Michael Merola
The American Indian College Fund is the largest scholarship provider in the country for Native students seeking higher education, and as such we collaborate closely with Tribal Colleges and Universities (TCUs) on our mission to transform Native communities by investing in these institutions and their students. So far in 2025, we have received over 9,800 applications to our Scholarship program; in terms of data, that is over 588,000 datapoints collected including demographics, contact information, and education history about Native students. In our presentation, College Fund staff Michael Merola (Database Administrator) and Juan Ruiz (Sr. Scholarship Manager) explore how this Scholarships program is operated using a grants management software called Zengine, how the principles of Indigenous Data Governance apply to our work, and our long-term solution for a sustainable data lifecycle. Because the College Fund and TCUs fundamentally serve the same subset of students, TCUs have the Authority to Control data that we collect during Scholarship operations, and the College Fund has the responsibility to provide a shared data ecosystem for our Collective Benefit. Using Zengine, we have created workspaces for each TCU to access data about their own applicants while restricting access to data concerning other institutions. The TCU utilizes this data to run their own selection/awarding process for our scholarship, as well as administer their own unique programs apart from the College Fund. Currently, our team is building a Data Warehouse to manage all Scholarships data in our own centralized system for advanced analytics and reporting.