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October 25, 2005
Community Development Financial Institutions Spread Like Wild Grass in Indian Country
by William Baue
First Nations Oweesta Corporation serves as a national umbrella organization providing the
structural framework and organizational support to fuel current exponential Native CDFI growth.
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Community development financial institutions (CDFIs), which target populations left unserved by
traditional financial institutions, are perhaps most vitally needed in Indian Country, where
control of access to capital by federal and tribal governments hamstrings the private economy. The
first Native CDFIs, such as the Lakota
Fund on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, were launched two decades ago. Ten years
later, however, only two of the 115 CDFIs federally certified by the CDFI Fund were Native organizations.
This slow
development has exploded into exponential growth since then, so that now 36 of the
747 federally certified CDFIs are Native. And if last week's annual conference of the National
Community Capital Association (NCCA--a network of more than 170 CDFIs) is any
indication, continued growth is on the horizon.
"The field of Native CDFIs has grown
tremendously and is continuing to grow--we had more than 20 different tribes represented at the
NCCA conference that are somewhere in the process of starting CDFIs," said Elsie Meeks, executive
director of the First Nations Oweesta
Corporation. Oweesta is the only certified national Native CDFI intermediary, which acts as an
umbrella organization for Native CDFIs. "What's driving this growth is the knowledge tribes are
gaining about creating vehicles that can help them gain self-sufficiency for their tribal members
and for the tribe."
Native CDFIs at the conference include Four Directions Development Corporation of Orono,
Maine; Council for Native Hawaiian
Advancement of Honolulu; Navajo
Partnership for Housing of Gallup, New Mexico; and Lummi Development Authority of
Bellingham, Washington.
"For so long we've had to rely on the federal government in hopes
that they fulfill their promises," Ms. Meeks told SocialFunds.com. "We're finally taking these
things into our own hands and using tools that non-Native communities have used for a long time."
"I see CDFIs as a way to make structural changes in how Native communities can
advance their own interests," added Ms. Meeks. "The next question is, how?"
That is a
project Ms. Meeks has been working on since 1986, when she helped start the Lakota Fund with the
mission of establishing a private sector economy on Pine Ridge, which had never been done before in
Indian Country according to Ms. Meeks. As with many other tribes, lack of community-owned
businesses sapped the government money funneling onto the reservation right back out into the
border towns, perpetuating cycles of poverty and disenfranchisement. Native-owned businesses could
reverse these cycles, placing ownership and control back in the reservation communities, and CDFIs
could provide the capital and technical assistance necessary to support the startup of such locally
grown business.
"For many people, this is their first credit opportunity, so when you
start operating a CDFI in the community, it's about behavioral change--teaching people financial
education and how to operate a successful business, which is hard under any circumstances," said
Ms. Meeks. "Operationally, it's tough work because the everyday crises prevent you from moving
forward in a bigger way--Native CDFIs have learned a lot of lessons about how not to make
mistakes."
"The progress I see at Pine Ridge in the Lakota Fund and what we've learned,
honestly, has taken about 20 years to figure out--we've only just recently started taking a more
systematic and structural approach," she added. "I don't know that we really got it as an
overall system until the last year or two."
Ms. Meeks remains chair of the Lakota Fund,
but she now focuses her attention primarily on Oweesta, which promotes Native-owned asset building
through three program areas: technical assistance and consulting; capitalization; and research,
policy, and advocacy. Capitalization is perhaps the most challenging aspect for Native CDFIs, even
for tribes with significant casino revenues.
"Just because a tribe has gaming operations
doesn't mean their CDFIs are more capitalized than tribes without gaming" explained Ms. Meeks.
"We've been trying to get tribes with substantial gaming revenues to recognize that CDFIs are a
great way to invest back into their communities, but CDFIs are new enough that they're not even on
their radar screens--these tribes are busy trying to provide healthcare and so many other things
that have been at a deficit for so long."
Meanwhile, federal funds are diminishing, and
foundations are experiencing "funder fatigue," so Native CDFIs are increasingly looking for other
capital sources--including socially responsible investing (SRI).
"SRI support is
absolutely key," said Ms. Meeks. "The whole CDFI movement really started with the premise that
there are people with money that want to get a return by investing it in helping develop
communities."
"I don't think we've tapped these sources to the degree we hoped," she
concluded. "There's much more out there, we just have to figure out how to bring it in."
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