Ranked #1 in the World
Greetings global citizens. My name is Stewart Sarkozy-Banoczy, a 1991 Thunderbird graduate. First let me say it is a real honor and pleasure to be a part of this new adventure in blogging. I do a little blogging of my own for personal and professional reasons elsewhere, and I stay active personally and professionally with Facebook. So this seemed like a natural progression in my local, regional and global connections. Now a little about me and my organization for this first time around: I am the vice president and chief operating officer for Oweesta, a U.S. Native community development intermediary based in Rapid City, S.D., serving indigenous people throughout the United States.
We also liaise at times with international indigenous organizations, and I was fortunate last fall to attend the Clinton Global Initiative in New York City. We were the only Native organization at the event, and it was great to see the global focus with all the work necessary for Native nations in the United States. Since then, I have had a number of topics on my mind that have driven my work and might be lead topics to throw around here on this blog.
At Oweesta we focus on the development of small Native community-based lending and capacity building institutions, known as CDFIs (community development financial institutions). These are primarily nonprofit Native loan funds, but there are also Native credit unions, banks, venture capital funds and microenterprise funds. We also provide training and technical assistance in the areas of enterprise and entrepreneurship development and financial education and asset building for Native communities and nations. Oweesta acts as an investor/lender to these local institutions as well, once they have reached a certain level of maturity.
Our work requires what I call a “nimble and locally sensitive” approach to each community we work in. With more than 500 different federally recognized Indian tribes and many more state recognized, non-recognized, urban, Native Hawaiian and Alaska Native communities and nations, we must have a global approach to “nations within nations.” This kind of community development investing touches upon socially responsible investing, social entrepreneurs, sustainable economies, Native values, ethics, customs and creating independent, sovereign Native communities. At its core, the work is “feel good” but very personal for all of us and directed toward the practical aspects of small business development, home ownership, asset creation, wealth development – things that every nation, small or large, and every citizen, global or local, should be able to achieve.
We are hopeful that, with the changes in the U.S. administration, change will come to the First Peoples of America and that there will be concerted efforts to improve the lives of Native people. I look forward to the coming conversations here and elsewhere.
January 23rd, 2009 at 1:03 pm
I drove to the Gila River Indian Community in 2005 on assignment for a daily newspaper in Phoenix. Most community visitors stop at the casinos along Interstate 10, but I went deeper into the reservation until I found an isolated housing project called Lone Butte. Each year, a handful of children from Lone Butte enroll at public schools in the upscale Phoenix neighborhoods that border the reservation. When allegations surfaced in 2005 that the children of Lone Butte were being pushed aside and underserved at some of these schools, I decided to investigate. The story opened my eyes to this concept of “nations within nations” that Stewart writes about.
The children of Lone Butte lived only five miles south of the schools they attended, but they might as well have come from faraway nations. The cultural gaps ran deep, and the educators assigned to help these children lacked proper training in cross-cultural communication. The educators couldn’t even see that a problem existed. They were genuinely surprised – even flabbergasted – when allegations surfaced of cultural insensitivity. Yet the fact remained: Children from Lone Butte enrolled every year at Desert Vista High School, but none had ever graduated. (If you want to see the story I wrote on the children of Lone Butte, the link is http://www.eastvalleytribune.com/story/40921.)
Thunderbirds travel all over the world to experience different cultures, but Stewart is putting his global management training to good use right here in the United States. The Native communities he serves need ambassadors who can reach out and help bridge the cultural gaps that remain in the United States.
Daryl James, Thunderbird Knowledge Network editor
January 23rd, 2009 at 2:22 pm
Daryl has described a very common occurence in the intersection (some may say collision) of the Native communities with non-Native communities and I really appreciate the story. We (and the clients we serve) are very concerned about the youth and so much depends on how they are treated on and off their own community and how those communities interact. Gila River (where I have been a number of times working for Oweesta as they are a client) is ‘hidden in the middle of Phoenix’ so you can imagine how extreme these collisions can be when the tribal members are from a very isolated, impoverished reservation, far away from the exposure to a city like Phoenix. That is not to say that every reservation or Native community has these issues or if they do they are the same as the reservation just down the road or in that same state. That’s why we know that we are involved in building individual, community and ‘national’ self-sufficiency, independence and economic stability. Having worked, lived and travelled extensively in Russia, Germany, the Phillipines and a number of other areas, there are lessons that can be applied and help Native communities and vice-versa. It is complicated, but then when isn’t it being a global citizen as TBirds are?