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News This Week

Message From the President,

For those of you who have been regular visitors to spiritlakeconsulting.com do not be alarmed by our new home page.  The look is certainly different as we focus on our new project, the Tribal Leaders Institute; you will eventually see a new, exciting user-friendly homepage.

For those first-time visitors (and regular visitors) we will still have all our features that may have brought you to our site, on-line courses in Developmental Disability:  Caring for Our People training series: Intro to Disability & Culture, Early Intervention, Special Education and Vocational Rehabilitation; Family Life Series, Intro to Disability Access, Family Life & Disability, Young Children & Disability, The School Years, Adulthood & Aging and Special Education Rights (IEP).  Simply go to the menu at the top of the page and place your mouse over each menu item. Pop-up menus will appear and you can view the information you want.

What prompted us to redesign is our newest project, the Tribal Leaders Institute, which is an expansion of the Phase I Tribal Leaders (TLC) with Character program.  In TLC Phase I we focused on two components; development of a research-based ethics training program and empirical validation of impact of training.  The objectives were:

1. Design a theoretically sound integrated training program consistent with the needs and constraints of the reservation environment
2. Develop an authentic assessment instrument to measure training effectiveness
3. Empirically test the impact of training program in a simulated business setting

The technical question to be answered was, “Will participants in an on-line program demonstrate significant changes in knowledge, skills and attitudes that are not shown by the comparison group?”  The answer was "yes".  Having demonstrated the feasibility of an on-line system of staff training in Phase I, Spirit Lake Consulting, Inc. will develop and evaluate a commercial prototype in Phase II titled, Tribal Leaders Institutes. 

Tribal Leaders Institute is a suite of on-line effectiveness training and productivity tools centered around re-introduction of traditional Native American leadership and contemporary research on business management and business ethics.  The problem addressed in Phase I was the loss of millions of dollars a year on each reservation due to repetitive, minor ethical infractions.  Quantitative and qualitative evaluation of the Phase I prototype documented significant changes in a few months’ time.  It is the hypothesis of the Phase II project that for these gains to be maintained and extended it is necessary to continue and broaden ethics training.

Over the next several months we will be adding a new sections to the website; a new forum, new on-line courses, a wiki, an ethics mailing list and an electronic newsletter on tribal ethics, to name just a few of the features.
Finally, in a few days, there will be link at the bottom of this page, and on our home page, that will lead to a more in-depth exclamation to what the Tribal Leaders Institute is all about.

Sincerely,
Erich Longie, Ed.D., President

Speaking of RUSH, this is a Research Utilization Support and Health grant, awarded to distribute the results of our Disability Access research project farther and wider in Indian country. The most recent quarterly report is now available, with information on the use of the Internet by tribal members, the effectiveness of IEP training and more.

Four ways keep updated on the latest news on program management, disability and chronic illness in disadvantaged communities as well as on happenings at Spirit Lake Consulting,

• Subscribe to our newsletters. It's free!
• Check Dr. Longie's blog, about ethics, management and life on the reservation.
• Check Dr. De Mars' blog, you might learn something, although it's not guaranteed.
• See the Happenings Section in the Spirit Lake Forum.

For previous news releases, click here