Alliance of Early Childhood Professionals DBA: Wicoie Nandagikendan

My name is Fawn Youngbear-Tibbetts, I’m the executive director of Wicoie Nandagikendan, Minneapolis Minnesota’s oldest Urban Native language immersion program. Over the last 30 years, we have dedicated our time and efforts to developing the next generation of Dakota and Ojibwe language speakers: over 500 families have come through our Ojibwe and Dakota early childhood immersion program, and we have trained 75 preK-12 language teachers to date through our apprenticeship program. In 2025, our food sovereignty program served 7,000 community meals and distributed $80,000 in traditional foods to families and elders in the Minneapolis Native community.

Today, we are under siege and we are asking for your help.

Wicoie Nandagikendan is 100% grant funded. Federal funding, including Wicoie’s 5-year ANA ESTER Martinez award, makes up approximately half our annual budget. Due to the federal hold on early childhood funding in Minnesota, we have an immediate emergency need of $50,000 to keep our doors open to the community during this time of unrest.

Our sovereignty is under attack.

With cuts to Medicaid and SNAP benefits, the families we serve need us more than ever. Yet federal reimbursement payments are being denied and our secured funding is being withheld. Economic support for Native education and socio-economic development is a treaty obligation of the U.S. federal government. Not only is Minnesota being targeted physically, we are under economic siege. We need your help to combat these unconstitutional tactics of fear and intimidation.

Children and families in Minneapolis are afraid and need your support.

Last week, our children witnessed ICE agents tackle someone outside our classroom which is located on Bloomington Avenue and Lake Street in South Minneapolis. Children were able to process this experience with teachers, but Native families are still scared. As one of our children said, “what if they come for us because we are brown?” With our city in crisis, Wicoie’s support for families, staff, and the Minneapolis Native community has become even more essential; however, the freeze on federal funding has put our program at risk of having to lay off our team and close our doors. $50,000 will ensure payroll is made and employee benefits do not lapse. $100,000 will keep Wicoie programs running until our secured foundation grant monies are disbursed.

Our immediate needs include:

paying salaries and continuing healthcare benefits for 10 full-time staff

keeping our full-day immersion classroom open, providing consistency and emotional support to our children and their families during a time of trauma

distribute food and meals to Minneapolis Native families and elders

Together we can support the Minneapolis Native community at this time of great need, and ensure urban Native language immersion is available for future generations.

Thank you for your support,

Fawn YoungBear-Tibbetts

Executive Director

Wicoie Nandagikendan

** Update***

First off this is a very nuanced and layered issue.

Yes we were able to do a draw down following the Federal injunction but the withholding did it's job. It disrupted payroll our Payroll and our HR Firm is now requiring a deposit of 35,000 to hold. Our employee benefits have lapsed and we are now in the process of entering into a new contract with Insperity, a Minneapolis based HR firm that Wicoie contracts with. With the required deposit our organization has roughly one payroll with fringe and benefits.

Our HR service provider is one of our most essential contracts, they provide group coverage for our small non-profit keeping our Health, Vision and Dental benefits affordable to our organization. They take care of our Unemployment insurance, Workmans compensation, etc along with other valuable services.

Many non-profits have a reserve fund for these kinds of Issues but Wicoie like most of our Small Native Run Organizations do not.

Due to DOGE changes in 2025 ANA has made several chages to the Management of our Federal Grant. We are currently in year 4 of a 5 year of our Administration of Native Americans (ANA) Ester Martinez award. Our award is for 300,000 annually and is specifically for Teacher and Apprentice salary and professional development expenses. Previously ANA would allow small organizations to draw down funding so we could make program salaries. Now all drawdowns are on a 100% reimbursement. Meaning the small gen-op funding I have has to carry us until all local, State and Federal reimbursements can come in.

We are also at the beginning of our new fiscal year and are waiting for our Foundation dollars to come in. This usually occurs in the first quarter of the fiscal year for Wicoie's payments from Better Way Foundation, MN IDEAS award etc.. the freeze at the beginning of the year really hurt our organizations that. will have a detrimental long term effect even with them releasing the fund that withholding has lasting repercussions.

The Temporary freeze on funding has had serious longterm effects on our staff's ability to cash checks and now banks are requiring more information to even to wire transfer our payments to our HR firm. They have messed up all of the systems in place to make things as difficult as they can. And they can take the funding anytime.

Like I said this a very nuanced and layered issue the impacts reach far and wide.