Native American Group Gives to Individuals to Build Community Wealth

In South Dakota, Native Americans living on the Rosebud Sioux Tribal Reservation face tough economic odds. About 40 percent live below the poverty line. Unemployment is as high as 80 percent. On a reservation nearly the size of Rhode Island, grocery stores are scarce, and a trip to the only hospital can take 90 minutes, says Sharli Colombe, a project manager with Tantaka Funds.

Tantaka is an Emerging Community Development Financial Institutions Fund and one of the groups that makes up Siċaŋġu Co, a nonprofit that serves the reservation. Colombe says few financial institutions outside of her own provide loans there, in part because of the challenges of lending when tribal land is held in trust and cannot be used as collateral. That dearth of credit is one of the many reasons for the community’s housing crisis and the bleak economic outlook, says Colombe.

Despite these outsize needs, few grant makers support nonprofits that serve Native Americans. They receive less than 0.5 percent of all philanthropic giving, according to a 2021 report by Native Americans in Philanthropy and Candid, though that has improved some in recent years.

Last summer, volunteers including Colombe, a Siċaŋġu and Oglala Lakota and a member of the Rosebud Sioux tribe, helped about 80 tribal members apply for a very different kind of philanthropic support. The NDN Collective, a Native American regranting organization and nonprofit, is providing $25,000 and $50,000 awards to individuals through its Collective Abundance Fund. The goal: to build intergenerational wealth in Native American communities.

Colombe and her colleagues provided snacks, computers, and internet access. They typed up some applications for elders. People applied for down payment assistance to buy homes. Some wanted to buy cattle or buffalo or grow gardens. Others were trying to start their own small businesses. One person, a spiritual leader in the community, wanted to build a house in which to hold traditional ceremonies.

“We saw so many amazing plans, I wish everyone could get funded,” says Colombe. “This grant was really amazing — a once in a lifetime opportunity.”

Years of Effort

The grants were the culmination of years of effort. In 2021, the Bush Foundation, based in Minneapolis, chose two organizations to receive $50 million each to boost wealth building in Black and Native American communities in Minnesota and the Dakotas. Nexus Community Partners is distributing money to the descendants of slaves, and the NDN Collective is awarding funds to Native Americans. The foundation also committed $50 million in grants to support nonprofits helping to build wealth in these communities.

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The Bush Foundation set few parameters on how the funds would be spent, beyond requiring that the money go to individuals, says Eileen Briggs, grant-making director at the Bush Foundation and a citizen of the Cheyenne River Sioux tribe. “It really spoke to the fundamental intention of the fund, which was to address wealth disparities caused by historical racial injustice that were impacting individual people,” she says. “Individual people are most impacted by the racial wealth gap.”

The wealth gap for Native Americans is likely among the largest in the United States, says Matt Gregg, a senior economist at the Center for Indian Country Development at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. (He spoke for himself, not the bank.) No one is certain, he says, because Native Americans are too small a group to show up in government wealth surveys. One study by the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis of clients of a CDFI on the Cheyenne River Sioux Reservation in South Dakota found that for every dollar in wealth a median white household has, a median Native American household has just 3 cents.

Before NDN began making grants, it asked an even larger question: What does wealth mean for Native Americans? It used an additional $500,000 grant from the Bush Foundation to explore that question, hiring a Native American-led research firm to survey 5,000 members of Native American tribes.

“Rarely do foundations go out into the community that they’re intending to serve and ask them how should we support them and how do you even define [wealth],” says Teresa Peterson, NDN’s associate director and a member of the Upper Sioux Community. “That was one of the most pivotal aspects.”

The group came up with a definition very different from the one that most people think of: money in the bank, real estate, and other tangible or financial assets. It found that Native American people focused on community well-being, relationships, and cultural heritage. They defined wealth as a tool to create financial security and self-determination so one can live a good life, “abundant in social and cultural sharing.”

Ivy Vainio

That definition resonates with LeAnn Littlewolf, executive director of the Duluth, Minn.-based American Indian Community Housing Organization and a member of the Anishinaabe Tribal Nation-Gaa-zagaskwaajimekaag Band of Ojibwe. She participated in the survey and helped people apply for grants. “My wealth, my sense of well-being is absolutely tied to my access to my culture and to my language and to my history and to my people, to my communities,” she says. “That’s a mindset that is ingrained as a child. It is something that was passed forward from my parents, my grandparents, and my great grandparents. Our community is really rooted in those values.”

NDN asked for applications from individuals that emphasized the benefits to community or family or bolstered cultural heritage. Littlewolf saw many people applying for grants to buy a home or to build greenhouses or community gardens. Some sought funds to help them travel to teach others about Native American agricultural practices.

Improved Circumstances

Philanthropy has long neglected Native American communities, says Erik Stegman, CEO of Native Americans in Philanthropy. Meanwhile, Native American nonprofit leaders have sometimes been frustrated by interactions with the few funders that support their organizations, according to a 2021 report by the Center for Effective Philanthropy.

The report found that grant makers had a poor understanding of the challenges facing Native American communities and little interest in learning about them. Native American leaders told the researchers that foundations denied proposals because they failed to understand the issues, says Ellie Buteau, director of research projects at the Center for Effective Philanthropy, who co-authored the report. Funding was often not renewed and leaders felt that the knowledge and strength of Native American leaders was not understood.

That undercuts the very thing that has led to huge advances in Native American communities over the past several decades. In 1978 a federal law returned more decision-making power and sovereignty to Native American governments. In the decades since, conditions in those communities have improved dramatically, says Megan Minoka Hill, senior director of the Project on Indigenous Governance and Development at the Harvard Kennedy School. According to researchers at the Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development, per capita incomes on reservations rose five times faster than those of the average American from 1990 to 2010. Over the same period, the number of Native Americans living in crowded homes fell by nearly half.

Native Americans are still more likely to live in poverty and be unemployed than the population at large, but Minoka Hill says self-determination is the key reason that circumstances improved. With agency, Native Americans could solve their own problems.

The Collective Abundance Fund follows a similar approach, giving individuals the resources to make the decisions that are best for them, their families, and communities. “What I love about the Collective Abundance Fund is the breathing room that it creates with the end goal being contributions to the whole of the community by giving to individuals,” Minoka Hill says. “I think it is just profound.”

Local Economy Benefits

In the first year, NDN Collective received 864 applications and gave out 200 gifts of $25,000 or $50,000 that must be spent over 12 months. This is the first of five annual $8 million rounds of gifts it will give. Grantees also meet with a group called Trauma of Money, which provides insights into the systems that create poverty and contribute to the wealth gap. NDN is gearing up for a second round of grants to be disbursed this fall. The group does not publicize the names of grant recipients and declined to facilitate interviews with them.

NDN meets once or twice a year with the Bush Foundation and Nexus, the group distributing funds to the descendants of slaves, to learn from one another, says NDN’s Peterson. “We’ve learned so much. It’s important to have the conversation, to be a partner in this movement and just to prop each other up,” she says. “This is a learning process for all of us.”

Although the program is very new, Colombe has already seen economic benefits from the small number of individuals who received grants there. For example, one who received a grant to renovate a home bought lumber and supplies at a Native American-owned store. Recipients needing help are likely to hire a community member, injecting money into the local economy.

Stegman hopes that Bush and NDN’s approach will ripple through the philanthropic world. He says that over the past few years more foundations are giving to Indigenous-led groups. Native American-focused regranting organizations are on the rise, helping donors get funds to the groups that can best use them. NDN’s work can act as a model.

“That’s a really Indigenous approach with individuals and wealth building at its core,” Stegman says. “I think it has the potential to really catalyze and transform some of the other funders.”

Reporting for this article was underwritten by a Lilly Endowment grant to enhance public understanding of philanthropy. The Chronicle is solely responsible for the content. See more about the Chronicle, the grant, how our foundation-supported journalism works, and our gift-acceptance policy.