| DR. JOHN GARLAND (Choctaw), Director of Research and Student Success, Cobell Scholarship) &

| DR. DAVID SANDERS (Oglala Lakota), Vice President for Research, Evaluation, and Faculty Development, American Indian College Fund &

| DR. JOHNNY POOLAW (Delaware, Chiricahua Apache, Kiowa, Commanche), Director of Student Success, American Indian Science and Engineering Society

Higher education data on Indigenous college students has long ranged from deficient to missing, thereby rendering Native students and their collegiate outcomes largely invisible to other researchers, policymakers, and practitioners. The four largest national Native Scholarship Providers (NNSPs), which includes the American Indian College Fund (College Fund), The Cobell Scholarship Program, American Indian Science and Engineering Society (AISES), and Native Forward (formerly American Indian Graduate Center), have been collaborating over the last five years to design and build infrastructure for sharing data, building collective research and analytic capacity, and disseminating original research where Indigenous data and research are largely missing in higher education. This collaboration has resulted in large grant funded research projects as well as new opportunities to explore establishing a shared research center that may serve researchers within the larger higher education community. 

This session will explore the process by which the four NNSP organizations found common ground for partnerships, organizational research capacity-building, and how we work together to address organizational and logistical barriers for sharing our data to improve Indigenous student outcomes. Having virtually no models by which to follow for our type of collaboration, we believe our Indigenous-centric process for data sharing and cross-organizational collaboration may benefit other organizations seeking to do similar work.