HISTORY

NINLHE was founded in 1993 by Colleen Larimore and Jim Larimore, the former directors of the Native American programs at Dartmouth College and Stanford University.  Both Colleen and Jim remain active on NINLHE's Governing Council Advisory Board.  With funding from the Intel Foundation, NINLHE began as a strategic, self-help coalition of a dozen directors from the most successful Native student retention programs in the country.  Though the directors faced nearly identical challenges on respective home campuses, at that time, each worked in isolation from one another. They realized that by working together they could do much to help themselves, and by extension, all of the students.  By coming together through an organization as NINLHE, it offered the opportunity to expand the impact to effect much needed change in Native education practice and policy at the institutional and national levels as well.

NINLHE's success as a national professional higher education organization in the past fourteen years has been achieved through the support of several philanthropic organizations. These include the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, the Educational Foundation of America, the David & Lucile Packard Foundation, the GE Foundation, the Daniels Fund, and the Lumina Foundation for Education.

We have several sponsors that have partnered with NINLHE. They are the University of New Mexico, Dartmouth College, the University of Washington, Stanford University, and the Mohegan Tribe.

We also have several institutional members that have partnered with NINLHE. They are Yale University, Buffalo State College, University of Missouri, and University of North Texas, Denton, TX.