An extraordinary meeting took place earlier this spring at the White House. It was a roundtable convened by senior Biden administration officials including Interior Secretary Deb Haaland and U.S. Treasurer Lynn Malerba. Haaland is the first Native American to serve in a cabinet-level post, and Chief Malerba is the first Native American to serve as the U.S. Treasurer. The goal of the meeting: To boost economic development and investment in tribal communities across the United States.
Philanthropy has a key role to play in that effort, as Secretary Haaland made clear during a meeting that included many from the sector, along with financial and nonprofit leaders. At the table were major players including the Bezos Earth Fund, Marguerite Casey Foundation, Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative, Nathan Cummings Foundation, Doris Duke Foundation, W.K. Kellogg Foundation, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, MacArthur Foundation and Skoll Foundation, among others.
Philanthropic support will be essential to build and grow the two ambitious initiatives unveiled at the roundtable: the Indigenous Futures Fund, launched by Mission Driven Finance and Hyphen under the banner of the Initiative for Inclusive Entrepreneurship, and the Tribal Community Vision Fund, created by Native Americans in Philanthropy. The goal of both funds is to catalyze billions of dollars for sustainable economic development in tribal communities, including by accelerating the distribution of federal funds to Indigenous entrepreneurs and tribal enterprises.
It’s an effort that’s been a long time coming. Indigenous-owned businesses make up a tiny fraction of the U.S. economy, and insufficient access to capital is a major factor. “There’s a lack of opportunity for economic development in Indian Country, even though there’s plenty of fantastic resources and all sorts of things that should be able to support growth,” said Lauren Grattan, cofounder and chief community officer of Mission Driven Finance. “But they’re missing a critical component: access to early and growth capital to help take advantage of programs that are coming down from the federal government and others.”
Capitalizing on a historic opportunity
At the roundtable, Secretary Haaland challenged philanthropy to commit 10% of total giving to projects in Indian Country. But the sector’s support for Native Americans has been consistently stingy, as Native Americans in Philanthropy found in a 2019 report. According to that analysis, philanthropy moves a tiny fraction of its dollars — less than half a percent — to tribes and tribal communities. The 2020 Census, meanwhile, found that about 2.9% of the U.S. population falls into the category of “American Indian and Alaska Native.”
As philanthropy finds ways to respond to and leverage the geyser of federal money materializing through the American Rescue Plan, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the CHIPS and Science Act and the Inflation Reduction Act, one strategy is to deploy private funding to make that much larger pile of public money easier to access.
Through the new Tribal Community Vision Fund, Native Americans in Philanthropy aims to raise and distribute $1 billion in capital and $200 million in grants from private and philanthropic sources over the next five to seven years. These commitments will be used “to leverage historic levels of federal funding and unlock potentially billions of dollars of investments in tribes and Native-owned businesses,” according to the announcement, which outlined potential plans for those investments including “large-scale renewable energy, climate mitigation, and environmental sustainability projects.”
The Indigenous Futures Fund is more modest, with a goal to raise $2 million in grants and $25 million in investment capital. But it could still demonstrate how relatively small philanthropic investments can stimulate change in the much larger field of federal funding. Its funds will be used to help tribes overcome barriers to accessing dollars through the federal State Small Business Credit Initiative (SSBCI) by providing matching funds, as well as administrative and technical support. Along with accelerating the flow of capital, the Indigenous Futures Fund will also increase the capacity of Native community development financial institutions (CDFIs) and similar organizations.
To get the fund off the ground, Mission Driven Finance is partnering with Hyphen, which helps develop and support public-private partnerships (its name comes from its role as the “hyphen” in those partnerships). Hyphen has been laser-focused on helping philanthropy make the most of a $4-trillion-dollar opportunity in the form of Biden-era federal spending, and it worked to convene the White House roundtable alongside the administration.
Grattan of Mission Driven Finance said that some philanthropic funders who express interest in supporting Native entrepreneurs aren’t sure how to get started. That’s where her organization comes in. “Foundations don’t have the staff to go out and figure out how to invest in their local Native CDFI,” she said. “Or there are 15 Native CDFIs in their area and they aren’t sure how to plug in. They’re turning to us and saying, ‘Please don’t make me figure that out.’”
A private impact investment firm, Mission Driven Finance boasts this tagline: “Getting capital to flow where it doesn’t but should.” Its partners and supporters include The California Endowment, Conrad Hilton Foundation, the Grove Foundation, Heising-Simons Foundation, the Prebys Foundation, the WES Mariam Assefa Fund and others.
To give potential funders a better idea of how this all will work, Ted Piccolo, senior director of Indigenous futures at Mission Driven Finance — who started and ran the first Native CDFI in Eastern Washington — is currently helping develop projects in four Native communities. “He is working to surface preliminary deals so we can do a couple of transactions and then share those as case studies with our investor prospects,” Grattan said. “That will provide more texture, so the ideas won’t be so abstract.”
On the ground, Mission Driven Finance and Hyphen support Native organizations as they steer their way through red tape. Grattan pointed to the Cheyenne & Arapaho Community Development Corporation (CACDC), one of the organizations Piccolo is working with. “[CACDC] just started and got their approval from the Treasury Department for how they plan to use the [State Small Business Credit Initiative] capital,” she said. “But they’re a brand-new organization and they’ve never worked through some of these issues. How do we put out a call for applications for loans? How do we underwrite them? How do we make sure that we are collecting the information that the federal government wants in their reports? We’re providing coaching and supporting their capacity-building.”
“Bear with us on some jargon”
The recent White House roundtable signals that, after decades of overlooking and underfunding Native American communities, the federal government is putting some fiscal muscle behind efforts to boost their economic independence and prosperity. At the end of last year, for example, President Joe Biden signed an executive order that directed government agencies to make funds and programs fully accessible to communities in Indian Country. “These commitments create long-overdue opportunities to advance tribal self-determination — and positively impact the lives of tribal citizens for generations to come,” according to the White House.
The roundtable was an important, even historic, development, but it didn’t receive much attention in the media or elsewhere. One reason may be the fact that Native American communities are consistently overlooked in the media and by the public. But it may also have to do with the confusing tangle of public and private financing entities involved in this effort.
Lauren Grattan considers it part of her organization’s mission to help people find their way through the complexity and bureaucratese that is common in the world of finance. “So much of the language in finance is so abstracted, it’s all this jargon,” Grattan said. “That means that it’s not accessible to the whole community and we’re trying to combat that.”
The description of the Indigenous Futures Fund on Mission Driven Finance’s website provides a visual breakdown of the initiative and its participants, and describes part of Mission Driven Finance’s role as “making sense of the jargon and acronym soup.”
“We help to design, develop and manage private funds that are creating a more inclusive economy,” Grattan said. “We’ve been around for eight years and have been supporting a lot of inclusive entrepreneurship through the funds we’ve spun up.” Mission Driven Finance’s initiatives support early care and education, small business development, immigrants and refugees, and environmental justice, among other causes.
So what’s next? Grattan has been reaching out to other grantmakers about the Indigenous Futures Fund and says there is significant interest when she has the opportunity to explain the initiative and its goals. She will be talking about the fund and spreading the word about investment in tribal communities at Native Americans in Philanthropy’s annual conference later this month, and at Mission Investors Exchange’s conference in May.
“I’m always, always happy to help educate so that the field grows,” she said. “This won’t work without philanthropy. I hope that folks will bear with us on some jargon so we can make it to the other side together.”
