{"id":42657,"date":"2025-01-31T18:16:45","date_gmt":"2025-01-31T23:16:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/test.greenmoney.com\/2025\/?p=42657"},"modified":"2025-02-12T12:14:26","modified_gmt":"2025-02-12T17:14:26","slug":"breaking-barriers-catalyzing-indigenous-entrepreneurship-toward-financial-inclusion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/test.greenmoney.com\/2025\/breaking-barriers-catalyzing-indigenous-entrepreneurship-toward-financial-inclusion\/","title":{"rendered":"Breaking Barriers: Catalyzing Indigenous Entrepreneurship Toward Financial Inclusion"},"content":{"rendered":"
> Back to February 2025 Issue<\/a><\/div>\n
Above: Elyse Dempsey, team member at Roanhorse Consulting works to change power dynamics in health and wealth systems by using an Indigenous worldview to co-create solutions to complex problems. Photo courtesy of Roanhorse Consulting.<\/span><\/h5>\n

\"VanessaStarting a business in the United States and being an entrepreneur are two related yet distinct experiences. In 2019, the Kauffman Foundation launched the Capital Access Labs and found that 83% of all entrepreneurs in the U.S. could not access formal financing to start or grow their businesses. By 2023, another national landscape analysis revealed no significant change. For many entrepreneurs, access to capital begins with a “friends and family” round \u2014 a privilege often unavailable to Indigenous individuals raised on reservations where generational wealth is more about shared community values than financial assets.<\/span><\/p>\n

Entrepreneurship is a tool for agency and mobility, particularly in Indigenous communities. In 2020, Indigenous businesses generated over $50 billion in revenue, with approximately 60% of these enterprises led by women \u2013 who are paid less than .58 cents to the dollar, are two-thirds the breadwinners in their families and one in three women will experience violence in their lifetimes. Yet, these women are starting companies two times faster than their white non-Hispanic counterparts and are an $11 billion dollar industry with little to no help or support. Despite this growth, Indigenous women founders still face unique challenges, including a lack of technical assistance, limited access to networks and, most critically, insufficient access to capital that fundamentally understands their lived experiences. Geographic and legal barriers exacerbate these challenges, as many investors remain unfamiliar with Tribal legal systems and protocols, resulting in hesitancy to navigate them.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

In 2024, Native Community Development Financial Institutions (CDFIs) received unprecedented funding \u2014 $76.32 million from philanthropic sources, with an additional $3 million from the U.S. Department of Treasury.<\/strong> MacKenzie Scott contributed $103 million to Native CDFIs, signaling a historic opportunity to address the capital gap faced by Indigenous founders. These investments have the potential to catalyze new lending and investment products tailored to Native communities’ needs. For many Native bankers, financial champions and innovators, this level of deep investment has the potential to be transformative and catalytic for Indigenous people and communities, if we can create space and runway for the desperately needed broad landscape of diverse capital products that redefine risk and innovative strategies for more inclusive and meaningful underwriting due diligence practices and frameworks.<\/span><\/p>\n

\n