The St. Paul-based Bush Foundation has announced the NDN Collective and Nexus Community Partners as the steward organizations of two community trust funds seeded with $100 million.

Announced in March, the $100 million commitment to address racial wealth gaps resulting from the legacy of land appropriation, slavery, and other race-based policies targeting Native and Black communities is financed by $100 million in social impact bonds issued last fall. The NDN Collective, based in Rapid City, South Dakota, will begin a comprehensive planning and design process for the grant program in January and expects to start redistributing funds to Native American communities in late 2022. The St. Paul-based Nexus Community Partners will engage Black community members around the region to design the fund — from the application criteria to decision-making structures — and when it is launched in early 2023, the fund will directly support Black individuals and families rather than organizations and institutions.

“[W]e know Indigenous sovereignty and Black liberation are tied to one another. While our people have unique histories and current needs, we are subjected to similar discrimination and violence — and neither of us will be free without the other,” the NDN Collective and Nexus Community Partners said in a joint statement. “We hope that other foundations and philanthropists will follow the Bush Foundation’s lead and make similar commitments to put the money that was made on our backs and stolen from our lands into our hands.”

“We believe the community trust funds are a powerful way to address the pervasive racial wealth gaps in our region,” said Bush Foundation grantmaking directors Jackie Statum Allen and Eileen Briggs. “Those gaps are the result of generations of unjust policies targeting Native and Black communities. There are direct through lines from broken treaties to unemployment rates, slavery to incarceration rates, redlining to homeownership rates.”

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