Just what we need, another new blog!

Greetings whoever you are, and wherever you are!



This new blog is intended to capture, document and present for the world to see the inner workings of the Black Hills Center for American Indian Health, a small, community-based, non-profit organization located in Rapid City, South Dakota, USA, whose mission is to conduct a wide range of activities intended to enhance the physical, mental, spiritual and cultural wellness of American Indian and Alaska Native peoples, tribes and communities.

In practical terms, we are a research-intensive organization that conducts a wide range of health-related studies and projects in partnership and collaboration with tribes and tribal communities. We were founded in 1998, received our first grant funding in 2001, and today have 18 employees spread across four states and three tribal reservations. We have a current research portfolio of approximately $10 million (historically over $19 million), and annual revenues of about $1.7 million.

The peril? We are a 100% soft-money funded organization at present, with most of our grants obtained in open competition against the likes of Stanford, Johns Hopkins, Harvard, etc. We have one other challenge that I'd like to highlight in this inaugural post. While some of the aforementioned, major academic instititions have indirect cost (IDC, aka F&A) rates (an additional amount of money an institution receives on top of direct grant costs, presumabley to cover overhead or pooled expenses) in excess of 50% or even 100%, we have a rate of only 12.3%, and that is applied only to our salary and wages category of our budgets. This is a legacy of the fact that we started with nothing, and literally had to write in complete overhead/administrative costs into the direct side of the budgets of our first several grants. Consequently, we've not realized a penny from the $8 million or so that we've spent on subcontracts, computer hardware/software, participant incentives, or any other non-wages line items. Thus, we've had to dance the razor's edge in terms of spending our general account monies on non-grant-related expenses in an effort to increase our base for a newly calculated IDC rate; at this point we renegotiate our IDC rate each year with a branch of the Dept. of Health and Human Services. It's also not entirely clear at what point we begin to be allowed to apply our IDC against our total budget line items.

This is really a very general, '30,000-foot' introduction to this exciting, dynamic effort, but it's all I've got time for now. In the future I'll try to share more of the nuts and bolts of what we're doing, and what it's like guiding a private, research-intensive non-profit. In the meantime, you might want to check out our website. We're getting ready to launch a newly-redesigned website in the next few weeks [http://www.bhcaih.org/], but our old site should still be up.

Please feel free to share comments or thoughts. We are a highly collaborative organization, and we have partnered even in several international settings. Toksa ake (Lakota Sioux, 'until later')