Tribal Court Improvement Program

The goals and objectives of the Tribal Court Improvement Program (TCIP) are to:

1. Conduct assessments of how tribal courts (including courts for tribal consortia) handle child welfare proceedings;
2. Implement changes to address the results of court assessments;
3. Ensure that the safety, permanency, and well-being needs of children are met in a timely and complete manner; and
4. Improve the quality of court hearings and legal representation, including engagement of parties, continuously through training and efforts to increase substantive and procedural justice.

For a list of permissible program activities, see p. 5 of the FOA in Attached Files.

This NOFO is intended to help tribes or tribal consortia make improvements that will benefit children and families in their communities and generate knowledge that will be useful throughout the nation. To maximize the benefit of these grants, CB expects that information and knowledge generated by the projects and activities will be shared with the field and efforts will be made to integrate project knowledge and lessons learned into policy and practice. Grant recipients will be asked to share information about the overall structures of their courts to help other potential courts gauge potential lessons learned. Structures includes information like the models of representation and judicial practice. TCIP projects will work with CB to disseminate their individual project products and findings and work with the other TCIP projects to disseminate cross-grant products and findings, where applicable.

• Native American tribal governments (Federally recognized)
• Native American tribal organizations (other than Federally recognized tribal governments)

Estimated Total Program Funding: