At the Sioux Falls Argus Leader, Annie Todd reports in $100 million trust fund established to benefit Black, Indigenous communities in Dakotas, Minnesota:
Black and Indigenous communities throughout the Dakotas and Minnesota will benefit from a $100 million trust fund meant to address racial wealth gaps.
Nexus Community Partners, a community group focused on building stronger communities of color, announced Tuesday they had been selected by the Bush Foundation to establish a $50 million community trust fund for Black communities in South Dakota, North Dakota and Minnesota.
NDN Collective, an Indigenous community group based in Rapid City, will also receive $50 million as part of the community trust fund, according to the announcement.
The fund was created by the Bush Foundation to address systemic injustices Black people have faced from slavery as well as police brutality and to keep wealth within Black communities.
"This fund is a powerful opportunity to scale up our work, and we look forward to redistributing these resources toward the safety of our children, the wellbeing of our elders, and the strength of our communities," said Repa Mekha, the president and CEO of Nexus Community Partners.
The money will provide individual grants to help people fund their education, buy a home or start a business, according to the Bush Foundation. Applications for grants will not start until late 2022 or early 2023.
"We believe the community trust funds are a powerful way to address the pervasive racial wealth gaps in our region," the Bush Foundation wrote on its website. "Those gaps are the result of generations of unjust policies targeting Native and Black communities. There are direct through lines from broken treaties to unemployment rates, slavery to incarceration rates, redlining to homeownership rates."
In a press release on Tuesday, the NDN Collective noted the development:
Today, NDN Collective announced that they were selected by the Bush Foundation to establish a Community Trust Fund which will be used to redistribute $50 million to Indigenous communities. Nexus Community Partners, a group selected for an additional $50 million grant, will be working to redistribute funds to Black communities in Minnesota, South Dakota, and North Dakota.
Today, NDN Collective and Nexus Community Partners released a joint statement as the two recipients chosen for the Community Trust Fund.
NDN Collective has been redistributing funds to Indigenous communities for three years through their Changemaker Fellowship, Radical Imagination Grant, Community Self-Determination Grant, and COVID-19 Response Project. Last year, the organization issued $12 million in grants to Indigenous communities across Turtle Island.
Comprehensive planning and design around the grant will begin immediately in January 2022, which will include input from community partners and advisors. Grantmaking will emerge from that planning process, and NDN Collective expects to begin distribution in late 2022.
“Indigenous people have had our lands and children stolen from us, and were left to live in poverty – all while this country became one of the richest in the world,” said Nick Tilsen, president and CEO of NDN Collective. “Yet we not only survived these struggles as a people – we have begun to rebuild our nations and communities on our terms.
“This grant is an opportunity to begin to Indigenize and redefine the meaning of wealth. We will be planning and executing strategies that will directly impact the lives of Indigenous people. Right now, there is a window of opportunity made possible by the social movements of today – this grant is a ripple that we need to extend to other pockets of wealth in this country. The wealth in this country was made by extracting from Black and Indigenous communities for hundreds of years, and it must be redistributed to our communities. As we march in the streets, we are also building the regenerative communities of tomorrow.”
“This is about rematriating wealth that has been built off of Indigenous assets back into Indigenous hands with Indigenous people making decisions,” said Gaby Strong, Managing Director of NDN Foundation. “It’s about resourcing our people in a way that honors community self-determination; resources that are designed by our people for our people, grounded in our values and life experiences and advancing our priorities and solutions for change and prosperity.”
“As we all continue to feel the economic effects of the global pandemic which have exacerbated the racial wealth gap worldwide, we are honored to develop a resource deployment mechanism alongside our Indigenous relatives in North Dakota, South Dakota, and Minnesota,” said Michael Johnson, Director of Advancement of NDN Collective. “While this grant is being offered through the Eurocentric, capitalistic system we all live under, we will be working to incorporate traditional Indigenous notions of holistic, meaningful, and collective wealth as we enter the planning process around distributing funds.”
The NDN Collective and Nexus issued a joint statement:
Earlier this year, the Bush Foundation committed $100 million to seed two community trust funds, one Black-led and one Indigenous-led, to address racialized wealth disparities. As the two organizations chosen for these grants, we find it necessary to speak out in solidarity with one another and to provide some context and transparency to our communities.
The Bush Foundation didn’t just come to this decision on their own. Their commitment was the result of the massive reckoning that the United States was thrown into after Black people rose up across the country, in outrage over George Floyd’s televised murder by police. The uprisings demanding accountability for continued racial violence created ripple effects in industries and organizations everywhere. Some of those ripples didn’t go far, with corporations simply making shallow statements about valuing Black lives and leaving it at that. In other cases, the momentum is just beginning. The Bush Foundation’s decision to allocate funds specifically for Black and Indigenous-led organizations is a result of the conversation our movements pushed to the forefront of this nation’s consciousness.
To be crystal clear, this decision also didn’t happen as a result of polite conversations and agreements around conference tables. It happened because people took to the streets for months. It happened because we’re demanding the dismantling of the white supremacist systems that are literally killing us.
Historically, Black and Indigenous people have been pitted against each other by our colonizers and oppressors. But we know Indigenous sovereignty and Black liberation are tied to one another. While our people have unique histories and current needs, we are subjected to similar discrimination and violence – and neither of us will be free without the other.
We know that money alone will not fix the deeply entrenched systems led by people who benefit from keeping us isolated from one another and without real power to change the way the world functions around us. The shifting of funding to our communities, however, is a necessary start as we build infrastructure and capacity to lift up our solutions.
Black and Indigenous people have concrete solutions for the issues our own communities face – but those same solutions will benefit everyone else, too.
When Indigenous people demand land back, we’re not trying to steal people’s homes and displace them. We will not repeat the violence and oppression that was used on us. We need land back because the lands that were stolen are sacred to us, and treaties protecting our rights are continuously broken by the very government who created them. We also need our land back so we have space to build sustainable practices and reconnect with our lifeways. Indigenous management of lands is necessary to combat the climate crisis which is polluting the water we all drink, the air we all breathe, and threatening the crops we all rely on for food, so that future generations will have a future.
When Black folks demand reparations, we are asking for a social, political, and economic reckoning for enslavement and the anti-Black policies that followed. Reparations means abandoning the extraction, destruction, and exploitation of white supremacy in favor of life, connection, and wholeness for everyone. Black people have been honoring our shared humanity, practicing cooperation, and caring deeply for one another for hundreds of years. We must live into this future of mutuality and collective care to survive.
The wealth gap was designed on purpose to keep Black and Indigenous people in poverty and therefore out of the halls of power. This grant is a step in the right direction – it’s the casting of a single stone in the pond, and it will stir up the waters a little. But we need much more widespread bold action. We hope that other foundations and philanthropists will follow the Bush Foundation’s lead and make similar commitments to put the money that was made on our backs and stolen from our lands into our hands.
When we talk about alternatives to the current systems, we are talking about building community wealth and regenerative systems that aren’t extractive of people or the planet. When we talk about wealth, we’re asking ourselves: what does wealth mean for us? How do we define wealth, and how is this definition shaped by cultures and values, rather than the market? We know that putting people and the planet over profit is the only way we can reverse the damages our world is currently facing.
Black and Indigenous solidarity means building something new, together with our people. We’re drawing from the past to stage for the future. We have collective visions of liberation guiding us through this next chapter, and look forward to learning together as we move forward.
Comprehensive planning and design will begin immediately in January 2022, which will include input from community partners and advisors. Grantmaking will emerge from that planning process, and is expected to be available to individuals and families in late 2022.
The wealth gap was designed on purpose to keep Black and Indigenous people in poverty and therefore out of the halls of power. This grant is a step in the right direction – it’s the casting of a single stone in the pond, and it will stir up the waters a little. But we need much more widespread bold action. We hope that other foundations and philanthropists will follow the Bush Foundation’s lead and make similar commitments to put the money that was made on our backs and stolen from our lands into our hands.
When we talk about alternatives to the current systems, we are talking about building community wealth and regenerative systems that aren’t extractive of people or the planet. When we talk about wealth, we’re asking ourselves: what does wealth mean for us? How do we define wealth, and how is this definition shaped by cultures and values, rather than the market? We know that putting people and the planet over profit is the only way we can reverse the damages our world is currently facing.
Black and Indigenous solidarity means building something new, together with our people. We’re drawing from the past to stage for the future. We have collective visions of liberation guiding us through this next chapter, and look forward to learning together as we move forward.
Comprehensive planning and design will begin immediately in January 2022, which will include input from community partners and advisors. Grantmaking will emerge from that planning process, and is expected to be available to individuals and families in late 2022.
We look forward to seeing the results of these grants.
Image: From the NDNCollective website.
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