The North Central CASC investigator James Rattling Leaf, former North Central CASC Director Robin O’Malley and Chad McNutt from Livestock WX have been awarded seed funding from Rising Voices for their project "Enabling Tribal Data Sovereignty: Supporting Great Plains and Northern Rockies Tribes Data Needs". Their project aims to create a regional entity that provides technical skills, oriented to tribal needs / capacities, and adequate resources to support training and data sovereignty issues to enable regional tribal governments to serve their citizens more effectively, support planning, and improve daily life for thousands of Native Americans. 

The Rising Voices program facilitates intercultural, relational-based approaches for understanding and adapting to extreme weather and climate events, climate variability and climate change. This project was one of three projects that received seed funding to catalyze their projects and advance the ethos of the Rising Voices Center for Indigenous and Earth Sciences.