The Oceti Sakowin Community Academy is a culture-based school supported by NDN Collective. (Photo by Angel White Eyes / NDN Collective)
On Jan. 27, the Trump administration’s Office of Management and Budget issued a memo that temporarily paused all federal financial assistance. The move has been held up in court ever since, leaving the future of federal funding in limbo.
“Everyone was just panicking and wondering what was going to happen when and if federal funds were frozen,” says Liz Welch, director of advancement at NDN Collective, an Indigenous-led organization based in Rapid City, South Dakota that works to build Indigenous power through organizing, activism and philanthropy.
But the NDN Collective has refused to be frozen. On Jan. 31, after just four days of development, the collective launched its For The People Campaign, which asks philanthropists and wealthy individuals to respond to the freeze by directly funding NDN Collective’s work that reaches Indigenous communities on the ground.
“As a greater ecosystem, we wanted to be able to respond to our partners,” Welch tells Next City. “We didn’t want to develop something brand new and shiny for the moment, like we often see happening in philanthropy or the non-profit sector.”
NDN Collective often works as a conduit for supporting Indigenous-led community-based organizations, many of whom have been hard hit by the freeze. At least 15 of NDN Collective’s partners have collectively seen just under $101 million in funding frozen already.
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NDN was also impacted directly. Last year, NDN Collective was selected to be an outreach partner for disbursing grant funding from the EPA’s new Environmental Justice Thriving Communities program, stemming from the Inflation Reduction Act. The collective was set to help cover for the Great Lakes region and the National West region, which in itself covered three regions.
“The purpose of the program is to deploy grant funds to frontline environmental justice communities, the historically marginalized communities that have been disproportionately impacted by environmental degradation and pollution,” explains Davis Price, NDN’s director of climate justice initiative.
But because the National West region’s contract wasn’t obligated before the Biden administration exited, the new EPA director was able to cancel the contract, explicitly citing the lead applicant’s support for a free Palestine.
“We know for sure that the $50 million [for the National West region] is not going to be awarded in any shape or form. Then there’s multiple regions that were awarded, have funds under contract, and have launched their grantmaking programs that are in flux right now,” Price says.
Through its new For the People Campaign, NDN Collective is calling for those with money to respond swiftly to the needs of the communities under Trump’s plutocracy and address the effects of a decline in U.S. philanthropic giving since 2020.
The collective’s leaders say its nimble yet broad infrastructure affords them the ability to quickly funnel money they receive to community partners in need. In just five years, NDN has been able to provide more than $109 million in grants across Turtle Island; that represents just 13.5% of the requests they’ve received.
“For us, [the campaign] was a doubling down on the ecosystem that we already have in place. That’s one of the biggest realizations of this time. We knew, but now it’s confirmed for us, that NDN’s ecosystem is really built for this moment,” Welch adds.
“We just need resources so that we can continue to support our partners who are reaching out to us and are really worried and are having to respond in their communities really quickly.”
The approach of investing directly into the Indigenous communities doing the work rather than routing philanthropic funding through a foundation-determined strategy is critical to decolonizing philanthropy, the collective’s leadership argues.
“I don’t think that it’s actually philanthropy’s job to have set strategies,” Welch says. “I think it’s their job to show up and fund movement leaders in the strategies that they’re setting.”
Writing in Alliance Magazine in 2022, philanthropy researchers Shonali Banjeree and Urvi Shiram explained it this way: “Given the inherent power asymmetry between the funders and ‘beneficiaries’, decolonized philanthropy must focus on breaking the perennially reinforced cycles of hierarchical oppression … and work alongside the communities and individuals who are closest to the problems.”
While the Trump administration has been jarring, Price explains that none of this is new for Indigenous communities. “The first engagement with colonizers was when our climate crisis began. It’s always been at the root of our work and it’ll continue to be that,” he says. “How do we continue to coalition build and organize and mobilize the efforts we need to take our power back from this authoritarian regime?”