Kevin Abourezk
ICT

As a young woman, Deanna Mousseau saw how hard life was for her Oglala Lakota people living on South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Reservation, and decided to do something about it.

She began working for a Native-led community development corporation – Thunder Valley – in the hopes of reversing those economic hardships but realized soon that she needed help better understanding how to connect to potential donors. Eventually, she learned about a program created by the nonprofit Native Americans in Philanthropy to teach Native youth how to become fundraisers for their communities – the Native Youth Grantmakers program.

Deanna Mousseau (right), Kul Wicasa Oyate and Oglala Lakota, serves as youth programs lead for the Native Americans in Philanthropy’s Native Youth Grantmakers program. She is shown here during the Native Americans in Philanthropy’s April 2024 Annual Conference held in Minneapolis, Minnesota. (Photo courtesy of Native Americans in Philanthropy)

As a 22-year-old, she joined the program’s first cohort, and now five years later, she leads the program.

“I was able to really use my connections that I made right away to make a project happen, which I think was really good timing for me to go through the program,” said Mousseau, Kul Wicasa Oyate and Oglala Lakota. “I was able to connect with people that weren’t from my community but were curious about how to support it, which is all about establishing good relationships with others through respect and through honesty.”

A report released this week by the Brookings Institution – “Underinvestment in Indian Country: How federal and philanthropic funding to Native Americans falls short, and how to fix it” – found a significant gap between government and private philanthropic funding to Native-serving causes and organizations and the size of the Native American population in America, which ranges from 1 to 2.7 percent, according to Census Bureau estimates.

The institution is a nonprofit public policy think tank based in Washington, D.C., that conducts in-depth, nonpartisan research focused on the work of government and public decision-makers.

Brookings researchers found that just 0.88 percent of foundation and corporate philanthropic investment in the U.S. goes to Native-serving causes or organizations, and only 0.51 percent goes to exclusively Native-serving causes or organizations.

“That level of underinvestment, the continued lack of adequate financial support for Indian Country, is really a violation of U.S. trust and treaty obligations,” said Robert Maxim, Mashpee Wampanoag, as well as a fellow with the Brookings Institution. He was the co-author of the report, along with the institution’s Glencora Haskins, senior research associate and applied research manager, and Danika Grieser, a former research intern.

“Especially in light of the funding cuts going on under the Trump administration, there’s really opportunity for philanthropy, whether that’s foundation or corporate philanthropy and in some cases individual giving, to step up and try and begin to close some of these investment gaps,” Maxim said.

The report examined federal spending on Native causes from roughly 2009 to 2024. However, the authors were unable to examine more recent federal spending on Native causes as the Trump administration has failed to publish new data about federal spending for Native causes, Maxim said.

“It’s been about 18 months and we haven’t gotten any new data issued by the federal government about investment trends on Native communities or how the policy shifts going on, especially fiscal policy under the Trump administration, are impacting tribal communities,” he said.

The Brookings Institution, however, has begun conducting research that relies on its own data to assess how the Trump administration’s federal spending cuts affect Native causes.

Maxim said the institution has, for example, found that the Big Beautiful Bill, H.R.1, which Congress passed last year, led to drastic cuts to federal climate funding for tribal communities and may have cost those communities as much as $1.5 billion. That legislation has also impacted the ability of Native people to access healthcare insurance and nutrition assistance.

He said a forthcoming report that aims to quantify the impact Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency cuts to federal funding.

“Based on our kind of early results from that, and this will be published later this summer, we found that Indian Country saw almost $400 million in federal funding and federal grants canceled by DOGE,” Maxim said.

While philanthropic investment to Native Americans has never reached a rate commensurate with their population share, increased federal spending during the COVID-19 did increase philanthropic funding for Native causes and organizations, the Brookings Institution report found.

In fact, the report found that “sweeping federal laws passed in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and recession brought historic levels of funding to Tribal communities in areas such as infrastructure, health, education, clean energy, and economic development.”

Spending on Native Americans tracked generally with overall per capita nondefense spending from Fiscal Years 2009 to 2019, according to the report.

Funding for tribes, citizens, and communities remained flat throughout most of the Obama administration and saw only slight growth during most of the first Trump administration, the report found. With the COVID-19 pandemic and recession in 2020, the federal government significantly grew overall spending levels, including to Indian Country; where spending more than doubled between Fiscal Years 2020 and 2021, according to the report.

However, as emergency pandemic spending ended, funding for Indian Country reverted to the pre-pandemic inflation-adjusted baseline in Fiscal Years 2022 and 2023. However, between Fiscal Years 2023 and 2024, funding for Indian Country saw another substantial increase, growing by 33 percent as a result of Congress providing advance appropriations for the Indian Health Service.

In addition, the report found, new sources of funding for Indian Country came as a result of four major federal laws passed during the Biden administration: the American Rescue Plan Act, Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, CHIPS and Science Act, and Inflation Reduction Act.

According to the report, the average grant to Native-exclusive causes in 2024 was $111,200, while the median 2024 grant is significantly below that average: just $20,000. That means that half of all awards made to Native recipients and causes were less than $20,000, indicating a relatively small number of organizations are receiving most of the funding going to Native Causes, the report showed.

The subject areas for grants to Native communities and causes have changed over the past

Decade, the report found. From 2015 through 2017, health and education services was by far the most significant area for Native-exclusive grants. Since then, investments in community and economic development, environmental causes, education, and human/civil rights advocacy have become significantly more common, the report found.

“This represents a contrast to federal investment, in which health- and education-related spending through the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Education continue to represent the largest source of federal investment into Indian Country,” the report’s authors wrote.

What can be done?

The report issues three primary recommendations. Maxim said he wants to emphasize that one of the most effective ways to increase federal funding to tribal communities that is stable would be to require the federal government to set aside mandatory funds to tribal communities rather than continue to make those funds discretionary and subject to more generalized federal spending reductions, such as those issued by the Trump administration.

“It makes them more vulnerable to funding cuts and it makes it more difficult for tribes to do long term planning, which is essential to nation building,” Maxim said, referring to the current discretionary spending model for tribal communities. “Moving to more mandatory funding, more consistent funding would help solve that.”

Michael Roberts, president and CEO of the First Nations Development Institute, a Native economic development and economic justice organization, said most foundations receive tax breaks that otherwise would have gone into public coffers and should be held accountable when they fail to disperse those funds equitably.

“If foundations can’t figure out how to serve people more broadly, maybe we either need to take away some of their incentives or make them more accountable with the money that they’ve been given,” he said.

The report issued two other recommendations to increase funding to Native causes:

• Make data about federal investment into tribes, citizens, and communities more accessible.
• Reform philanthropic approaches to investing in Native causes.

“Policymakers should act quickly to reverse harmful funding cuts affecting Native Americans, and philanthropic leaders should begin scaling up their investments into Native communities and causes,” the report’s authors wrote.

Roberts said the Brookings Institution report corroborates much of the research conducted by his organization.

“Philanthropy has really failed Native American communities,” Roberts said. “In fact, when we did this study 10 years ago, it was pretty clear that private donors gave more money to non-Natives doing work in the name of Natives than they gave the Native institutions themselves, and that’s gotten a little bit better over the last 10 years, but it’s still pretty woefully bleak.”

In addition, he said, less than 5 percent of the annual distribution by foundations goes to organizations controlled by people of color.

“I think that the logical conclusion is there’s a lot of prejudice and bias against people of color in the foundation community,” he said. “I mean, we just need to call out what it is. That is outright prejudice and bigotry.”

At the same time, Americans largely have forgotten about Native people, he said, citing the results of a report that the First Nations Development Institute released in June 2016 called “Reclaiming Native Truth.” A follow-up report released in 2018, “We Need to Change How We Think: Perspectives on Philanthropy’s Underfunding of Native Communities and Causes,” examined the way donors in America view Native people and found the same invisibility that Native people experience from non-Natives in general was reflected within the non-Native philanthropic community.

“They didn’t see us at all, and when they did see us, they had a whole bunch of made up stories about us, right? That we were all rich from gaming, or just the opposite, that we were highly dysfunctional and that we had squandered our wealth, and that’s why we were impoverished,” he said. “Making Native people visible is a very important part of the work that we need to get done in order for philanthropy to change its mind.”

One of the most effective ways to increase visibility of Native people and causes is to increase Native nonprofit board membership, Roberts said.

Cheryl Crazy Bull, Sicangu Lakota and president and CEO of the American Indian College Fund, which co-published the report along with the Brookings Institution, said the report’s findings didn’t surprise her.

“In the many years that I’ve worked with Native issues and Native higher education, we’ve seen a great deal of underinvestment in Indian Country so these figures kind of are aligned with the experience of other reports and my own experience with how philanthropy works,” she told ICT.

She said it’s often difficult for Native organizations and tribes to connect their causes to the causes that private donors want to support. For example, she said, Native organizations and tribes often seek funds to buy land but struggle to find donors willing to support those efforts.

“Philanthropy generally operates by targeting funding toward particular issues that are aligned with their mission or their corporate purpose, and Native people need investment that is more flexible, that builds our capacity and allows us to work in the communities that we serve,” Crazy Bull said. “I think funders should also make an investment in their own knowledge about the diversity of tribal communities and the opportunity that they have to invest in not just the diverse types of communities and people that we are, but the kinds of priorities and needs that we have, everything from food sovereignty to health to housing, youth programming, elder care.”

She said tribal communities also struggle to build fundraising infrastructure that allows them to skillfully navigate the bureaucracy of philanthropy. That’s why the American Indian College Fund devotes a portion of its funding to support tribal colleges so they have the technical assistance they need to apply for funding.

Crazy Bull said the college fund has not seen a decrease in contributions over the past year. The fund takes no federal funding and relies on individual foundation and corporate gifts and last year distributed $22 million in scholarships, a significant increase over previous years.

“I think we are really able to tap into people’s understanding that education is life changing, that education changes not only an individual’s life, but the trajectory of the lives of their families,” she said. “And we see that. We have all the evidence. We can tell that story. We can tell it from a data perspective and from the personal experience of people.”

Erik Stegman, CEO of Native Americans in Philanthropy, said it will be important for tribal communities to lean on the many strengths they already have as they look toward increasing philanthropic funding to their causes and to continue to pound on the doors of philanthropy.

“Philanthropy is fundamentally a relationship-based sector, and Native people, that’s really our superpower,” he said. “And so a lot of what we try to do is to really to really focus on that as one of our core values as Indigenous people to really build those longer-term relationships between all of the different kinds of funders in philanthropy to help them understand that if they’re working on education or in the environment, they really need to be thinking about Native people and not just sort of, you know, check box an occasional investment but to think about what is your strategy to really make sure that Native people are really at the table.”

A particular challenge facing tribal communities in today’s funding climate, with the federal government slashing funding for social programs, is finding ways to replace federal funding with private support, Stegman said. He said his organization plans to connect tribal communities, especially grassroots organizations, to private donors and organizations.

“We’re going to be focusing a lot of our conference this year on really meeting particularly smaller grassroots organizations where they’re at and to think about different kinds of trainings and capacity building that we can do to help them build that ability to do that kind of fundraising because I do think that’s another hurdle. It’s a specific kind of capacity that we really need to continue to grow and develop in Indian Country.”

Stegman said he became interested in philanthropy and how it serves and fails to serve Native causes as a young lawyer working in tribal law and policy. He said working as a prosecutor focusing on domestic violence and victims’ rights advocacy it became clear that programs meant to support victims and reduce domestic violence lacked the financial support they needed to be effective.

To address these funding gaps, he began attending conferences that focused on building fundraising capacity for Native causes.

“That’s a really important resource that I can bring is the knowledge and the relationships to the table,” he said.

As the former director for the Center for Native American Youth at the Aspen Institute, which works to improve the lives of Native youth ages 24 and under, Stegman said the youth he served began expressing an interest in learning more about effective fundraising.

“I started to bring those young leaders on the road with me and just had them speak in their own voice to these funders about the work, their lives, why they’re doing what they’re doing, and they learned a lot about how philanthropy works and why their voice mattered in it,” he said.

That experience led to the creation of the Native Youth Grantmakers program at Native Americans in Philanthropy, which is a leadership program that seeks to educate youth about philanthropy.

“They actually get to become grantmakers through the Native Voices Rising funding collaborative, so they learn what grantmaking is really like, those practical skills of having to set up applications and develop frameworks for how you’re gonna give funding out and then to make those tough decisions with a finite set of resources about how to invest in other Native youth organizations across the country,” Stegman said.

Native Voices Rising provides financial support – $9 million to Native-led organizations since it began in 2013 – as well as organizational and civic engagement support, and advocacy to Native communities.

Full circle

Mousseau said the Native Youth Grantmaking program connected her to other Native young people also seeking to bolster their communities, people to whom she’s remained connected, and also helped her see philanthropy through the lens of Indigenous experiences and needs.

A lot of the program’s curriculum focuses on helping participants learn more about their community’s history and about their own Native identity. The program also seeks to connect those youth to mentors.

“It’s really an intergenerational approach, trying to connect them with elders, mentors, advocates, anyone that could kind of support what their interest and their skill set is, as well as connecting them with philanthropic professional, from different sectors just so they can see just that variety of what philanthropy can look like and really how diverse and unique it is,” Mousseau said.

The program currently serves 10 youth and has served another 17 youth since 2022. This year, the program is using a program called the Indigenous Tomorrows Fund to teach the Native Youth Grantmaking program participants how to write requests for proposals for potential grantees, as well as how to write grants by allowing them to do just that, Mousseau said.

“It is a big ask to have them be the leaders and be the community voice for this fund,” she said. “It’s been really special to be a part of that, to see their learning journey.”

“It’s very full circle for me, being able to participate in the program as a youth and now being able to help new youths go through the program.”

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