Tribal Judicial Institute - Tribal Courts Assistance Program
TCAP Fact Sheet - pdf
Other TCAP forms
TO BUREAU OF JUSTICE ASSISTANCE GRANTEES,
Congratulations on being awarded a grant from the Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Assistance, to either plan or enhance the operation of your tribal justice system. The Tribal Judicial Institute (TJI) at the University of North Dakota School of Law was selected by the BJA to help coordinate the technical assistance and training for you during the term of the grant. We are one of many programs that have forged a partnership to deliver technical assistance to you during the term of your grant.
As you may recall, all Tribes were required to allocate monies in their grant applications for travel to training events sponsored by BJA providers. The Institute is currently developing a calendar of BJA approved training events that will provide training on a variety of topics that were identified by Tribes in their proposals. Your Tribe can expend your travel money to attend any of these training events. It is important that you expend the monies in your grants for training by attending the events that will be identified in the upcoming calendar.
Additionally, the Institute will host one Orientation session for TCAP Tribes. This session will be held Monday, December 8, 2008 at the Wyndham Hotel in Palm Springs, CA, in conjunction with the Walking on Common Ground II and the 11th National Indian Nations conference. Please see the enclosed information for more information on all of these events.
At the Orientation session, Tribes will meet some of the TA providers and learn about reporting requirements for their grants and discuss any issues with the TA providers and BJA staff. We are requesting that each Tribe send at least two people to the orientation session as we plan to sit down with your representative(s) to develop a training and technical assistance plan and to listen to any concerns or needs that you may have.
In addition to the Orientation, TJI will be hosting a variety of other substantive training sessions throughout the year that will appeal to judges, attorneys, probation officers, law enforcement officers, social workers, alcohol and drug counselors, tribal councilpersons and executives, and others who are involved in the tribal justice system in your community. The Institute will be providing announcements on our website, by email and by regular mail for upcoming the training events. Events will be posted at least one month ahead of time to allow sufficient time for staff to make travel arrangements to the event. While planning our events calendar, we have scheduled many events around the time of important social and cultural events to permit people the opportunity to partake of these social events while they receive valuable training.
In December of this year we will be assisting in the Walking on Common Ground II conference, which will be an opportunity for state and tribal judges and others to come together and share cooperative ventures and agreements reached since the first Walking on Common Ground conference in Green Bay in 2005.
Another different aspect of this year’s technical assistance is that we have a very limited amount of scholarship monies for Tribes that were not funded by BJA. Please feel free to share the training calendar with other Tribes in your region. Most events will have either no registration fee or a very modest one to compensate for meals provided during the sessions. For more scholarship information, those Tribes who have not received a BJA grant can contact our office.
We look forward to meeting each of you at training events and orientation. Please feel free to contact myself or Melissa Johnson at mjohnson@law.und.edu or 701-777-6306 should you have any particular questions.
B.J. Jones