Participants in the Montana ICWA Community of Practice on Zoom voted to make tribal community outreach and education, and strengthening cultural connections for children, the group’s top two priorities for 2025.

The facilitator, Ashley Chaney McNeil, opened the session by reminding participants of the group’s mission: "The purpose of this Montana ICWA community of practice is to foster meaningful, culturally humble collaboration among people who are involved and affected by ICWA in order to preserve and empower Indian families' connection to their culture," she said.

Meeting organizers said the group first crowdsourced four priority topics in February, then held a live poll in April. Eleven participants took the poll, and the results were: tribal community outreach and education, 11 of 11; strengthening cultural connections for children, 7 of 11; preferred placements for kids, 4 of 11; and the need for more tribally enrolled qualified expert witnesses (QEWs), 2 of 11. The facilitator said the top two topics will guide the community’s work through the summer and feed into Court Improvement Program planning for the fall: "In October ... we're going to take all that we've investigated and ... draft up kind of a set of imperatives ... that the court improvement program will be able to take in hand as they go into their PIP drafting," Ashley Chaney McNeil said.

The meeting also included a short clip from the documentary Tough Love featuring Judge Patricia Clark. Participants discussed how Judge Clark’s informal, strengths-based courtroom dialogue — urging small, concrete steps such as staying in contact with a social worker — modeled approaches that can activate parents’ "power within" and support cooperative problem solving. Participants described the courtroom exchange as an example of shifting from "power over" to approaches that emphasize "power to," "power with," and "power within." "If you can get it together to keep walking through that door, we can get there," the judge told a parent in the clip (verbatim lines from documentary shown during the meeting).

Attendees shared local efforts that align with the chosen priorities. Jason, who described a locally run nonprofit, said, "We have a nonprofit called the Kids Coop ... We have 2 farm to school grants, 1 from USDA and 1 from First Nations Development Institute," and described programs designed to reconnect children to Native foodways and culture and to build collective-impact planning and food-sovereignty projects in Ronan, Montana.

Other participants noted examples from their jurisdictions of judges and systems adopting more conversational, documented courtroom practices that keep parents and departments engaged in active efforts and cultural connections. Several community members emphasized deep listening, partnership with tribal leaders and educators, and cross-agency collaboration as starting points for outreach and education work.

Why it matters: The Community of Practice intends to use the votes and subsequent months of study to develop recommendations the Court Improvement Program can incorporate into its Program Improvement Plan. Participants framed the priorities as actionable areas where outreach, training, and local programming can make immediate differences even as legislative or policy changes are pursued.

Next steps: The group will continue the work at upcoming sessions (the next meeting was scheduled for June 19, 2025) with focused discussions and a planned progression toward concrete imperatives for the Court Improvement Program’s fall PIP drafting process.