First Nations Tribal Councils often rely on grant funding from a variety of sources to sustain their communities. In addition to economic development, grant programs may support everything from critical infrastructure to healthcare, education, housing, and other community services. In addition to improving quality of life for tribal members, grant programs are also used for cultural preservation and wildlife conservation.
As you've probably guessed, managing the intricacies of applying for and complying with grant programs tends to be extremely complex. They tend to be uniquely challenging even for someone experienced in grant management. Adding to this issue, many tribes have limited resources or operate out of smaller communities — meaning they have access to fewer people who understand the intricacies of the various grant programs.
As a result, they may encounter roadblocks that impede or even prevent access to grant funding. We're going to go over a few of these roadblocks before explaining how best to overcome them.
When a tribe receives funding, it's crucial to not only allocate the funds correctly but also ensure proper documentation and record-keeping. At the same time, the council must maintain awareness of and adhere to the grant program's criteria. This can be challenging for several reasons.
Regulatory standards in both Canada and the United States are not only complicated but also have a tendency to change from year to year. Even if you've managed to get a handle on how grants work this year, there's no guarantee you won't have to relearn things next year. Case in point: The processes and criteria for Federal funding in the United States have, until fairly recently, prevented many governments from accessing funding altogether.
Even those governments that did qualify were often overwhelmed by the grant's administrative burden.
Legacy software is a better alternative than manual grant management — but only just barely. Frustrating and cumbersome interfaces aside, older software often lacks the necessary reporting capabilities for efficient and effective grant management. What's more, integrating these legacy solutions with modern systems can be a logistical nightmare in its own right.
Effective grant management also requires that your government be able to communicate effectively not just with internal stakeholders, but also with third parties such as government representatives and auditors. This requires a clear division of roles — there should be no doubt as to each stakeholder's responsibilities in the grant process. Moreover, you need a standardized approach that'll allow you to maintain comprehensive records of all communication.
This also applies to performance measurement. Many governments lack an effective means of determining the return on investment (ROI) of their grants. In addition to making it more difficult to properly allocate funds, this also makes it more challenging to know if you've received enough funding and to identify areas where a grant may have fallen short.
Ideally, your grant portfolio should be stored in a central location, fully digitized and accessible only to authorized stakeholders. In practice, this is often easier said than done. Many Tribal governments are forced to combine virtual and physical record-keeping, increasing their already considerable administrative load while also increasing the potential for mistakes or inaccuracies.
The grant management process becomes even more complicated when one accounts for how many different types of grants and programs exist. To make matters worse, many of these programs are limited in both category and scope, making it difficult to discern which ones are the best fit for a community and its needs. In Canada, for instance, Tribal Council Funding is divided into three separate tiers based on member nations, on-reserve population, and the number of ongoing programs.
In addition to Tribal Council Funding, there are more than thirty different programs, services, and initiatives geared toward Indigenous communities, each one falling under one of the following categories:
Complicating things even further, many Tribal Councils already have ongoing grant programs with which they must comply.
Between changing regulations, the huge variety of available programs, and the sheer complexity of documentation, adhering to each grant's criteria can make it difficult to actually use those grants. You can't really maximize the positive impact of your grant money if you spend all your time making sure you receive it, after all.
A modern ERP platform like Sparkrock provides the necessary technology to more effectively manage not only grants, but also your entire community. Accessible from within a secure, cloud-based government, Sparkrock is designed specifically to meet the needs of Tribal Governments. To that end, it includes tools for both pre-award and post-award grant management.
For pre-award management, Sparkrock 365 allows your organization to set up its grant cycle stages, with extensive tracking at each stage and a clear overview of the full funding pipeline. This is further augmented by comprehensive data analysis that enables more strategic decision-making. Sparkrock also offers a specialized project and grant accounting module that helps maintain compliance, particularly when managing the intricacies of multi-year grants.
A few other ways our purpose-built ERP helps include:
Is it time to upgrade how you manage your grant programs? Book a demo today to see how Sparkrock can help you do so.