Red Cloud School
About Red Cloud:
As a college preparatory school on the Pine Ridge Reservation, Red Cloud provides excellent educational opportunities for Lakota students and families. Today Red Cloud integrates Lakota culture, language, and art into all aspects of education, honoring the Indigenous identity of its students, staff, and community. But that work is shadowed by its history as a former boarding school founded to assimilate Native children. Now, as Red Cloud openly addresses the trauma and injustice in its past, it has made a commitment to decolonizing its approach to serving the local community by elevating Lakota leadership.
Challenges and Opportunities:
Red Cloud partnered with Emergence to begin to conceptualize new Advancement strategies and systems that are grounded in Indigenous leadership. With over 95 percent of its budget supported by individual donations and grants, Red Cloud successfully raises nearly $14 million each year just to sustain its programming. But in the past its approach to fundraising had often relied on emphasizing extreme poverty--ultimately perpetuating stereotypes about Indigenous communities--and its grant writing team in particular lacked Indigenous leadership.
Approach:
Emergence brought Red Cloud’s Advancement team together for a series of in-depth internal sessions to examine current fundraising systems, bring Indigenous voices and perspectives forward, and envision dynamic new messaging celebrating Red Cloud students’ success and self-determination. To advance Red Cloud’s groundbreaking Lakota immersion curriculum, the Emergence team created a new language revitalization grants strategy. And to secure needed resources during the first year of the pandemic, Emergence launched a series of high-impact virtual events that amplified the voices of Indigenous leaders driving Red Cloud’s innovative educational and arts programming.
Impact:
Across the organization, Emergence is supporting Red Cloud’s commitment to amplifying Indigenous voices and elevating Indigenous leadership. The structure of Red Cloud’s Advancement team has shifted significantly to empower Indigenous staff. Indigenous program leaders are now actively engaged in the fundraising process so that it aligns with their vision. A $300,000 federal grant is now fueling creative new work in Lakota language immersion. And with support from Emergence, Red Cloud will launch a new Advancement communications plan to unify the team around a core message of community and cultural empowerment.