First Nations Development Institute
Rebecca L. Adamson, Founder and President
Michael Roberts, Chief Operating Officer, E-mail meroberts@interserf.net
Sherry Salway Black, Vice President
The Stores Building, 11917 Main St.
Fredericksburg, Va. 22408
(540) 371-5615
(540) 371-3505 fax

Founded in 1980 to carry out a specific dream of its founder, Rebecca Adamson, a woman of Cherokee ancestry who started with a small Ford Foundation grant and turned it into a national organization, First Nations has stayed very much on its original course. Adamson, who had been working in the Indian-controlled school movement, came to realize, Sherry Black said, that "until the tribes and the Indian people controlled their own economies, they would be controlled by other people."

Based on the knowledge that American Indian people knew what would work for them but needed resources to make it happen, Adamson used a $25,000 Ford grant to begin working on six goals that grew into the six program areas that shaped First Nations to this day: hands-on technical assistance; policy development from the grassroots up; gathering information through research; developing marketing expertise; building capital resources of appropriate size and type; and developing the high-level management skills of individuals on the reservations.

For most of its first decade, First Nations pursued these goals by working closely with a relatively small number of field sites, and it achieved some impressive goals. Its Saginaw Chippewa Trust Fund Management project, for example, has made inroads toward breaking up the Bureau of Indian Affairs' traditional stranglehold on tribal trust funds, making the money in those funds (said to total $2 billion nationwide!) available for investment in housing and economic development by the tribes.

Other programs, like the Umatilla project in Oregon, have pursued land reform on reservation properties; and many projects have yielded effective affordable-housing and business-development initiatives on reservations. (The Lakota Fund, another model programs described in @GRASS-ROOTS.ORG, began as a partnership between First Nations and the Oglala Lakota community; it's now independent.)

In the early 1990s, First Nations shifted its methods somewhat, although not its goals, in an effort to extend its reach. Its Oweesta program (named after the Mohawk word for money) makes venture capital available for small-scale, startup businesses and economic-development projects.

The Eagle Staff Fund, which First Nations calls "our greatest challenge to date," mobilizes outside funding and the group's own technical assistance to inspire economic development projects through grants and awards to "Native-controlled economic-development initiatives . . . for reservation-based, culturally appropriate, sustainable development programs." As of May 1996, Eagle Staff Fund has awarded 53 grants totaling nearly $2 million in 18 states, for projects ranging from ecotourism to income-generating activities from bison, raspberries and wild rice to self-help housing.

First Nations is based in an attractive business park in a renovated distillery. The irony here is not lost on the staff, considering the problems that beverage alcohol has caused for American Indians, but this group has a sense of humor, as shown also by the name of their quarterly publication aimed at funders, called "Indian Giver." With a staff of 14, First Nations has an annual operating budget of about $1.1 million, awards about $1 million a year in grants, and currently holds about $600,000 in its revolving loan fund. This is an excellent organization with a record to be proud of in encouraging sustainable development and effective policy change.

All the feature stories on @GRASS-ROOTS.ORG's pages are reported and written by Robin Garr, a prize-winning journalist who has visited more than 500 innovative grassroots programs in all 50 states since 1990.

Browse his book, Reinvesting In America, at Amazon.com.

Send him E-mail.

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