The Rocky Mountain Tribal Leaders Council (RMTLC) is a tribal organization that serves an AI/AN population of nearly 100,000 people across eight reservations in Montana and Wyoming. With the assistance of the Administration of Native Americans, RMTLC established a regional office in Billings, Montana in 1996.The mission of Rocky Mountain Tribal Leaders Council is to “Preserve and maintain our homelands, defend our Tribe’s rights under our Indian Treaties with the United States, to speak in a unified voice, to offer support to our people, to afford ourselves a forum in which to consult each other, to enlighten each other about our peoples, and to otherwise uniformly promote the common welfare of all of the Indian Reservation peoples of Montana and Wyoming.”
The purpose of the Rocky Mountain Tribal Leaders Council (RMTLC) Good Health and Wellness in Indian Country (GHWIC) project, is to reduce rates of death and disability from commercial tobacco use, diabetes, heart disease and stroke, and reduce the prevalence of obesity and other chronic disease risk factors and conditions experienced by Rocky Mountain Area Tribal members. This purpose will be carried out by facilitating policy, systems and environmental (PSE) changes and developing clinical-community linkage (CCL) strategies to address obesity, commercial tobacco use, type 2 diabetes, heart disease, and stroke prevention. Direct community involvement through Tribal subawards and with technical support from the RMTEC, will ensure that PSE and CCL efforts are culturally adapted to best serve the needs of respective Tribal communities.
RMTLC will expand the implementation of C1 strategies and activities outlined in the notice of funding opportunity by creating a subaward system within our C2 application. A minimum of fifty percent of awarded C2 funds will be opened for at least five subawards to Area Tribes and UIOs that have not received C1 funding from the CDC. Subawards will range from $50,000 to $100,000 for a one-year period of performance length. Programmatic planning, development, and implementation will follow strategic planning methodologies. This framework includes assessment and organization of the current status of the C1 sub-awardee, an environmental assessment of internal and external factors that could potentially affect the implementation and outcomes of the program, formulation of overarching goals, activities to achieve these goals, development of operating plan frameworks such as the logic model framework, and alignment. These processes will be repeated throughout the duration of the 5-year funding period. Adjustments will be made based on lessons learned, evaluation results, Tribe/UIO changes, and C1 strategies not yet addressed.
The continued work of GHWIC will allow RMTLC to address the health disparities that plague our American Indian communities and build capacity on reservations and urban areas to move toward health equity. The answers to good health in Indian Country are found in tribal culture and resilience. RMTLC’s GHWIC project provide the structure and support for tribes to build their capacity to determine what is best for their health.