“Defend, Develop, Decolonize.” Inside NDN Collective, a Thriving Backer of Indigenous Causes
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Toronto, Canada, one of many 2016 rallies in solidarity with Standing Rock water protectors. The ndn collective emerged in the wake of the demonstrations. arindambanerjee/shutterstock
NDN Collective is an “Indigenous-led organization dedicated to building Indigenous power,” and its approach is as determined and defiant as its tagline.
That makes a lot of sense, considering the group’s origins. NDN Collective was created by Nick Tilsen, now its president and CEO, in the wake of the 2016 resistance to the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline near the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation.
“[The Dakota Access demonstrations] were part of what became a global effort about water protection, land defense from the energy industry and the extraction industry, and about what that was doing to our tribal people on treaty lands,” NDN Foundation Managing Director Gaby Strong said in a recent interview. “It was a threat to poor people, primarily people of color. That was a mobilization that brought a lot of us together. And shortly after that, Nick began designing and conceptualizing NDN Collective.”
Since its founding, NDN Collective has been busy, rounding up a who’s who of funders, spanning small but steadfast backers of Native causes, sprawling national foundations and billionaire mega donors. That’s allowed it to launch a number of affiliates — what the organization refers to collectively as the “NDN ecosystem” — including the NDN Foundation, the NDN Fund, and the NDN Action Network, an advocacy organization.
NDN Foundation Managing Director Gaby Strong
NDN Collective does grantmaking, impact investing and lending, offers capacity-building services and awards fellowships. It’s an advocacy and organizing force — its Landback Campaign supports a nationwide movement to return Native lands to Native ownership while building power across BIPOC organizing efforts. And it’s a thought leader, producing regular position papers and statements on national and global issues and their impacts on Indigenous people — from the overturning of Roe v. Wade to the Biden administration’s recent approval of a massive oil drilling project in Alaska, which an NDN Collective spokesperson called “a climate disaster in the making.”
Some of the organization’s work is less conventionally nonprofit-like: In 2020, it participated in a protest when then-President Donald Trump was scheduled to visit Mount Rushmore; the group demanded that the monument be closed and the Black Hills returned to the Lakota people. Tilsen was among the protesters arrested, but charges against him were dropped last year.
Any controversy hasn’t swayed donors. NDN Collective has amassed quite a list of backers in its relatively short history, including the Bezos Earth Fund, and the Bush, Doris Duke Charitable, Ford, Grove, JBP, Kataly, Libra, MacArthur, Northwest Area, NoVo, Robert Wood Johnson, Surdna, and W.K. Kellogg foundations. It also received a grant from MacKenzie Scott in 2021, although the amount was not disclosed (chances are, it was large). The organization’s total revenue for 2020 was over $48 million, up from over $11 million in 2019, according to tax filings.
In a sector that has long neglected Native causes, NDN Collective has accomplished quite a feat, aligning a diverse array of funders behind an agenda that is, frankly, a lot bolder than many philanthropic actors are comfortable with.
NDN Collective’s relationship with its funders doesn’t stop it from sharply criticizing the world of philanthropy and the sources of its largesse. Its staff often talk about “rematriating” (the female form of repatriating) wealth, as in a quote from Gaby Strong on the website: “The NDN Foundation was formed to rematriate wealth back to Indigenous hands under Indigenous control. We seek to honor and resource our Peoples’ prosperity and self-determination.”
As associate director Tina Kuckkahn put it, “What some people see as fundraising, we see as liberating wealth, because we understand that the majority of the wealth in the country was built upon the land that was taken from us, and on resources extracted from the land and built on the stolen labor of Black and brown people. So our idea and approach is to liberate that wealth.”
Defend. Develop. Decolonize.
NDN Collective employs what it calls “The Three Ds” — defend, develop, and decolonize — to define its mission and direct its work.
“Our strategies are to defend our lands, our people, and our resources from the extraction industry,” Strong said. “And to develop our communities in sustainable, regenerative ways that don’t compromise our environment or our future, being mindful of climate change. Then decolonization, which is our lifeways, our language — reclaiming and revitalizing all those things that are really the foundation of our identity as Indigenous people.”
Two NDN Collective programs, its Community Action and Collective Abundance Funds, illustrate this approach. The Community Action Fund just announced that it is accepting applications for its most recent round of funding. The program offers support for movement-building and front-line organizing efforts across Turtle Island (the Indigenous name for North America). Past grantees include organizations working to protect the environment, combat fossil fuel development efforts and train community organizers. The goal of the fund is to “help further Indigenous Peoples’ mobilization strategies as it relates to the defense, development and decolonization of our peoples and the planet.”
The goal of the Collective Abundance Fund is to address the racial wealth gap in Native communities in Minnesota, North Dakota and South Dakota. The fund is underwritten by the Bush Foundation, a regional funder that focuses on those three states and the 23 Indigenous nations that live there. In 2021, the Bush Foundation made a commitment to address “wealth disparities caused by historic racial injustice” by providing $100 million in seed funding to two community trust funds. The foundation selected NDN Collective and Nexus Community Partners as steward organizations for the community trust funds; each received $50 million to distribute in grants.
“The goal of these grants is to build stability and generational wealth by improving access to opportunities such as education, homeownership and entrepreneurship,” according to the Bush Foundation announcement.
NDN Collective recently announced that it has hired a team to support implementation of the Collective Abundance Fund. The new program will provide about 200 grants of $25,000 to $50,000 a year to individuals and families. Gaby Strong calls the Bush Foundation’s commitment “probably the closest to a full rematriation effort we’ve seen to date.” Since NDN Collective was selected as a steward organization last year, the organization has been reaching out to community members to get their input.
“What we first had to do is to determine what wealth means to our people,” Strong said. “So the planning for that took almost a whole year, to be able to define wealth on our terms. Our people are coming back to us and saying, ‘Here’s what it means to us and here’s how we can begin to address it.’ We will begin to address it — we’re not going to solve it. Because simply teaching somebody how to budget better, that’s not going to solve the wealth gap. Financial literacy alone is not going to solve the wealth gap. These are systemic issues that were designed intentionally to do exactly what they’re doing, which is why we have to have systemic change.”
Radical Indigenous futures
Philanthropy could and should be doing a lot more to push for systemic change, according to Gaby Strong, and she has ideas for how to make that happen. Both she and Nick Tilsen contributed essays to the Stanford Social Innovation Review (SSIR) for its 2021 series, “Decolonization and Radical Indigenous Futures,” a partnership between NDN Collective and SSIR.
In her essay, “Building Indigenous Power in Philanthropy,” Strong offered this critique: “When most philanthropic leaders ask what systemic racism is, they can look to their own organizational structures and where decision-making authority is centered,” she wrote. “Even when the sector strives to ‘do good’ or ‘make a difference,’ the presence of Indigenous people on the staff within institutional philanthropy is rare, and their presence on boards of directors is rarer still.”
Strong, who has a background in philanthropy (she was a program officer at Margaret A. Cargill Philanthropies and the Grotto Foundation) offered this challenge to the sector: “We look at the history of philanthropy, modern day philanthropy, and the amount of investment into Indian Country overall has been less than half a percent for decades and decades, despite really strategic efforts to engage in donor education,” she told me. “I mean, the numbers don’t lie. The numbers do not lie.” (Find out more about funding for Native Americans.)
Instead of spending much of its time educating donors, NDN Collective works with funders that respect the organization’s mission. “We don’t seek to align ourselves with your priorities,” she said. “Our priorities are the priorities of our people. So unless a funder is really about honoring that, they’re probably not a good partner.”
Asked what advice she would offer philanthropy, Strong replied, “Turn over your assets, number one. Second, get folks on your board who understand community and are grounded in community and reflect the community.”
Tina Kuckkahn added this: “Acknowledge that we are our own authorities and experts on what our priorities are. As one of our young people put it, ‘Stop telling us what to do.’”
