically on managed care, but we've been tracking welfare reform. I would like to make the audience aware that we have five elders in our audience that are tracking the issues and have some pretty serious concerns about the impacts of welfare reform. I think this community of people will probably absorb a lot of the negative downside of if these programs don't work. For example, they'll have to worry about food and shelter and clothing and child care and all those sorts of things that people need if people, all of a sudden, off of welfare and in situations where they don't have any funding sources.

I think that that's a real critical key component, and I know some of our people earlier suggested that, really, the answers are in the community. And one thing I think is really important that we keep hearing from our elders is I think as far as when you've taken a look at the population of people that are affected by this, the vast majority of them are single mothers. In the process of this, I think it's just really important -- I was a single mom and I used to work with single parents for several years in getting them into situations where they are working and going through the educational process. I feel like I have some insight into this and was a single mom for a while.

But in particular, I want to mention that I think it's really important to engage the single parent community in this, and also the elder community as advisory in the process of how do we really make this work. Because I think that oftentimes, we talk in a very technical sense at a very arms-length sort of sense, and I think that it takes that personal involvement. I can't tell you how many people I've taken literally by the hand and gotten them into a classroom and gotten to the GED program and into college and things like that, and it's a really difficult process, oftentimes, but it very definitely is worth the investment of time and effort. And I just would like to see a more personalized approach to that and also consider the elders as a wonderful source of wisdom in how we can really, truly address these issues, and I think they should be engaged in the process.

DR. BROWN: Good. Thank you. I know that a lot of times when tribes are developing their TANF program, we've talked to the tribes and said, you know, the state's required to go out and get community input, participation and share that; how many of the tribes have made a major effort to get out and create a dialogue among -- whether it's the elderly, whether it's the single-parent mother, or whether it's the community, to inform them about the program, what that program really means and to share the plan before it's actually even taken to the council for support. So I think that's one thing that we need to consider as we develop.

I know the Navajo tribe had made an extensive effort in developing a process, even in pictures, the use of pictures, to show what welfare reform meant for those elders that did not read or write English, that they could then follow along in Navajo as to what the program meant and its impact.

But I think that's critical that we do capacity-building in the community to make sure we're going to have the support when the plan comes out. If I were to ask the question: If you were to go to your recipients right now and ask them, the tribes are going to take it over from the state, would they be happy, would they be nervous, or would they be saying no? And I think that's important to note, too, that you've got to build your constituency out there to make sure that when you take it over, you're going to have the kind of support and help from those recipients and community members as well.

One question?

QUESTION: I'd like to just quickly respond to that comment. What we've done with Navajo is exactly that. We took this out to the communities, we presented it to our local chapters, elders provided their input. But more importantly, the thing that we did was we included actual TANF recipients on the advisory committee that we have. So their input is there, so that's how we've developed our process.

DR. BROWN: Good. Question, please?

MS. CHURCHILL: Yes. Good afternoon. My name is Bernina Churchill (phonetic) and I am the District 3 representative with the Blacks Band of Ojibway in the state of Minnesota. And, Mr. Sykes, is it true that most of your community development programs are not only eligible to nonprofit organizations, but also eligible to states and local governments.

MR. SYKES: No. The block grants that I mentioned are restricted to states, but the discretionary programs I mentioned for economic development are restricted to nonprofit corporations.

MS. CHURCHILL: Okay, thank you.

DR. BROWN: Any other question? Okay, one of the things I'm interested that I've really heard about child care out there from many people saying, well, we don't think we have enough child care money. And what you're really doing in developing child care and now asking us to put TANF recipients as first priority, is that us as child care operators, whether it's Head Start programs or child care programs, you're asking us now to prioritize TANF clients, and if we don't have enough money to begin with and we may even have a waiting list, what's going to happen if we take on these TANF clients, we're going to put these working poor out of child care as well. It's almost a give-and-take.

How do we resolve that problem?

A PARTICIPANT: What we have to do is we have to look at developing people within our community and not only is there not enough money, but there is not enough child care providers. So we need to look at relatives, at grandparents, aunts, uncles, friends, relationships within the communities, try to develop those people into providers as far as child development curriculum and things that they need to be working with the children. And the tribes are going to have to start putting some money into child care.

Many of the tribes access federal dollars, but they don't put any tribal money into child care. We also need to look at state dollars. We need to go and apply through the state and try to access their money. The money that the states have, our children are all duly eligible for child care services with the state and with the tribes as a U.S. citizen, resident of their state and as a tribal member. So we have been lacking and only accepting federal dollars to the tribes. We need to go to the state and access money that our children are eligible for in this categories.

DR. BROWN: I think some of the interesting things is that some of the tribes have really worked out a state agreement since Indian clients have dual eligibility for child care services not only from the tribe, but from the state. Some of those tribes that have been most successful have worked out agreements with the state as to the kind of recipients they were going to fund and the kind of recipients that tribes were going to use their money, and they've been able to really stretch those dollars in some creative ways.

Now, the last part -- you may have heard that the Navajo tribe, a number of months ago decided to take a new approach to rather than doing Section 412 in the legislation, that is, developing the tribal plan and submitting it through that legislative process, or that process has been laid out in the legislation, decided that they would take a different approach and look at the 638 process and said, why can't the tribe's 638 contract this and under 638 contracting. They have done that. I know a number of tribes have been following this and have been curious as to what's taken place.

I wanted Leila to just address that very briefly. Leila has had the opportunity, if you might want to call it, to chair the Welfare Reform Task Force there for the Navajo Nation and was partial in setting down in developing that approach. Could you just briefly tell us what the approach was and what the outcome is right now in that regard?

MS. TULLEY: Thank you, Dr. Brown. Thank you for the opportunity provided to the Navajo Nation to share with you a unique approach in addressing this TANF development for all of Indian country. As you all know, much encouragement has been given to become creative. We've heard over and over the ideas of flexibility as to what nations can end up doing to actually implement a TANF program.

This is exactly what we as a Navajo nation have taken to task. In Navajo Nation's effort, we are pursuing a 638 contract TANF plan. What we are doing in this effort is that what the federal government has pretty much controlled historically administered, VIA and IHS services, you know, those are all changes that are forthcoming. And we've really taken a close look at the 638 amendments that happened as of 1994 to actually assess that and to see what opportunities could be available to us. And I know -- and this new authorization of amendments that have happened, that Indian tribes are going to be able to request for federal programs such as education, social services, health, law enforcement and many other federal programs, we have that opportunity that's available to us now.

So these are the things that we've really pushed to begin to look at. We did end up at first thinking about just going and complying with the law, of going according to the Section 412. But we realize, also, that we were very limited in resources to actually end up operating for our 27,000 recipients as to what would be best implemented.

We end up initiating our efforts according to the 25 CFR Part 900, and this is where an outline is provided to us to say that the Secretary of DHHS shall, upon request of an Indian tribe or tribal organization is subject to the availability of appropriation, provide technical assistance on a nonreimbursable basis to such Indian tribes or tribal organizations to develop a new contract proposal or to provide for the assumption by Indian tribes or tribal organizations of any program, service, function or activity.

This is contractible under the Act is what we firmly believe. We also end up on October 7th of 1997 was when we submitted our 638 application to implement TANF to the Secretary. On November 13th, the Navajo Nation received a fax copy of the letter from DHHS to Secretary Shalala informing the Navajo Nation of her decision to decline the nation's position and actually going 638 with our TANF plan.

These were her particular citings. Number one: The TANF program is intended to operate for the benefit of needy families without consideration for the status of these families as Indian or non-Indian. Number two, the TANF program is not a program under which the federal government would otherwise directly provide services to Indian tribes pursuant to the federal law. Number three: Since TANF program cannot be characterized as either one programs that operate for the benefit of Indians because of their status as Indians or, two, a program under which the federal government would otherwise directly provide services to Indian tribes.

Pursuant to federal law, the TANF program cannot be lawfully carried out by an Indian tribe pursuant to the Public Law 93638. The fourth area that she cited was the TANF program as beyond the scope of programs, functions, services, or authorized under the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance. And she had indicated in the letter, also, that her decision was final. But there is an opportunity, also, to the 25 CFR 900 that there are some option to be provided. And some of those options would be for Navajo to request an informal hearing.

The second option would be to -- an appeal the process. The third option would be to enter the federal district court. We also carefully assessed and analyzed this whole process with our legal department of the Navajo nation, and we decided to pursue option number 2. We ask and we file a notice of appeal. And this notice of appeal was given to the Secretary and what happened on this one is on January 27th of '98, our notice of appeal was dismissed from the Department of Interior Board of Indian Appeals. The dismissal was based upon the grounds that they would end up upholding the Secretary's position. And they also end up stating that the other option that Navajo Nation has is we could end up pursuing federal district court.

As of this week, February 24th, Navajo Nation has filed a complaint with the U.S. District Court in Phoenix, Arizona. We are informed that the process would possibly take from 15 to 30 days, depending on if there is to be a settlement based on the briefings that could be entered in, or if the actual hearings kick in, then it could possibly take longer than that period. So Navajo is asking for a discovery and if hearings are to be held, to actually challenge the decisions that have been made.

Navajo firmly believes in the idea of self-governance. And if we can challenge this even in this way and to have a litmus test of the 1994 amendments, let us pursue that as Indian country. Because it is important for us to know that as ideas of self-governance are pushed upon us as Indian nations, we have to end up taking that challenge as an Indian nation. And it is important for us, you know, as we've taken a lot of consultation, also, from our elderly people. As we've gone to do many of our public hearings, we've done all of our education in Navajo. And many of our elderly people have strongly encouraged, let us implement our own plan for our Navajo people. We will be more sensitive to the issues that would be forthcoming.

DR. BROWN: Let me ask on that, what is the difference? Why push for 638 when you can get it through 412? Alex -- whoever wants to respond to that. What's the benefit of 638? And this is so that we can all understand what the issue is.

A PARTICIPANT: Control. Seriously. We, as tribes and as Navajo Nation, as I alluded to earlier, have a number of 638-funded contracts. With the times of BIA streamlining, budget reductions, budget cuts, somewhere, or rather, the Navajo tribe, or as well as any other tribes, has that opportunity to approach the Secretary DHHS, DOI and possibly DOL and say, look, we want to contract these dollars in a way that we're familiar with.

What we have also seen in our assessment -- okay, we have welfare reform 104-193 that we have to deal with. There's provisions in that law that calls for certain requirements that the tribe has to meet with. There is another law that just came out recently: 10533, which allows a one percent set-aside for tribes to establish a Welfare to Work program which would basically coordinate with the TANF program.

There is also another law previous to that -- 102477, which is asking for consolidation of programs within the Indian tribes and Indian country so that these programs could be properly administered and that avenue. So we reflect back to 638 and say, look, we've done this, we have the experience, we have the authority to continue to provide these services under this law, so why are we faced and posed with all of these different requirements and regulations and so on and so forth, so that we can simply streamline the process, make things easier for ourselves and make things easier for those that we serve within Indian country. So that's one thing.

But the most underlining fact here is that we are basically again reminding the government that we are pursuing a self-determined initiative, we are pursuing a self-governance initiative, so let us continue to do so. So I guess the underlying thought is that we do want to control the destiny of these services and have it befit the Navajo people as well as Indian country.

DR. BROWN: Okay, any questions at this point? Yes, sir.

QUESTION: I had the same opinion about a year ago when we started writing our TANF plan; I'm with Klamath tribes. And when they started asking for comments -- and I'll make this real brief -- asking for comments from the tribes in developing regs, I said we should be using 25CFR part 900, and that was when they initially started talking about doing regs, because that's something that's real simple.

The other issues becomes, though, real quick, is the indirect cost issue. If you take on a tribal TANF and you require it or you need a self-determination act to collect indirect costs, those indirect costs go pay for all of those support services, purchasing systems, payroll systems, all those management systems that support TANF and TANF clients, because you're issuing a check out to TANF clients; you have personnel working. You've got purchasing, the purchased materials. Those things go to support those programs. And many Indian tribes throughout -- and Klamath being one -- depend almost 100 percent on indirect costs to run their tribal support-tribal government systems.

And those things become -- so if it is a 93638 process, indirect costs become an add-on as opposed to coming out of the direct grant. If it comes out of direct grant, you have that much less money for support services, TANF clients, personnel, all those things necessary for you to get clients into being self-sufficient and being healthy.

So that's basically my comment.

But there was one other thing that just becomes, but I can't think of what it is right now, so I'll just stop here.

DR. BROWN: We're going to have to get you more sleep, I can tell that.

A PARTICIPANT: That's it, yes.

DR. BROWN: Any other questions before we move on?

QUESTION: Just a real quick response to that. Contract support costs, indirect costs, any type of pre-award costs for startup implementation and any of the monies -- 412 does not have any monies for tribes to implement this program. And we took a look at 638 as that option to do so.

DR. BROWN: Okay, thank you. Any other questions before we dismiss the panel? Panel, we want to thank you for your comments and input.

(Applause.)
 

Panel 5- Impact Data Collection Methodologies

DR. BROWN: We're very close on time and we're going to guarantee you we're going to stay right on time. We're going to set up for our last panel, and as we're asking the last panel to come down, let me begin to state that somebody mentioned that if the tribe gets state money, how are they going to show to the state that they're utilizing that money, that money is being put to good use. Not only that, but over the course of the next few years, there is going to be hearings in Washington and it's going to be very important for tribes to show up and to be able to tell their story.

One of the major concerns is, is what is the data or the process that tribes are using to collect data to ensure that they have something to present to Congress. So the idea that becomes critical is to what tribes are doing in developing systems to collect information, to do case management and follow-up, but even more so, to be able to show the impact, whether positive or negative, in regards to Indian people. So if we could have the individuals down here.

Where is Mr. Anderson, Dr. Pandey. Critical to the situation, one of the things we had mentioned earlier is that the tribes are not, have not been allocated any dollars to do any real extensive or evaluation in their programs. If you look at the legislation, the legislation appropriated approximately $15 million a year for evaluations. When NCAI approached the situation, along with several of the Intertribal Councils, questioning what amount did the tribes get for evaluation, it was told that the tribes had no money for evaluation, that that money had been obligated to states for evaluation.

So the real issue came of how tribes were going to set up management information systems, how they were going to collect data, and how they were going to be able to, in any way, measure the impact that was happening. So as a result of this, there were two: One, a grant or an RFP that was let out last summer by Health and Human Services, requesting anybody that was interested in welfare reform to submit a grant proposal. The Center for American Indian Studies at Washington University, George Warren Brown School of Social Work, working with the Intertribal Council of Arizona with the support of the NCAI and the support of the Navajo tribe and a number of others, submitted a grant to do some evaluation research in that area. That grant was submitted with the principal investigator being Dr. Shanta Pandey, who has, for the last six months, been involved in beginning to collect a database on tribes on welfare reform, looking at national data and then looking specifically at the state of Arizona and its 21 tribes.

She is here today. She is Associate Professor at Washington University, George Warren Brown School of Social Work, which is, I might add, the number one school of social work in the nation. Just a little aside there. And who has, perhaps, a major endowment for the recruitment and education of American Indians in social work who provide, annually, five to six fully paid scholarships for those American Indians wishing to get a master's degree in social work. So I want to throw that out as well.

We do have one or two people that are graduates in this audience. Phyllis Big Pond, who is a graduate not of this program, but of Washington School of Social Work.

(Applause.)

DR. BROWN: And Sarah Hicks, who has recently accepted appointment with BIA social services and told me she's going to turn that whole system around. (Applause.)

DR. BROWN: So, high expectations there.

We also have with us Mr. Rick Anderson, who is President of Tribal Data Resources. The question has come as tribes are trying to put together management information systems, how do you put together a management information system that's going to allow you to follow and track and case manage clients, what kind of data systems are going to be necessary, so that has become critical to tribes as they begin to think about how they're going to actually track, account for the cases as they move people from welfare to work.

So I want to quickly turn the time over to Dr. Shanta Pandey, if you would, please.

DR. PANDEY: Thank you. When we found out that we were the only ones who have been funded to look at the effect of welfare reform, we were in a way glad that at least there was one project that was funded, but we wished there were more so we could share information back and forth as to what else other evaluation projects were doing. So at this point, in many ways, we think ours is a modest effort in understanding what's going to happen and what's happening right now.

What we were hoping to do is, in the first year, we wanted to see what sort of administrative changes are being made in order to adjust with the new system, and then in the subsequent years, we wanted to follow a group of TANF former recipients and current recipients and see the strategies that they use in order to survive through the new system.

So in that perspective, we have collected first wave of data that is pretty much targeted toward looking at the administrative changes. We are looking at the nature of programs, processes and the kind of impacts -- early impact that we can observe, the kind of work requirements, different tribes are requiring, the time limits, again, the flexibility and the kind of time limits that they're coming up with.

We're also looking at the administrative structures and changes in administrative structures. We're looking at the training programs that are available and the nature of training programs and how congruent are these programs with regard to the type of jobs that are available. We're also looking at the demographic characteristics of welfare recipients who find jobs and those who don't find jobs. We are also looking at the kind of support services that are made available -- for instance, transportation, child care, and health and we're trying to understand to what extent these support services really help families move out of welfare or the families who cannot move out of the system, even with the support.

We also wanted to know how tribes are preparing for inflation. We know the dollars are fixed for the next five years; we wanted to know how they're going to plan to adapt with that. Also, we wanted to know if they have any -- they're making any preparation for any day, meaning if unemployment rates -- already unemployment rates are very high on reservations, but in case of the unemployment rate goes up by a little more, how are they preparing, or are they making any adjustment for that, preparation for that.

Also, we wanted to know other local services, local programs -- general assistance, how are these being affected. Also, we wanted to know, for instance, other community-level variables, like crime, child abuse and neglect, other factors: are they being affected in some form or the other.

Also, we asked every reservation that we visited, we asked if they had other concerns that they would like us to take into account and see if we could include in our studies. So, basically, our goal is to really help the policy makers, administrators and implementers provide up-to-date, as early as possible and quick feedback on how they are implementing these programs and what sort of outcomes they're likely to foresee when, and the other is to come up with intellectually stimulating questions that are also of interest for academicians.

With that in mind, first, we started out saying, okay, we're going to collect data so that we don't have to ask questions or collect data that are already available. So we started saying we're going to collect the data that are nationally available, the Census, the data that state keeps, and then the data that tribes collect. We didn't want to collect the ones that have already been collected. So we went ahead and looked at the Census. Of course, Census has quite a lot of extensive data that, by tribe. We have gotten that. Unfortunately, at this point, after a lot of communication, we realize that we couldn't somehow get hold of that data electronically; we have hard copies. So we entered that and we have analyzed that.

The next step that we have done is, we're still going to go in and try and see if we can get the Census data electronically so we can look at every single tribe in the nation. At this point, because we had to analyze manually, we are analyzing only for the state of Arizona.

The other thing we have done is, we have collected information that BIA had, so have gone back in the last few years, we have gone back 1995, '96 and '97 to see how general assistance cost has gone up, if it has gone up and child abuse and neglect on cases if it has gone up by tribe; we've gotten that data and we are analyzing that; all crime information. None of this information, by the way, we are releasing by tribe; we are only releasing -- or by names. We are only releasing aggregately.

Focus groups. The third thing that we did was to go to each of these tribes, telephone interview the service providers, as well as tribal service providers, and then also meet with recipients through focus groups just to get a sense of what they think is happening or what is actually happening as a result of --

(End side 9, tape 5.)

-- programs. Back in the morning discussed, and these are the issues that she brought are the same issues that we heard over and over again, and those are like state have evaluation component. They have money to evaluate, but tribes don't have that. That states get rewarded, they are able to reduce the costs. But the tribes don't get that.

States share -- tribes do not necessarily have to provide the state's share. And that even of the tribes that are providing the state's share, only they're providing 80 percent of the state's share, not the full amount. States -- tribes, they don't have start-up money if they want to go independent. Also, yes, the states and the federal government follow a different fiscal year, and therefore, they have to keep up with that.

So there are a lot of things that are going on, but the most important thing that we noticed was that tribes that were wanting to go independent are also wanting to subcontract the state to run the program, and we could understand that because they thought that the states have the technical skills to implement the program for the time being, and the tribes were not ready to do that. So these were the issues that were discussed in the morning, also, and evening in our meeting with the tribes.

General assistance, other community-level information, general assistance, cost has not gone up since 1995. It hasn't gone up significantly -- 1995 and 1996 -- and we didn't expect it to go up, because in the state of Arizona even though they did start implementing the program two years ahead, they are -- the program two-year time limit ended on November 1st, so we expect that if, in case, general assistance does get affected, we expect to see it in the next few years.

We did notice that there is more coordination and more collaboration and communication between the state service providers and the tribal service providers, as well as within the tribes, service providers are meeting more often trying to figure out what should we do, and in a way it's a blessing that this has brought a lot of discussion at the tribal level, which was quite interesting.

There were barriers to employment; some of these came up in the -- in the morning today, but I'm going to briefly mention it. One of the major issues that we encountered in almost all the tribes that we visited were the lack of employment opportunities. Lack of employment opportunities. I'm going to read to you one of the quotations of one of the service providers. "The big concern here," this is the exact quotation, "the big concern is that we can change people until we turn blue, but if we don't have jobs, there will be -- where will we put these people?" So, in other words, there was a lot of frustration and concern as to, okay, there are more people looking for training, more of the women are coming and saying that they want to be trained, but then where will they find the jobs?

The most interesting thing is, even though nationally we're doing so well economically and regionally we also are doing well, but the tribes remain to be socioeconomically, particularly economically isolated completely from the economic boom. That is a major issue. If we want the tribes to do well, we need to somehow make sure that economic opportunities are there, not just training, but training and economic opportunities must go hand in hand.

Transportation was a major, major, major issue. Most women that -- focus groups that we interviewed mentioned that they didn't have cars, they didn't have their own vehicles, they relied on someone else, and of those who had vehicles, they were not reliable. And I leave out a comment that one of the women made: "My truck is always broken down. The further I go with my education and training, the harder it is. I'm not close enough to town, I'm not close enough to stores. My aunt has to take me shopping. I have to go 30 miles to buy gas."

So it's sort of -- and this is typical, these kinds of comments we heard, typical. Child care. Child care was a major issue. Again, these women, first of all it's hard for these women to find jobs and, again, more complicated is that it's hard for them to find regular jobs that's 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. So this -- of course, child care, most of the slots that were available were already full, there was a wait list, and these women in particular relied on the family members for child care.

You can imagine, as one woman said: "I went for an interview for a job, and then they asked me 'Do you have children?'" Of course, she has two children that need child care and she relies on family members for child care and she doesn't have transportation and she does not have telephone. Now, how likely is that, do you think, the employer will give her a job? And she knew that. So these are the questions and concerns that came up over and over again.

Communication -- not having a telephone was a major issue. Most of the women didn't have telephones. So there were individual and family problems. Many of these women did have alcohol problems. I'll read out some of the comments that -- well, I won't -- the next one. Stereotypes and discrimination. Am I out of time?

DR. BROWN: Thirty seconds.

DR. PANDEY: Yes. Stereotypes and discrimination. As Don mentioned earlier, stereotypes and discrimination is very much alive among women who are on welfare, and I'll read out one of the comments a woman made. Here it is, powerful enough. "Because of my name, people think all my family members are alcoholics. My father died of alcoholism." Another woman says, "I've been sober for three years, but no one will hire me because I used to be an alcoholic. I'm trying to get back with the rest of the world, but I have been labeled as an alcoholic."

And we had these similar comments, that there was sex discrimination, there was -- of being -- and alcoholic and so on and so forth. We also found out there were women who were opting out of the system. We don't have -- these are anecdotes that I'm presenting today, and we hope to follow a larger proportion of these women. But the women were opting out of the system. These are women that because they could afford to be out of the system, or because these are women opting out of the system because of the self-pride. And my concern is that what if these women opt out of the system because of self-pride and end up having children who were malnourished at the end of the day? That may mean that we may have to spend more money in the long run in health while we are trying to squeeze out on these women at this point. And this is an issue that we need to look into.

As I said, we have information at the community level -- crime -- but impulsive crime as well as intentional crime and we're going to follow it for the next five years. We're going to collect all other community-level variables as well as at the individual level see how these families fare over a period of time. And we do believe that there are a few things that need to be seriously considered as soon as possible, and that is training and education, because we know that nationally, four-year college puts women out of poverty for the rest of their lives. Most women with four-year college tend to stay out of poverty. So that is an area that we can blanketly go ahead an lobby, and we do think that economic development and training needs to go together. We do think that child care and telephone -- telephone is an issue that I have not thought before this project.

I realize that, how are they going to be contacted by their employer, or potential employer? They cannot be contacted through telephone. So those are some of the findings. Thank you.

DR. BROWN: Dr. Pandey, thank you very much. Let's go now to Mr. Anderson, if you would, please.

MR. ANDERSON: I'm going to keep my comments very brief today. We don't deal directly in the realm of welfare or welfare reform. The reason that I was called to this panel today is that my company, Tribal Data Resources, has undertaken the task of developing a process, a uniform data collection process for all of Indian country, both for the reservations, for the membership of each reservation, each Native American Indian in the country, not just from within the tribe, but even in the urban areas.

We have accomplished that to a great degree at this point in time. We have developed the survey mechanisms that to a great degree address all the needs for the Bureau of Indian Affairs programs, for HUD's programs. We have recently made adjustments for the new regulations for the housing programs.

In developing this process over the last 10 years, we've now worked with over 100 client tribes, developed databases for over 100 client tribes, and done so uniformly. In doing this, we have learned that there are various levels of data for Indian country, and it's a very difficult situation. As anybody here who works with tribes knows, U.S. Census data is great if it's the only game in town, but it's not what we need when we're reporting data down at the tribal level.

At the tribal level, we need to know information that's current and accurate, not 1990 Census data, not 1994 projections. We find that the Census data, because it's virtually an impossible source to gain for every single tribal member, is skewed for two reasons: Number one, we have a lot of people who claim Native American heritage and have no social or economic ties to the reservations, and their information is being weighed against the Native American statistics. We also find for every one person who may not be socially or economically tied to the reservation, 20 actual folks from the reservation may not have been counted in the Census at all. Therefore, we have education, employment statistics for folks that we don't know.

The problem that we have with this is, we don't have names, addresses, phone numbers, we have no case history, we have nothing from the Census on those individuals where we're getting the data from.

Now, the Census Bureau is making great strides in their attempts to change this. Each census, it's improving. There has been preparation for the year 2000 Census unlike ever before. The Census's efforts to meet with tribes, set up committees and do a much better job has already been kicked off. But Census data, at best, is not enough. We also need tribal data, information that the tribe can get their hands on. It's a lot more personal data. We need to know the incomes and the employment, the occupancy; how many people own their homes, how many of those homes are substandard, how many folks are on AFDC and we need to be able to update that on a regular basis.

So at one level, we have the U.S. Census. If Congress or someone in Washington were to look for the statistics for Native Americans, they would be looking at Census statistics and they would be looking at the Bureau of Indian Affairs Labor Force Report. Those of us who have worked with the Labor Force Report know the difficulties with those statistics.

So in developing this tribal data management system for demographics for the nation, we have addressed those issues. And the second level down is where we have concentrated our efforts at this point in time. Tribewide demographics, household demographics that meet the needs of the tribe on a daily basis, answering questions about the percentage of poverty on res, off res, surrounding service area communities, and so forth. Even to the degree that we can compare zip code by zip code the kind of demographic information that we can acquire from the U.S. census and go toe-to-toe with that if we need to for the benefit of our people.

Now, there is another level down that's being developed now, and that is the case management system that does affect each of you in this room who are dealing with welfare reform issues. The case management system, the system where your program beneficiaries from not just AFDC programs, but other social services programs, come in to one intake system, it's very manageable. That system is being put into place right now around the country, it's being tested. Those systems can feed our system and other systems like ours as they become developed. Where our system reports on all Native Americans from a particular tribe, not just within our tribal land base, but wherever our members are across the United States, a case management system at my tribe is going to deal with it on or near my reservation, within my service area. But those statistics, as they change daily, through these case management systems can update these larger systems. So that's our place and that's the role that we have played and are currently expanding within Indian country. And I'd be happy to answer any questions that anybody would have on what we're doing, or demographics for Indian country in general. Thank you.

Okay, yes?

QUESTION: Have you connected two programs together? Because I've seen both in tribal data resources -- is there any tribe that has both programs?

MR. ANDERSON: There's not. We've met with Cindy from Eagle Sun. I'm a big supporter of all of her efforts and I can't wait to see that program put fully into place. I know that that program is being implemented, or it's beginning to be implemented in various areas. And I've been in contact with some of the programs that she is working with. And we've talked exactly about that -- linking the two programs where she can report to our larger tribe-wide statistics.

She is just one of many programs that we see beginning to be developed around the country. Some tribes are looking at using the states' database systems, some tribes are looking at modifying an existing states' system. Eagle Sun is just one system that's being developed right now for actual case management of welfare reform programs.

DR. BROWN: We've got a question back there.

MR. MAKOBI: Yes. Blaine Makobi (phonetic) with the Yurok Tribe in California, Northern California. That's really interesting what you're talking about, but you know, what our tribe was looking at and asking for is a tribal-wide data system where people could apply, give all of the pertinent information that they need, and then not have to keep reapplying to each of the different programs that we have. And it's especially important because of the wide range of programs that we have. We have the housing, social services, we have the food distribution -- all of those other programs.

Our people get sick and tired of filling out forms, and we were thinking that if we had one central database which you enter them into, all the pertinent information is in there and then just have some other kind of system where you just plug them in to the appropriate programs. Is there something like that on line, or do you have something like that?

MR. ANDERSON: That's exactly what I'm referring to. I use the Census as being one level, I use tribe-wide demographics, non-case management demographics as being the second level where my company focuses, and that the level that's closest and the most accurate is the day-to-day case management systems. Eagle Sun is a company out of Oklahoma that is one source for the development of that type of a system where you have a single intake, and all of your programs are tied into that, so that even law enforcement, in some cases, can be tied into the same system when someone goes for a commodities or whether they be some of the social services program, you have one intake system and they all access the income information, family information and such from one source. And, yet, there is a module for each of the programs that's program-specific.

DR. BROWN: I think one of the things we know that in the future that's going to have to be a reality to tribes. Tribes are going to have to have a management information system that's going to have to have where workers at different agencies or different services are going to be able to bring up on a screen and be able to see what that client is receiving, where that client is in the process.

Let me ask some of the tribes that are TANF tribes: What system do you have at Red Cliff that you're using now as far as your case management or tracking system? How are you doing that?

MS. MEYERS: We're doing it the good, old-fashioned way: by paper and pen. And I hope that every tribe here will heed that advice. Don't let the system's cost prohibit you from taking this on. States have only most recently gone to an electronic system of monitoring the programs. It's a wonderful thing to have and, yes, we would like to have that in Red Cliff. But it did not prohibit us and it will not prohibit you from taking on the program.

We also have -- that's just a side story -- we also have access to the state of Wisconsin's system because we have the Food Stamp and Medical Assistance Program, so we do enter some of the cases on to the computer system and then we do get the reports off of that.

DR. BROWN: Is anybody from Klamath or Silletts here?

A PARTICIPANT: I can go get him?

DR. BROWN: No, that's fine. I just wanted to see how they were addressing their case management. Any tribe here have the case management system already installed or know of a tribe that has?

Phyllis?

MS. BIG POND: White Mountains is working with Eagle Sun's program.

DR. BROWN: Okay.

QUESTION: How is that program running?

A PARTICIPANT: I don't know that they have it in place --

DR. BROWN: The White Mountain tribe is not actually in operation. They have an approved plan, they're still negotiating with the state. They have a contract to develop a case management system which is in its beginning stages. I know the Navajo Tribe has put out or will be putting out an RFP for that same kind of thing. So that will be moved in.

For those of you who have small caseloads, great; but if you've got large caseloads, it gets a little more difficult as you work through that. But I think that's clearly something we have to take a look in the future.

Yes, ma'am?

QUESTION: (Inaudible.) But I just got some disks from VSHS in one of the other states, and it's the personal responsibility plan. You're coming out the 16th, right?

DR. BROWN: Yes.

QUESTION: Okay. I was just wondering if that could be incorporated into our program that we already have existing?

MR. ANDERSON: I would need to see what the criteria is. We just, as I mentioned earlier, looked at the new NHASDA, the HUD rates for housing, and felt that the program that we offer is quite comprehensive, but we've found that there were some fields for our tribes to meet; for example, the Census challenge, as they've put it out to us to do, we needed to roll with that a little bit and we added five new fields and accommodated that quite nicely for you and other of our client tribes. It depends on what's in your package and what the criteria is. But we certainly can do that if it's desirable for our tribes.

I would like to make a comment. The question came up: Are there any tribes with case management systems in place. This is new. And a case management system, all of us have talked about for a long time. Our company chose not to get into case management because there are experts out there who know inside and out what it's going to take to have a central intake system for each of your programs. Heads have been put together, and these programs have started to be constructed.

The program for White Mountain, for example, is nearing completion, to my knowledge, and I wanted to bring one more thing to a point on one more thing. I brought a map of the state of California. In California, the California Indian Manpower is a large, nonprofit consortium; it's a multi-tribe, nonprofit consortium. The tribes in California are very tiny for the most part, and many of the services are provided through this nonprofit consortium. I know you probably can't see this from where you're at, but each of these little symbols represents approximately 68 of the 104 federally recognized tribal entities in the state of California -- reservations, rancherias -- and almost all of them were funded, our project was funded through California Indian Manpower.

One of the services that they will be able to provide is the welfare reform program for many of the tribes who won't want to be taking this on themselves because of their size or whatever the circumstances may be. I know that they, as a multi-tribe entity, are also developing a program very similar to the White Mountain program to serve each of their client tribes irregardless of size. So there are a lot of efforts going on right now to build these programs.

DR. BROWN: I think one of the -- we'll take a question, yes, please?

QUESTION: I have a comment. I appreciate the presentations that you brought to us today and I think specifically that the presentation on the findings of the surveys that you did may make a good base for the development of an equitable access discussion, and I think that's something that needs to be added to the agenda for the next meeting when you have it is: How are we going to define equitable access and how are we going to share data with tribes across state lines with tribes interstate so that we don't have duplications of service.

I know that in the discussions that we're having with the state in Washington state, those are very real concerns on the state's behalf; they don't want to fund something to -- tribes, and then have that person receiving services also at Lummi and other places when they're out of compliance under one tribe. And those are federal requirements, also, that we haven't discussed and those all are centered around data questions and how do you identify real numbers for your tribe and coming to some resolution so that you know what you're contracting for.

I guess I disagree with the comment from the lady from Wisconsin that it's going to be cheap to do a paper system and don't let it hold you back if you don't have an electronic system. But at some point in time, the federal law requires that we share information and that clients can't be served in two states at the same time and those are going to become issues; those are expensive issues. The infrastructure is not there. And it just bothers me that we don't ever talk about them. They don't ever get put on the table, and there's no group developing solutions. So it's just a comment.

MS. QUINCY: Am I next? I'm Tony Quincy; I'm from the Silletts tribe. The only viable solution that we have come up with is to access the states' database with regards to welfare recipients and/or public assistance recipients, because we found that our tribal members, by and large, who are receiving our TANF services were also being asked to do monthly reporting on their income for food stamps as well as which was something different than the average participant in the AFDC program as a whole within the state they do not have to do.

If they're receiving TANF -- she's shaking her head over here -- yes, and it is a discriminatory process, but we also want to say to our state, who we are very friendly with, we would like access to your computer system -- not read only, access. We want to be able to enter information into the system so that we can put data -- not necessarily data, but at least the monthly amount that they're receiving on a TANF grant into the system, then the other thing that we want to be able to do is to create a child support case.

Because if you're not aware of the Silletts Tribe, we serve 11 counties. And our tribal membership is right around 3,200 people. Eleven counties, three of the largest metropolitan areas in the state of Oregon. It's a service area the size of the state of Indiana. So we have to be able to access this information, provide this information, somehow expediently, so that we're not creating a problem with the folks at the state level who are getting food stamps because we have chosen not to do food stamps -- big wanna*, big, bad wanna -- to do food stamps and have -- make people go back to the state and receive their food stamps and their medical cards so that we have to report to them how much their income is.

We've been doing it all by phone. You ought to see my phone bill. Let me tell you, U.S. West ought to give me a real good rate, because I spend probably two to four hours a day on the phone either verifying income, giving cash grants amount, or assisting people with, well, now that they're on your program, what do we do with them -- that kind of scenario. Where if it was something that was accessible to their desk, at their desk as a state worker, it's still accessible and shows us as the income provider and the payee, then we would be able to circumvent some of this whole system of "I'll call you, I'll fax you, I'll phone you, I'll do all of this stuff," because electronically it's just going to be quicker.

For the last four months, I've done it by hand. Our first run was on sticky notes. All of that -- all of that kind of stuff. As progressively as you get going within the months and the months, you realize that there are things that you can to do expedite all the process and you really need your state partner in there.

MR. ANDERSON: Thank you. In addressing both of you and your comments, it just stresses the importance of a uniform system. Where she's trying to deal with the state and there is no automation between her and the state, another tribe in another state, maybe five different tribes are using the same system such as the White Mountain system, and if others are building their systems there needs to be uniformity. We found this in developing our system and all 100 of our tribes, for example, are really talking the same data language. They can be merged, and in merging them we can go in and look for duplicates.

For example, I have several of our client tribes in this room right now. If we needed to, you folks, for example, you and Lummi are an hour away up the road, we can merge you to -- we can look for duplicates. We've built in a reporting feature that in a few moments we can look for a duplicate and it's built to do just that. So as I said, systems are being built for your case management right now, and one of the issues that are going to have to be built into it are reports that go in and do searches. At some point, there's going to have to be a centralized system that will do global searches for duplicates outside of just your tribe and your tribe.

DR. BROWN: Okay, I've got a question.

QUESTION: Dr. Pandey, would it be possible to get a copy of your survey? I'm over here. A copy of your survey and a copy of a preliminary report?

DR. PANDEY: We will be glad to. We will be sending it at the end of March. We'll be glad to.

DR. BROWN: If you could make sure we got your name. You know, this is fine about developing management information systems. Where is the money coming from to do this, because this is not inexpensive, so where's the dollars? Who has got the dollars? NCAI is going to have a special grant for the dollars? Is that what it is? No, where are the dollars coming from? Anybody have an idea or a clue?

QUESTION: It's another area of inequity because the states get dollars to do that. The states have got dollars for 65 years to do that. The tribes were expected to do that for nothing.

DR. BROWN: When I was director of the Department of Economic Security for the state of Arizona and the short two and a half years, almost three years that I was director, just in that short period of time, we got $6 million that was matched on a 90-10 for the state in those two short years. I know in years before the state got millions of dollars.

There has been continual input, and I think this is why we get back to the 638 concept is that if tribes are asked to run a system --

(End side 10, tape 5.)

-- any more questions for the panel? Yes, ma'am?

MS. SANCHEZ: My name is Florinda Sanchez, I'm Executive Director of the California Indian Manpower Consortium. And our agency is probably one of those that has been very aggressive in the technological field, both in collecting demographics for our tribes as well as being one of the major investors in the Eagle Sun Case Management Development Program. Both are important and our initial involvement with the demographics for the tribes had nothing to do with a foresight of the need in welfare reform; it was more in that our funding, especially for our job training programs, is based on the 1990 Census. And although we tried to do a really good job in getting our tribal members in our urban Indian communities counted, it was not a real successful job, particularly in California. But in regards to the tribes, they've always had a major problem. And the demographic survey processed through tribal data resources was one of five different projects that we looked at before as an agency we made the investment. So our goal over five years was to survey all 102 tribes that are receiving some type of service through our organization.

In regards to the data case management system through Eagle Sun, it is a very expensive process. Our involvement only was agreed to because of the White Mountain and the Navajos' commitment to be partners in getting this whole thing actually started. But the one piece that hasn't really been mentioned here is, in the state of California, we did go to get legislation not only for the match, but we also made a request that the state utilize some of their dollars, both at state level and at county level, to help us design or have integration money for reporting and exchange of information. So we will be utilizing some of those state dollars or county dollars to perfect the case management and reporting system of those levels.

And we would be more than happy to share with any of the tribes or groups the language that is included in the legislation for you to pursue with your own state legislatures in regards to the match To data collection, California does utilize -- they do not look at the Census data. They will use BIA labor force reports or tribal data for the negotiation for their funding to the tribes.

DR. BROWN: Good. Thank you. I think while we talk about the development of systems, people, I think it's important to point out from my estimation and looking, we have several tribes that are attempting to develop. I have yet to see one developed. And I say that only as a precaution that we're not there yet. What I know as we talk about White Mountain is certainly working. I've gotten various reports as to the progress on that and where they are on that.

Navajo tribe has decided to take a different initiative and do and RFP for theirs and have identified some dollars. But I've yet to know of any program that's in place, and I think that's still up for grabs in looking at what you might want to do and being as innovative as possible.

We're committed here to almost if there's no other further questions, we want to thank our panel members. Let's see -- I guess I shouldn't overstep the president up here, who is scratching his head, and I want to make sure I give him the proper amount of time. Yes, sir.

MR. ALLEN: Thanks, Eddie. I think that the only thing that I want to comment about this last dialogue, and it probably does overspill into some of the other points that were made in some of the other panels. I don't know if Leland or anybody else has notified you that we're working very closely right now with the Kellogg Foundation in putting together a very large -- we think it's going to be about a $1-million grant on helping us in helping the tribes get a handle on the implementation of welfare reform and the TANF programs and all of the other programs that are around this particular legislation.

You had just made a question that was a very important question regarding as we try to put these different programs that could be used in the various states relative to how they are implementing the program and the variances of how they approach it. We think that's a very important question. So the question becomes how we make our case for the resources that the tribes will use. So that's one of the things that we're going to be using. I know that we're going to work closely with Rick, and I think that we would also like to work with the Washington University on identifying how we're going to measure the cost of implementing these programs that can be crossed over and can collaborate in a way that shows the impact or the gaps that are created in this implementation.

So I want people to know that we're trying to help, and we're reaching out to foundations. That is only going to help us get the materials together and the argument together to go out and get the kind of dollars that are necessary I think from the Congress. The Congress created this problem, so I think that they need to help us address it as it affects the Indian communities. And we just need to make sure that it's gathered in a way that is going to be useful for us to make a case that will be useful from the large tribes like Navajo all the way to the tribes like California or Alaska where you have very unique, diverse conditions.

DR. BROWN: We're committed this afternoon to get you out a little early. We want to do closing remarks here and I want somebody to keep time on me as well for five minutes. So when I reach my five-minute limit, somebody goes like this and we'll be done. So let me get started here. Hey, okay, okay, hold on.

Welfare reform has been presented to the American people as a grand experiment that's going to take us into the 21st century. There has been a lot of talk today of great potential and promise of what can come out of welfare reform. We talk about for the first time being able to put together education and training programs that talk about unifying the resources that we have and focusing clearly on that most underprivileged population group, and here, principally, of single-parent mothers with children.

We see the idea of the innovation or the possibility of creating very innovative employment, job creation, economic development, not only within the tribe, but tying in with state, and understanding that if tribes do well economically, the surrounding community with tribes do well as well. It's not the idea that if Indians do well, non-Indians do poorly. The fact is that when the Indian tribes do well and that dollar turns over and continues to turn over, everybody benefits. And that reality is there.

We talk about the possibility of redesigning and for the first time, rather than developing programs that reflect what the federal government has through 477, through 638, through Section 412, for the first time, we have within our grasp the opportunity to truly design programs that reflect the needs of tribes and individual tribal members. That's within our grasp.

We talk about the idea of creating services that really are reflective to the needs of the people. If somebody knows the needs, we've talked continually, we are the most prepared. The basic -- the idea that the government that governs best is the government that's closest to the people. If we can get tribal governments to be responsive to tribal needs, then we're well on our way.

However, then, we can turn over and see the other side of the coin, that while the potential of great promise is there, there also lurks in the shadows possibilities of other things, such as the possibility of creating greater poverty on reservation, people who are sanctioned and are unable to find jobs, the increase of unemployment even further on reservation, the undermining of tribal government and tribal programs if we take over these and we don't have enough resources to accomplish that.

I think one of the things we discussed here today that perhaps the vision and the potential of this program of whether it's going to be positive or negative lays a lot at our doorstep as tribes, of what we're prepared to do in the next five years to make this thing a reality and a promise rather than a curse or a non-blessing that has been put upon us.

You know, there is a story -- and I'm sure some of you -- it's my favorite story, I have to tell it -- about the disgruntled employment worker, and this is the idea that every day he would come to work and at lunch he and all of his workers would go outside and he would open up his lunch and he would start cussing and complaining. Sure enough, he would pull out that lunch pail a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. And he would go on and rant and rave "I hate peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, I'm sick and tired of peanut butter sandwiches. I don't want to see another peanut butter and jelly sandwich again," and the next day the same thing would happen.

After two or three weeks of this, his fellow workers get perturbed at this and say, "We can't enjoy our lunch break listening to him." So one afternoon he comes, and sure enough, he pulls out the sandwich and he begins to complain, "I hate this. I hate this." His other workers finally had enough of this and one speaks up and said, "You know, if you dislike peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, why don't you tell your spouse to fix you something else," and to which the disgruntled worker replied, saying, "Why don't you mind your own business. I pack my own lunch."

(Laughter.)

DR. BROWN: I tell the story only because in the past, we've been able to complain about the kind of sandwiches we've been served and we've been able to say, "Hey, that's the federal responsibility," or particularly at the state, if there were problems in welfare, we could always say, "Hey, it's the state's problem. The state's not doing this, the state's not doing that."

With TANF, we have been literally given as well as with other legislation, the opportunity to literally pack our own lunch and to design and put in what we think is best. And the reality is, whatever we pack, we're going to have to eat. And so the idea that when we start taking a look at what's going to be necessary here in the future, we have to understand that there is a time for these pondering tribes to begin to ponder and to do some critical thinking about which option is best for them. What are they prepared to get into now, and the bottom line is, what is going to bring better services to their people than as opposed to who is operating.

And I think that's important that there has to be a time of some real analysis and to watch those other tribes who have taken the lead and to follow them closely, to listen to them so that we're not reinventing wheels, and to support them as well. If they're in trouble, if they need legislative changes, then we need to be there supporting them knowing that any change they get will be beneficial to us as well.

We need to also be looking at creative negotiation with the state. One of the things that has happened is that states have scrambled to develop their state plans. There has been very little creativity that states have thought about in doing welfare reform. They scramble to get their plans in. So if you look at the plans, they're pretty dead and dry plans.

One of the problems when you look at some of the early TANF plans as well, many of those reflect very closely to state plans. And we know that some of them are beginning to rethink, renegotiate; that's a potential promise for these other tribes who are doing critical thinking of what can we do that's more creative, what can we do that's different. How can we negotiate the greatest flexible time requirements, work requirements that really fit the needs of our people.

We talk about pushing for amendments to the legislation. Clearly, any piece of legislation that we look at that's had any major impact in the United States did not pass in its truest form the first time. People had to come back, fix it a little, fix it a little more, fix it a little more. We talk about maybe next year in the next session of Congress an opportunity to begin to tweak or fix or to add legislation. We need to be prepared to tell our story next year.

That, then, brings us to one of the last points I want to make, and that is: Are we going to be prepared to tell our story? When people ask us about how many TANF people do you have, how many people are on AFDC, what's the whole situation, did we have research to turn to? We did not. And rightfully so, because the state handled that. We had to rely on the state's data and information to tell the story for us. In the coming few years as we change this, we have got to be prepared with data to tell our own story -- data that's considered relevant, that's considered factual and that can stand up to test and questioning. This is going to be critical.

When I became director -- many years ago when I was director over BIA social services, having worked for a state I went in and was over BIA social services for a very short time, and one thing I found that there was a clear double standard. When I worked for state, we had error rates and reporting and things that had to be followed. When I went over to GA and looked at tribes, there was nothing about an error rate or any kind of strict standards that had to be followed. Clearly, a double standard. When we move into welfare reform, we've got to understand that this is tough program. When we take on the responsibility that we're going to place people to work within a certain period of time and we don't, we've either got to be prepared to sanction or to forgive. And if we forgive, we've got to come up with the dollars to keep those individuals on the rolls and receiving help. So that we're going to be under a microscope that we probably haven't been under in the past that's going to require some good, sound critical data and impact study as well as when the states, for those states that are providing match, come to ask you: what are you doing with our state match, what results have you had, what data can you show us. We need to be prepared to tell that story.

Again, I don't think of any of exciting time. I've been in social welfare for a long time as many of you people. I've seen your faces probably more times than you would like to see mine. But the idea is that we know what has to be done, we know the challenge and it's an exciting challenge. It's up to us to make it either successful or not successful if we want to turn away from it. And I would hope that we would take the challenge.

I want to thank NCAI for the leadership that they've provided in bringing a summit to that. I also want to thank HHS for the dollars they are providing. Small as the dollars might be -- we need more -- but we certainly are thankful for what we've got and we hope that we can expect more as we go down the road.

Again, I want to thank you. All of you have a pleasant trip home and enjoy yourself. And as soon as you get home, get to work.

(Applause.)

(End side 11, tape 6.) * * * * *