Big Water feels privileged to have been able to join fabulous experts within the tribal housing community for a week filled with insightful conversations, the exchange of ideas, and discussions about the future of housing in Indian Country.

Last month, in partnership with Katie Symons and Suenary Philavanh of Beaux Simone Consulting, Kevin Klingbeil of Big Water Consulting conducted a webinar on behalf of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Office of Native American Programs and the Native American Indian Housing Council (NAIHC) on Housing Needs Assessment and Effective Community Engagement. The audience included staff members from a variety of different tribes, regions, and programs interested in learning best practices and strategies for engaging community members as well as the primary components of conducting housing and community needs assessments.

Big Water Consulting had the honor of giving three presentations during the 2021 NAIHC Legal Symposium, held in person in Las Vegas.

Rachel Kramer and Kevin Klingbiel had the opportunity to present findings from recent work regarding research surrounding thirdhand methamphetamine exposure. This project was funded by an NAIHC T&TA grant to the Salish and Kootenai Housing Authority.

Kevin Klingbeil participated in the NAIHC Legislative Conference in Washington, DC in order to address data-related tribal issues and directly assist tribal housing staff in their efforts to convey their concerns to elected officials and agency staff regarding recognition of tribally collected data by federal programs and static tribal housing funding levels as well as present ideas to improve the deployment of federal grants and housing loans in Indian Country. Kevin accompanied housing authority staff and representatives of the South Dakota Native Homeownership Coalition (SDNHC) to Congressional offices and met with senior staff from the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.

In an effort to complement the community engagement, housing managing and law enforcement efforts described by other presenters at the HUD/NAIHC Crime Prevention Summit in Denver, Big Water presented an array of data collection techniques and data storage and sharing tools that could enable tribes and tribal programs to better coordinate with other tribal and non-tribal agencies, mobilize their communities to gather critical information, better target the use of limited law enforcement resources, and integrate available data to allow for identification of critical patterns and timelines concerning issues such as Missing and Murdered Indigenous Persons, gang activity and methamphetamine use in tribal housing units.  

Big Water staff members Harry Maher and Kevin Klingbeil presented alongside Nathaniel Corum of Sustainable Native Communities/MASS Design at the NAIHC Legal Symposium in Las Vegas to describe their new collaborative effort to fully integrate data collection, community design and planning processes in order to ensure that tribal data collection and needs assessment activities are informed by planning and design principles and that the data produced from these efforts can fully inform subsequent design and planning processes.

Kevin Klingbeil presented to attendees of the National American Indian Housing Council (NAIHC) and Amerind Annual Convention and Trade Show on May 8 and discussed how tribal data collection and data-driven planning activities can be used to demonstrate both community need and tribal capacity to funding sources within the context of competitive grants.