Brett Weber
BWeber@nihb.org

The National Indian Health Board is providing grants to pilot the Tribal-Focused Environmental Risk and Sustainability (Tribal-FERST) Tool and identify opportunities and challenges for improving the tool to support system-wide efforts. The project is designed to support tribal environmental health staff with conducting COVID-19 investigations and integrating environmental health data with data from other sources to enhance COVID-19 surveillance and monitoring.

Funding will be used to:

• Conduct a pilot investigation to determine:
  • Steps needed to collect, analyze, and contribute environmental health data to COVID-19 surveillance and monitoring efforts
  • How best to incorporate environmental health and epidemiological data into GIS tool to support COVID-19 response decision-making
  • How to foster greater collaborative efforts to support real-time bidirectional data sharing between TECs and/or Tribal environmental health programs
  • What is needed to better coordinate with laboratories processing tests and samples
  • How the use of GIS tools may contribute to tribal adaptation and mitigation planning to develop and implement actionable public health activities
• Complete a pilot report detailing the effectiveness of the GIS tool, the ability of the awardee to conduct investigations, and recommendations for further refinement of the GIS tool

Eligible applicants include tribal epidemiology centers (TECs), federally recognized tribal governments, tribal organizations, and inter-tribal consortia that have an existing environmental health program, department in place, or demonstrated staff expertise in the area of environmental health epidemiology.

The award is expected to support one entity with significant experience using GIS tools, one entity with moderate experience, and one entity with little or no GIS experience.

Award ceiling: $100,000
Project period: 6 months
Estimated number of awards: 3

Email the completed application package to Brett Weber.