 I'm Ruffin. I'm here with a whole bunch of my co-conspirators working in the area of making sure that BIPOC entrepreneurs have access to the capital they need to be successful. Whenever I'm with this group, I wanna do like a announcer voice, like let's get ready to rumble. Like I'm so excited because it feels like our studio hall. Like I feel like I'm just so pumped all the time. So I have to tone it down, but truly this is a group of rock stars who are changing the game. Vanessa and Jamie, who are at Native Women Lead and Roan Horse Consulting, just won the Equality Camp Weight Challenge. 10 million dollars going towards this dope-ass cause. Eric and Lucas are doing work with Common Future and San Copa Group. And I learned so much from them because I'm not super technical on the finance side. So whenever I'm in their presence, I'm just like my mouth hangs open. I'm just trying to learn new shit. So hopefully all of you walk out of here with your mouth hanging open too. We're gonna learn, we're gonna have fun. And with that, I think Vanessa and Jamie, y'all are gonna do the share screen thing that we're so used to doing at this point and kick us off, right? We are. And I think before we jump in, we're just gonna do a quick storytelling about how Jamie and I met. So this whole work has been probably a lifetime in progress, but we didn't know until Jamie and I found each other here in New Mexico, each working at our respective positions and each experiencing and seeing from different sides of this conversation of how entrepreneurs, particularly native women and native people were getting access to capital. Me on the side is like my own business owner trying to find resources and also recognizing that there wasn't a lot of organizations interested in trying something different, interested in helping me get where I needed to go as someone with no friends and family around. The best thing my family was able to do was provide a vehicle so we could drive from Point A to Point B and borrow a car. And then my sister took care of our kiddo who was at the time like 18 months old. That was the level of friends and family around I experienced. And so I got an email one day from Jamie asking for coffee and we met and I will say, when you meet your sister from another mister, you know it. And that's how it felt immediately with her and this idea of these conversations just started happening. Jamie, I don't know if you wanna share any other details to this like how we got here story cause it's about relationships. Yeah, absolutely. Hi, good morning everybody. I'm Jamie Gloshe, co-director and co-founder of Native Women Lead. I met Vanessa a couple of years ago when I worked for CDFI and I was developing their Native American Lending Program. And I had this naive idea that I would go into Native communities and knowing we had like $30 million in our back pocket to lend. I went there and I was like, okay, I'm on a fun Indigenous entrepreneurs, cool. You know, like I've never had this kind of like power before is amazing. And lo and behold, I was like, I'm gonna go at home and like I got money, like let's build businesses and money. No one like came in drones. And what I saw there is there was a lot of not only historical trauma that exists because of predatory lending, because of exclusion from economic systems. I saw folks that were in the informal economy that didn't even see themselves as entrepreneurs. And the process internally that I had to do is follow a typical traditional underwriting to ensure that they were risky enough or worthy enough to get the lending dollars we had. And it was just really hard. I found myself in the space of being an advocate and being a fighter for telling people why we should give my people money. It was just a really hard space. So I reached out to Vanessa because I knew she was in the ecosystem. She said, hey, like let's connect with some women. Other women, other Native women business owners, maybe we can figure out how to like do better. You know, open those doors. So I went very naive again to a group of indigenous women and I'm like, I got lending dollars. Let me know how I can help. I didn't know that would be like the beginning of my path of Native women lead. It's going to a beautiful journey. We one asked ourselves, who are we? What are we trying to do? How do we help ourselves? How do we help one another? How do we help our community through this work? And that's how we began. And so with any good origin story, we had to find the right partners to help us build what this crazy concept was, which is who you see here today. So thank you all for joining us and learning a little bit more about who we are, but also hearing where we start, which is always in relationship and it's always in community. And so this doesn't happen alone. So I'm going to share my screen and we're going to just kind of walk through what it is we've been building and then we're going to open it up after this to have a real conversation with this crew because besides having the most fun, we also had to do a lot of pushing on our own belief systems and pushing on the current systems together. So welcome to SOCAP's reimagining and revolutionizing investment through rematriation, which is a mouthful, but as we share this work, you'll get a sense on like what this is all about. So let's see. Okay, all right. So why are we doing this? Well, as Jamie shared earlier, we created this initiative in partnership with Native Women Lead and through the work we were doing at Roanhorse Consulting because our vision is for Native Women to use entrepreneurship as a pathway for healing, safety, stability, self-determination and sovereignty. Ultimately, we're looking at entrepreneurship to address some of the bigger systemic issues that we're facing because we recognize how important it is for women and people who have not had voice to have agency and ability to make choices. We're also doing this because we know that we have to center Native Women in our communities and our cultures because we are the breadwinners. We're all the cultural caregivers. We're also the caregivers of our elders and children. We saw that happen across all communities of color that women really had to rise and not only be recognized for the care infrastructure we offer, but also that so many of us are having to make the hardest choices between staying in business or having to close business down to do the work that really is the community stabilization. And so for us, we have to center Native Women in particularly looking at sort of the historical discrimination that's happened to Indigenous women since colonization over 500 years ago. And really for us, this has always been about closing the gender and racial wealth gap. And again, we're doing this through entrepreneurship. And one of the things with entrepreneurship is if you don't have access to capital, you can get all the technical assistance you need. But without capital, we're not setting people up to actually be successful. And so Jamie and I in all of this work really felt that like looking at something different was the only way we could do this. And also by centering our values as Indigenous people and women that we could come up with a way to fund and provide meaningful patient equitable capital that met the needs of what we were seeing across Native Women Needs Network and also for ourselves. So we as project have created the Matriarchs Revolutionary Fund. And this will be the first of its kind Indigenous women led and owned fund in which we're looking to invest into Indigenous people in particular women across the United States. And this is our thesis, which is we believe we can build a thriving, sustainable, inclusive and equitable Indigenous economy by investing in established Indigenous women and supporting them with integrated capital and regenerative Indigenous social enterprises that build restorative, regenerative and resilient communities. This statement took a very long time for us to figure out. It's wordy, but part of it is because every word in this statement matters. Every part of this thesis is about a bigger conversation and where we're trying to go. With that, I'll hand it over to Jamie. Thanks, Vy. Yeah, it was really neat to kind of work on this and bring in that lender lens as we talk to not only our own community, we talked through our own problems of accessing capital. What would a fund look like that really not only centered us, but also ensured that we were able to access this capital holding all of those things in mind, the financial trauma, the predatory lending, the exclusion, not having access to not only financial education and the resources before, we really wanted to make a fund that was able to meet people where they were at. So this is just, as we were going through our process, really looking at why do the five Cs fall short? And this happened all the time in lending. I just could not get people to qualify. You know the five Cs of credit capacity, capital collateral conditions character. Oftentimes people actually don't have the generational wealth, the capital to put money in their businesses in native communities. We can't access collateral because of sovereign status of being on tribal lands. The conditions of the market, a lot of people operate in an informal economy. So we can't do market analysis locally. And then the character, a lot of people don't have relationships with the financial institutions and the bank and even credit might be an issue. So we had to really take all those things into consideration. Next slide, Vy. So we really thought like, how could we reframe this in a way that centers our values and our worldview, but also flip it. A lot of the work we do right now is testing relationship-based lending. We're seeing really low default rates. We're piloting with, we send a credit union and we're seeing less than a 1% default rate with the businesses we fund in microfinance. And we're also gonna pilot another fund with a CCL and Common Featured Community Credit Lab to support indigenous, establish indigenous entrepreneurs. And then our bigger fund is all gonna be woven within these five hours. So we're looking at relational, rooted, restorative, regenerative and revolutionary. And this really is about having native people serve as the primary decision makers along the investment decision making continuum. So we wanna apply this throughout the whole process, not only through the values, through the application, through the underwriting, through the decision making, and then to the funding. This is how we are looking at entrepreneurs based on the types of businesses we wanna fund and how we're gonna underwrite them. So think about relational. A typical question might be like, what relationships do you have with other native women? What do you value about empowering others? And this is what we're hearing from our community as well, like how do we underwrite in a way that shows that they're committed to repaying? Rooted, are you aware or informed by your community's needs? Are these entrepreneurs solving a problem? Restorative, how does your business speak to the abundance of closing the racial wealth gap? Do they know that they're regenerating economies, that they're regenerating incomes for themselves and their families? And then regenerative, will your business have a seventh generation impact? So we're looking at entrepreneurs that are really interested in solving problems as well as not doing harm, not exploiting, not being extractive of their communities and planet. Revolutionary, is this game changing? We know a bunch of entrepreneurs in our community right now that are trying to change the game, they just don't have access to capital. And just to see, just to share how it kind of weaves in into our greater vision or greater theory of change, we wanna build a healthy thriving ecosystem. We wanna support a waterway, not a pipeline, a waterway of strong indigenous women entrepreneurs to access capital, but it's only one part of the greater vision. We're planning to launch a fund fellowship so we can see more indigenous women in spaces of finance, community table-building is something we've done really well. We wanna continue to convene, to learn from our community, to build community, to talk about the issues that are most pressing as it relates to entrepreneurship and closing the need of women's racial wealth gap. We wanna create the wraparound technical support that's culturally reflective and understanding of our people and the current systems that be in historical trauma. And we also wanna kind of change the system in looking at indigenous enhanced evaluation methods and impact metrics. We are actually redefining success, we're redefining wealth, we're redefining impact in many different ways. And last, this indigenous women's fund will actually be able to allow us to do this work. As you can see in the waterway, the long-term impacts are rematuration, agency, healing, sovereignty, economic empowerment and advancement for indigenous women entrepreneurs. And the way we wanna root, if you look on the ground, is by creating all of these revolutionary ideas so that we can really see systems and policy change be. Oh, this is just, yeah, yeah. Go ahead, do this one. And in our modeling and our fund, we really wanted to think about, who are we gonna fund? And we've actually thought about different types of borrowers that we could fund. And we did some borrow profiles to really understand the sense of who we're gonna fund and why and what types of loans we're gonna give. And also look at integrated capital. So this could actually not just be just the typical, it's not a typical lending product. It's actually could be in the form of loans, revenue-based investments for gettable loans, for couple of grants. So we're really looking at integrated capital. Yeah. Okay, thank you. And I just wanna say, this is like the level of rigor we got to, we got to this minutiae and this process. And so I'm gonna stop sharing because what we're about to do now is move to this collective of incredible people that Lauren mentioned, that's been part of this work for us because so much of what we had to learn, we've had to learn, as they say, through baptism by fire, building while the plane is going and all the things. So with that, I wanna just bring on the team here and have folks just do a brief introduction of themselves. And Lauren, can we start with you because we didn't actually have you say who you were and where you're working from. Yeah, well, I'm Ruffin. I have a whole bunch of things that I do. I guess my full-time job is as the interim chief marketing officer at YBCA, one of SoCAP's cultural partners. I also started a cooperative called CRUX, which is the only cooperative of black artists working in immersive technology, immersive storytelling. And then I do a whole bunch of other stuff. But my entry way into this conversation has been years of conversations with Vanessa about how we capitalize folks and how we change systems. Primarily my interest is digital entrepreneurs. And as Vanessa and Jamie and the rest of the crew were developing the five Rs, I was also thinking about how do we eliminate the five C's? Because as we look forward, five, 10 years in the future, the majority of the folks that I work with and care about are gonna be making money online. And there's no way to underwrite things to them because banks don't understand how to underwrite loans to influencers, to gig workers, to graphic designers who are working online, to YouTube content creators. So that's my entry point. And it's been a pleasure to sort of help think through how we get this idea into the world with all these folks. So that's been a nutshell. And I think I'm kicking it for you, right, Lucas? Yeah, happy to jump in next. So my name is Lucas Turner Owens. I'm the founding partner of the Sankofa Group. We work with impact investors and BIPOC social entrepreneurs and others in the ecosystem who are passionate about supporting BIPOC social entrepreneurs. My entry into this conversation, into this work is actually I started my career in social sector consulting which is where I met Vanessa, working with foundations and families who were trying to catalyze entrepreneurship and communities of color across the country. And I immediately connected with what Vanessa was doing. Among many other things, she was a navigator for folks who were trying to figure out, where's the TA? Where's the grant? Where's the opportunity to do procurement work with the federal, state, local government? So since that though, I've done a few other things which is how I sort of came into this conversation which is I helped to launch the Boston Ejima Projects Ejima Fund where I was its first fund manager. I now serve on the board of the CDFI called the Cooperative Fund of the Northeast. We invest in work-grown cooperatives, producer cooperatives and I'm part of the deal team at Impact Venture Fund called TMV, stands for Trail Mix Ventures. So really happy to be here. I'm gonna pass it to my friend and partner in the Sankofa work, Eric Horvath. Yeah, hey everyone, my name's Eric Horvath. I'm a partner. I work with Lucas at TSG on strategy, operations and then consulting projects like the one we did with Vanessa, Jamie and Ruffin. My full-time job, I'm the director of capital strategies at Common Future. We're a national organization that works at the intersection of racial and economic justice and in my role in capital strategies, I have the great fortune of doing things like this but just what I would say is designing and building capital products by, for and with communities of color to really kind of flip the narrative of how we shift power and how we shift capital together. And then similar to Ruffin, there's other things too but we don't have enough time for that. And the reason why I'm here is a lot of reasons just because I'm interested in the social finance, impact investing space and how that can be kind of really subverted or done differently but to be really honest, the reason why I'm here is because I can, when family calls, you show up and I consider the people on this call family and it can be scary to do things that haven't been done before or things that kind of feel like you're pushing a boulder up the mountain but again, when family shows up, you get up and start pushing and helping them and you find a way. So thanks for joining. Thank you. And so first part of the conversation, so much of this is just pretty much what Eric, Lauren and Lucas said is that each of us were interested and we all have different relationships that started at different points in all of our careers but part of the reason we have to kind of bring this crew together as well as an advisory council to join us in this journey is because what we needed to do was to be able to fall into a conversation of trust. What we wanted to build wasn't, didn't exist. We also needed to trust our partners that they were willing to like think outside of whatever this box is as well as thinking and pulling in actual examples, real experienced examples of how this is gonna go because we can dream as much as we want but we have to have that rigor. And so that was not the easiest thing to like work through but once we found and we realized this was the right partnerships, trust and relationships matter. And so for us, you know, Jamie and I have been doing this work for years and it was because I had met Lucas in a past period in which I also saw him building the Boston Ujima project and thinking so much about what has been learned from that initiative and also knowing that like there was an interest and a desire to really kind of put these concepts and ideas into paper and so we really came together through sort of saying, hey, Lucas, we have this thing we wanna do, are you interested? And he said, yeah, let me talk to my friend, Eric. And as they were talking, Jamie and I were thinking a lot about we need a strong partner who we've been calling the high level sheepherder who can make sure that the conversation we're having is focused, it's pointed and that we're getting somewhere but also we wanted to bring someone in who wasn't a facilitator, who actually is interested in this work. And so in all of these pieces, we created a network and a family to get there. You know, some of the folks who couldn't join us today is Edgar Villanueva from Decolonizing Wealth has been part of this journey and the folks on our advisory council, I mean, some of you will know them because they are incredible. It's a ritual Roboskari from Addisina Capital, Kristen Hull from Nia Capital, Nikki Piatos from formerly Indian Collective, Guy Thriceva from one of Avere Fund and Karla Fredericks from Christiansen Fund. And so we have this incredible circle of people that came together to understand this. So I just kind of want to ask everyone, you know, like we all sort of fell into this with this idea of trust and relationships and why that matters to this process. I'd love to just hear where people are at with that concept because I don't think that's how we approach fund making or capital building in that way. I'm happy to kick off with one comment, which is just that in this conversation around how to sort of ease the barriers and the restrictions around how money has moved or not moved into our communities. You know, there are folks who will come to that conversation and say, well, doesn't that mean that there's going to be just more risk involved in the lending that you're doing? And I think what those folks need to hear, specifically folks at SOCAP is that without serious trust and shared incentives and really shared alignment on what you're trying to do, you can't do this work. And at the same time, do all that we're talking about. So that trust looks like convincing the entrepreneur who's applying to capital from a fund like Revolutionary Matriarch fund that you're doing this probe, you're doing this due diligence so that you can ensure that you have money to invest for the next 10, 20 years in other entrepreneurs just like them, right? Like that shared value that there are other folks who look like them who wanna get this money too, that should be the shared incentive to wanna understand or unearth whatever's true about the business, not for the sake of being punitive or paternalistic. The other point I'll say about trust is just that maybe in that process of unearthing, what's true about the business, about historical cash flow patterns or the minutiae of it, that entrepreneur might also understand how to manage their business better. You know, maybe there's something in it for them about, wow, I didn't realize that every December, we have this reality that we're not planned for. So I think just trust looks like a lining behind a shared goal rather than feeling like there's someone who has a checklist and a black box that you can't look into who's assessing you. I wanna follow up on that. I think, you know, to Ty and I think Vanessa and Lucas's comments around how trust is like interwoven throughout the entire initiative. Lucas I think is talking more about like the investments of the loans from the fund down into the businesses. I think Vanessa was talking, or we'll talk about is kind of this other level of like the strategic partnerships as well. So I think obviously trust is across the entire continuum and the entire initiative. And you know, one thing that I wanted to build on on the kind of strategic partnerships piece is I think I talked to a lot of people and people ask about like, how do we network? How do we, you know, build relationships? How do we be in community? And I've talked to Jamie and Vanessa about like how people approach you both and how sometimes it's very tokenizing or sometimes it's very uninformed where it's like, just tell me how we can be friends. It's very transactional. And I think something that's really been fundamentally different and really incalculable and also probably frustrating people looking for best practices is I don't think as a template. I don't think any of us on the call operate as a like building trust, building relationships in a transactional formulaic way. I met Jamie and Vanessa at a conference when we're just sitting at a table and I was like, what's going on? And I didn't know who they were. I didn't have any agenda. And that was like a couple of years ago and we just stay in touch because we care about each other as human beings. And I think that there's just a lot more to unpack that. I think sometimes folks miss because around the trust and relationship piece because everyone wants to build it. And I think everyone wants a path. And I just, I'm curious if Jamie or Vanessa you have perspective because people are always reaching and looking to build with you all. And I just think there's this like heterogeneity. There's a different way that that's not really unpacked that much. Absolutely, I feel like to all the pieces, right? Whether it's with the trust with the borrowers and the entrepreneurs, the trust internally with our team that needs to be built, the trust with investors, critical stakeholders. It's the foundation of any relationship that trust and transparency and that honesty. I felt like in our partnership, when we were talking about, there's lender talk, right? Do they have skin in the game? And I remember being totally like, hey, let's hold on, let's reframe that because actually, yeah, our people do have skin in the game. There's bodies in the game. There's things that we've already given. So we've been able to have those difficult really uncomfortable conversations around why this matters but also like, how do we reframe these ideas so that it's not harmful to our communities and not harmful to one another as we continue to speak and build relationship. And even with our borrowers and the people that we wanna fund, the entrepreneurs that we serve, we have to be completely mindful that, there are those things that can trigger someone because of the trauma that exists in our communities. And how do you build trust and relationship in a way that's honoring of those histories, of those nuance, but also so that we can push a path forward together? Yeah, and I'll just, I'll chime in and say like, the thing that I think about all the time is how not new this work is. You know, like, we sit here, we do a presentation on the five Rs, but there's a real history of trust and lending in black and brown communities that we lost partially, you know, in the 80s with the savings and loan crisis where a bunch of white people stole a lot of money and then the rest of us have been penalized for it for years. But I think it's really important for us to really acknowledge that like, this is the work that our people have always done from Susus and Giving Circles, and that we're just really building on those shoulders and that there's centuries of data that we could pull from if we wanted to to sort of prove that character-based lending, that relational lending and that, you know, sort of having trust in relations as we're doing business really works. And there's an incredible return on investment, both in terms of, you know, obviously that interest that will come back in some circumstances, but you know, how we really support our communities in moving forward in a way that is sustainable and healthy, we've always known how to do that shit. So I just, I don't want us to lose that thread and act like we're doing something that is groundbreaking, but it's already been done. It's exactly, I think that's the part of this is that like when we all came together, we all had these like personal lived experiences and then we all had these like, well, what about this? What about this examples? And the truth of this like character-based lending, you know, we knew, we know it's worked in other places and to be honest, have been really frustrated because we had to look globally to really sort of say those examples work in the United States because I think here in the United States we just, until the pandemic, until, you know, the racial whatever we wanna call it, folks just assumed that these ideas of first world problems or developing world conditions didn't exist here. And yet it's like so blatantly obvious to us that these issues are in our backyards. These issues of how systemic it is that folks are unable to have safety to live freely and to be able to access the resources they need to have some dignity and agency in their lives. And so character-based lending that's been going on for years, decades and other parts of the world. And I just have to lift that as well as this idea of like why we keep returning to relationships and why we keep talking about the fact that like the reason we have to center black and brown folks doing this work is because we can kind of get to it faster without having to like bring everybody along. Like when we all got together, it was like we all know the reasons why we're doing this. We don't have to recenter ourselves or have norms about what racial inequity is in capital injustice looks like. We started from that point. And I think that's part of that relationship that Jimmy was talking about as well is it is really painful to constantly have to educate the history of United States and the places that we've come from to folks who just don't understand why we have to create models like this. Like the reason we have to create this is because the system, the five C's are so broken. So part of this just makes me wanna get into the next piece of this, which is this is really fucking hard to do. This isn't easy. Like we all could come into this like circle and dream big and have the rigor, but putting this together, I mean, in some ways it's the antithesis of the way I think as an indigenous person about how to solve a problem. And so I just wanna open it to the group and just be like, you know, let's talk about how hard this was. So much of what we pretend is one, your two, roughens point that we're so innovative and new. We know we're not. We know we're just building off of ancestors, knowledge and wisdom. And that too, we make it look so easy, but it's not easy. It's painful. This is difficult. So yeah, let's talk about that. Let's talk about that piece because none of us are gonna get to where we wanna get if we can't just be real and transparent about it. I just wanted to say, I think we're gonna be first place for the amount of curses at SoCat panels. So I'm proud to be number one in that. Anytime on minimum, bring it home, that trophy. That's just a real life stuff though. All the F-bombs all the time. I don't know, one thing that I just wanted to say about that. So when we think about like, it's very difficult is, you know, I think it's so common collectively, not just the five of us, but just in general, to always look for comparisons, precedent, historical data. This is where, you know, the present day is built on, obviously what we look back on and we look for those for reference points. And I mean, I think, you know, Lucas and I, you know, we went through this as well when we were proposing like, what are the due diligence questions you're gonna ask? What's the criteria, what are the documents you're gonna look for? What's the criteria that you're gonna value your borrowers by? What's the price of the credit? And to the point of it being very hard is just, those were the comparisons. That was the historical reference point. And we constantly face that every time we got into a meeting. And I think Jamie and Vanessa did a terrific job of just being like, you know, we knew that we needed to go beyond that. It is very difficult to do that. When we're looking up historical default rates for different profiles of small businesses, but then Jamie says like the data on native populations is insufficient. They don't factor in X, Y, and Z. So we're basically gonna wade into an area where there is no historical data, documented historical data. It exists, but it's just not in the form that people tend to use or look at. But we've constantly went up against the structure and how things, you know, business is usual. But I think to weave in the trust piece, we were both, you know, everyone on the call, we were able to come together and just be like, yeah, we understand this is what the baseline is, but we've come together and we're on the same page because we're here to go beyond that. But just to acknowledge like the five C's, like that was there, that was a reference point, the default rates, the reference points, and we're going stretching beyond that because if we weren't, then what are we doing here? Just to build on that, I agree with what you framed it, Eric, and I'm gonna pick up on a few points that were made. So to learn's point that this has been done before, yes, to Vanessa's point that this is still really hard to do, yes, and I think how those two things live beside each other is that we honor work that's been done before by doing the research, right? By actually looking into what are all the due diligence questions that have been asked by other CDIs, other mission driven lenders, other folks that are trying to do similar work, right? What's all the data that we can get from those industries about default and about performance? And then we look through on a, and this is where it gets really hard on a one by one basis, we look at every single one of those due diligence questions and we say, are we gonna keep this? Are we gonna toss this? Are we gonna keep it but not use it in a punitive way to sort of bring an interest rate up or down? And that's what makes the work so hard is that you have to bring in context and your own analysis and there is no roadmap for that discernment around every single one of those previous data points and how you're gonna use them. So a good example would be talking about the five Cs when you're looking at each of those questions, there's a different answer about whether or not you wanna bring in some sort of allegory or whether you need to blaze a new trail. So I think that that's how those two things live side by side for me. I'm curious to everyone else, to Jamie, to Vanessa, to Lauren, when did this work feel really hard for you? Or was there a moment when you said like, I don't know if there's a path here, this feels really stressful, what's going on? Lucas, can I say one thing like to the roadmap piece, it was the five Rs that we developed and where we co-developed was when we were going through the list of like, what do we need to ask? What do we need to know whether or not they're investable by our terms or not? It was filtered through like the colander or the sieve that was like the five Rs instead of the Cs. And we're like, no, we actually don't need to know that because Jamie and Vanessa would bring the culturally competent perspective of being like actually native women. This doesn't really apply to them or this won't really work out in their favor. So I think that was the really crucial kind of adaptation transformation and like integration of those values because I think some people, maybe you'd be thinking like, okay, you have your vision and your mission statement, but like how are you actually weaving and integrating that into your process? And that was a great example of how we sorted through the questions that do diligence, the criteria taken from Vanessa and Jamie's values with the five Rs. Thanks. So many things. I think that this has been such a beautiful and difficult journey. Not only when I think about the entrepreneurs we're serving, we're testing this, we're piloting this, right? And constantly when I talk to established organizations and investors, they want to see that it's proven. And at this point, because there's really no like starting point, like we can't prove that right now. We have to demonstrate that. And so we're building the, like Vanessa said, building a rocket ship as we're like in space at this point, also putting on our helmets and giving each other oxygen. One thing I also wanna say that's really been hard is to weave in Indigenous values and worldview in this very Western like capital finance framework. So things like ROI, for example, if you wanna return on investment of like 7%, you want your money back, okay. Well, what if that isn't important to us? Like what if we're not trying to make a lot of money from our people? What if we actually wanna ensure that an Indigenous woman and her family are safe? What's the value on that? What's the ROI on that? What does that mean to give a woman an opportunity to have safety? Can you put a price tag on that? So we're trying to think of these things in very different ways, but we're also trying to incorporate what is, we're working within a system that exists and we're also trying to challenge it and also kind of like rebuild it, reframe it, reclaim it. Another thing that's been really hard in the space of finances, there's not a lot of people that look like me and Vanessa. Vanessa runs a full-time company, you know, I'm run native women lead and but we also have to like be these frequent experts now in finance and investment. And it's like, I already put like 20 years in my education. Like what else do I have to be in that? Like it's just crazy. But because we don't have representation in not only finance, but in this country, we represent less than 2% of the population. Oftentimes we're the only representation there and that tokenization happens. And then we have to have the emotional, spiritual, physical strength and wherewithal to deal with questions like why do indigenous women matter? You know, why is this important to you? What am I gonna get out of it? And it's just really hard to carry that emotional labor at times. And I think that's also why we brought in this like advisory council of bad ass women and experts because we know that we can't do this on our own. We're very much aware of that. We know that we have families to feed and communities to care for and nations to build. So yeah, that's what I would say has been very difficult about this. I'm down to learn, I'm down to grow, I'm down to share, but the expectations of a person, a person of color, an indigenous person to be the expert and to do and know everything is just so unreasonable. Yeah, I mean, we blacks have a saying about that which is, you know, you gotta be twice as good to go half as far. But I think that's the expectation. What I'd been astounded by in the last couple of years of doing this work is the shocking ignorance of people in positions of power. Like I leave a lot of those conversations being like, why do I have to make myself legible when you haven't read a fucking book yet? Like go read a book and then talk to me. Like that's just, it's breathtaking that we continue to allow the people who drive the narrative around what investments should look like about what return should look like and what value is to be like just so shockingly unread. That's like for me just really burns me. But I feel like we've all always been twice as good. Like we know that we've all existed in white spaces. That to me hasn't stressed me out, but it is just constantly being reminded of how unread people are. Yeah, I feel like that's just like our consistent safe conversation is just like the things we're constantly budding against. One, it's exhausting. You need community to deal with that exhaustion. So I feel like we all, particularly me, I know I did throughout the process would just hit my head against the wall and was just like, I don't feel like I just, I felt all of the belief gap. Like I felt all of the imposter syndrome, all of the things. And if it weren't for the relationships in this community we created around these concepts together, it was really the ability for each of us to like remind us like why it is we're doing this and also help us kind of reframe the purpose and the goals of what we're building. But I will tell you like there was so much of this challenge was when we got into the deep rigor, when we got into that lying by lying due diligence piece and then we got into the modeling of what would each entrepreneur look like at X amount versus X amount, the reality of the fact that we were creating a process that would actually one for me, if I could remember at the time when I was looking for capital, how great would it have been to have been able to be measured by the five R's, not the five C's. One, I probably would have gotten money which I did in at the time. And then the other side of it though was like, holy crap, we have to like put people into these like strange buckets and say they're worthy at this amount. And that felt super uncomfortable and really challenging. And then the third piece for me which is about where we're moving in towards is the kind of questions we're gonna have to answer from investors and funders on the return on the investment. What is there are lie and part of me gonna continues to go back to that like the shocking ignorance of the fact we have to have a financial return on investment or we're talking about a nominal amount of money for people who've never had access or the ability to fail. That's a whole nother mind F that's gonna happen soon is how we're gonna have to move into those conversations and build this idea of why this is investable. So the truth is as we've been doing this, we have been collecting the receipts with our other smaller funds because we have to constantly prove to Ruffin's point where twice as good, we hopefully won't get halfway there. But like, you know, so it's like we're having to show with our smaller funds that these larger investments are really needed. And we have to constantly explain why debt or integrated capital is what we're looking at versus like equity financing and or venture capital which I don't even wanna unpackage because that's a whole nother reason for another conversation. But I just bring those up as like some of the challenges I've experienced. The last one, I'm just kind of wanna throw to the group and maybe then we can open it up for Q&A because that'll give us about 10 minutes of question and answering because there has been some questions here is, you know, like I look at, so Jamie and I are gonna be co-conspirators for the rest of our life. Like I said, she's my sister from another Mr. And we're committed as an offering and we've made it, it's our job to follow through. The thing I think a lot about with this crew that we've had to bring together is every single person here is experimenting at what we would call the thresholds. You know, we're all at these ends of this idea of capital. And whatever we're gonna do, we're gonna continue like recycle and bring each other back again. There's gonna be this generative conversation. I guess for each of you, like what happens from here? Like, you know, Jamie and I have our marching orders for, I don't know about marching orders. We've given ourselves those orders for the revolutionary fund. We got to finish this thing out, raise the dollars, et cetera, but what happens for each of you as you kind of go forward from here? I can say two things that I'm passionate about that work that I wanna keep doing for the next decade. One piece is, you know, let's say we're three years out from now and you've made a series of loans and a number of investments, some have revenue finance and some have equity investments, a whole host of investments. I would love to use some social capital to help shift buyers to become aware of the businesses that you've invested in so that they can start getting big contracts. I think it's the other side of this impact investing conversation that gets a little bit less attention, whether that's, you know, federal, state, local procurement or whether that's talking to a target to help identify who are the small businesses in a certain state or city that they can work with. So that's one piece of work that I think there's opportunity for down the line. The other thing which is more kind of conceptual is, and Eric and I have talked about this, is just I wanna be part of shifting the conversation away from investor primacy towards the work that we're trying to do, right? Because I don't think those two pain points are equal. The pain point of an investor who's yearning to do impact investing, I don't think that that pain is as serious as the entrepreneur who's waking up every single day, running their business and wishing that they could get some support to buy a new walk-in freezer in their restaurant. Those pain points are not the same. I wanna see support for that entrepreneur 10 times out of 10. So I hope I can shift the conversation a little bit in that direction. I'll share. I think as we continue this work one, one, we have to prove, yeah, that our people are investable. And we are, I think with the microfinance fund that we've developed, less than 1% of the people that we serve in Native women lead, there's the less than 1% default rate. Nearly 25% of the cohort have paid off their loans in 18 months compared to all the other cohorts based on its design. And we've known from an American Express Report that Native women businesses are growing twice as fast as anybody else. And two thirds of us are the economic stabilizers in our communities. I'm interested in redefining ROI, redefining wealth, looking at indigenous models such as potlaps, our own community ceremonies of how wealth is redistributed and how people can pay into that. I'm interested in the conversation about what's our return on investment. Our bodies, our labor, our land has already been given and stolen and taken. So what does it look like for us to get that back? There's a big land back movement that's happening. And with regard to the underwriting, we actually have really phenomenal ideas in our own community about what does it look like for our community to underwrite and show credibility of someone uplifting a leader in their community? What does it look like to pay off an investment with their own expertise and their own giving back to their community? A lot of our people wanna give back in some way. And what does it look like to create funds that not only look at economic safety nets and growing businesses, but also investing in people's mental health? Does trauma does exist and continues to exist throughout our communities? And last, I wanna make sure that the process does not beat down our people, that it does not create additional barriers, that it does not continue to extract or exploit or do additional harm. That's what I'm interested in. I'll go quickly. The two things I would say is, and they really do relate to what Lucas and Jamie said, I really do think that folks of color and people with lived experience need to be actually in the positions of decision-making and not as minority voters and minority stakeholders. So I really don't think that it's sufficient to have finance committee, like with one person of color that has lived experience in your targeted issue and they're outnumbered by seven other people that have more traditional backgrounds. I don't think that's the type of inclusion or participation that's gonna actually lead to different outcomes. So I mean, there needs to be a title wave, a complete sea change of not just calling in people to advise and talk about things, but actually relinquishing seats of power, seats of decision-making and seating them. So Vanessa, Jamie, folks on the call, we don't always have to make something. I think a lot of entrepreneurship for folks of color comes from like, no one's gonna hire me, this is the best thing, I gotta do it on my own. Vanessa, we talked about that. There are so many institutions, so many places of power, so many resources, but honestly, if there's eight seats on the, nine seats on the board, it's a zero-sum game. Someone's gonna have to step off, someone's for someone to come on. I really fundamentally believe that who is making decisions in scale needs to be changed and things around boards, committees, like investment committees, these are things that like existing can be done now. So that's like a shifting power kind of mindset and actually empowering people in those positions. And the second one would be related to this and what I do at Common Future as well is just, I'm very, I want to create impact products, capital impact investing products that I think to the viability question or the ROI question, I wanna create these capital products buying for communities of color that are scalable alternatives to the things that everyone wants to divest in, but the measure of what viability is informed by the people that are affected and the impact that we wanna have. So viability is not how does this compete against your benchmark or how does this compete against S&P or other alternative investments, those are gonna exist, but I think the North Star needs to be viability as defined by what we're actually trying to do. And that reminds me of what Lucas said around the investor primacy piece. So we need alternatives, we need to show people, we need to lead the way to the edges point that Vanessa brought up and I'm a big builder. So I wanna put them together and then say, here it is, you're enjoying or not? Yeah, I'm good. I just wanna get to the Q&A, see what these folks are talking about and thinking about how should we do this Q&A in the chat? Or me, did you go? I know you did, you started, right? I started this whole thing. I just wanna add one point and what Luke, I'm sorry, Eric was saying, Lucas, Eric, all the friends. I don't think we're used to do that. She would put a few names and just go down the whole line of everybody. I do that with my children, it's terrible. It's, you know, the governance, that was one thing we were also interested, like in the power and decision-making, like how do you look at governance models that put the decision-making into the people that are doing this and for this? So we've actually been really inspired by Buen Bavir in that like putting the onus or the responsibility on those that have the most power and wealth as far as the risk. So re-transforming that as well. And we actually did that with the club capital model with the microfinance model where philanthropy actually took the, took the, I guess the risk and we're showing that they actually could have taken the risk, but they also, they're not losing anything at this point. Yeah, no, it's, I mean, you could get us in a room. We could probably go for another couple of hours. I know questions should have probably gone into the Q&A, but I think there are some questions in the chat. One of them is asking about the framework. And in this framework, is there a minimum amount of money you would need to get started? And Darrell, I don't know if you mean like how much money do you lend out? And are you asking like to get started like enough money to like make some return on that investment? So I'm not sure where the question sits, but I'm just kind of see if anyone has an answer to that. Yeah, I can pop in for that. Cause I think how I hear that question is, what's the amount of money where this kind of project could be sustainable, like self-sustaining specifically? And I'll answer it and then I'll kind of hopefully push the conversation a little bit. So with all these funds, there is a certain amount of interest that they can produce generally with a fund below about $30 million, it's tough to have that interest cover full-time staff with benefits. With that said, there's this continuum of capital that's out there. There are foundations making PRIs, there are groups making grants, there are groups trying to get back 75% of their capital, there are groups trying to get 20 and 30%. There's this broad continuum. I think certain projects, certain initiatives need to stack that capital so that they're able to get the right kind of funding so that they don't need to have the lending engine fully cover the cost of staffing. To Eric's point, like let's center the impact that we wanna be making and then bring in the capital to make that possible. You know, I'll add additional wrinkle to that, which is, I mean, Darryl, you're already doing this work with artists like Giving Circle to a certain extent. So, you know, y'all started with a quarter million but in many ways, the way that's being broken out is small-dollar investments of a couple hundred dollars. And I think that can be meaningful too. So yeah, I think there are lots of ways to get this done without needing to raise a ton of money. And figure when we're talking about hyper-local community-driven efforts. Jamie, did you wanna add anything to that? I know you had kind of already responded. I can't remember what we learned in BII, but just to start a fund, you know, it costs like $500,000 to run. Like that kind of blew my mind. You think about the labor, the brain, the time, the design, incorporating the recruitment, you know, getting entrepreneurs ready. And that's one thing we didn't mention is we actually have a holistic frame in that, which we wanna make sure entrepreneurs have the skills, the tools, the resources they need to ensure that they are successful with their investment, that their businesses do grow, that they do sustain with this injection of capital. So we are thinking of that as well. And that also requires TA and support and expertise and mentorship. So that's why we're looking at these other frameworks of ROI. Like what would it mean if this woman who started a gray water laundry map business on her tribal reservation to actually have access to just basic hygienic needs? Like what would the ROI be on that? And I think there's a question for Eric. It's a good one, yeah. Eric, I don't know if you saw it, says what are some of the alternative ROI metrics that you're considering? I also wanna just note, I think, I don't know if our session ended at 15 after. No, it started at 30. No, when it ended. Cause I see other things in the general chat. Was this an hour or 45 minutes? I think we're ending now, right? In a minute's an hour. Well, some people say. I thought it was 45 minutes. I don't know. I'm just here to hang out with you guys. Okay, well. I think folks are staying, that's a good sign. That's my chance of the question. We'll wrap it up after that, E. Darryl, thanks for the question. It makes me think about, so I'm not gonna have my top greatest three hits. My answer, my response is, to the Greywater comment, I don't think that nuance can be scaled. I think those are kind of diametrically opposed concepts. So nuance comes with community rootedness, comes with local connection. And I think that can be replicated, but scaled at a massive level where it's like cookie cutter. It's hard. So how I think through things is I usually build partnerships like the ones on the screen right now. And we talk about what's important, what's material, significant to the folks that you know better than I do. And it just, it's where the trust and the relationships come back to, because I've relinquished, I mean, I listened to them, we listen and we believe in their expertise. And with that, because I think we are over. Yeah. I just wanna say thanks to all of you for joining the panel, for just joining the team and the work. We're gonna continue to be doing this. So please feel free to reach out. I mean, everyone here, you can find their information on the SoCAP website, but also if you are interested in talking particularly about this fun, feel free to email Jamie at jamieatnativewomenly.org. And yeah, thank you all so much.