finance corporation previously she served for three years as the director of special projects for the father like band and for eleven years as the executive director of the y duluth she was a founder of the american and supportive housing initiative and she represents area tribes on the indian health service tribal self governance committee bachelor's degree in economics from the university of minnesota duluth and a masters degree in finance i'm sorry in public administration from the kennedy school of government and harvard university she was a two thousand and two bush foundation fellow leadership fellow so maybe once again is president and see little earth of united tribes bill ziggler came to the city or from lower brule and started work for a little earth in two thousand and four since that time he has put programs into place that are meant to assist in the growth and development of our children young teens families and the overall community these programs consists of education for children early learning programs mentoring services tutoring cultural activities empowerment for parents assistance with food and housing and more littler is now consists of partnerships and businesses such as the little earth housing corporation the little earth residence association and the neighborhood early learning center on bill was instrumental in creating a ten year capacity building and program development initiative with the goal to increase parental involvement in children's education preschool and roman rates the high school graduation rate the employment rate community  safety resident involvement homeownership and earning come wow i'm very busy we know this so what are some of the things that you do if you know the minneapolis foundation board newly on the board the minneapolis foundation i serve on the grant making committee for the women's foundation's girls are not for sale campaign steering committee for the wellstone institute on the board of the american indian community development corporation and an organization called artspace and bunch of other stuff but but they actually have there is now serving on the board at this time but the organization is involved with a lot of partnerships and a lot of coalitions and we we work with a lot of various partners on many of o and at the end of the table we have an enterprising young woman who is founder of the new native theater is a navajo playwright and author of audio theater based in minnesota sees a two time playwright summer jerome fellow for twenty ten twenty eleven and two thousand and six two thousand and seven and is a playwright center corps member she founded new native theater as a nonprofit organization in two thousand and nine new native theater and then kiddie is an organization dedicated to producing theater and theatrical events by and for native audiences and the broader community it is like its name suggests a new way of looking at thinking about and staging native american stories it is the first native american organization of its kind to emerge in minnesota with ambitions to become a professional theater during this three years and then she has been in operation it has greatly progressed the quality and quantity of native theater experiences in minnesota and she is successfully invigorating the native community and engaging non native communities through play production actor training audience development and the establishment of the first permanent home for native theater in minnesota is an aside rianna and i were also colos for the first nations radio which is now first person radio and so she knows her way around the radio studio well that's our panel and what we have in mind is that we're going to talk about the experiences knowledge and what these different ways of looking at  ninety's there were different times economically had different hills to climb and so their experiences come out of that and they're there's a lot of wisdom also that comes out of th so we're going to just sort of have a conversation among ourselves and share with the audience and then we're going to invite the audience to ask questions what and not just ask questions but your own experiences that can add to the flavor of the discussion this report by the minnesota council of nonprofits is the first one in the american and has made great had an impact on minnesota even though we were before the meeting we were talking about how much fun taking it goes to indians and it's under seventy percent a lot of accomplishments under our belt so so the first area we're going to just kind of talk about is organization and resources so what is your experience in terms of your organization and the resources that you've been able to gather and that's you know the the half full side and the half empty side so there certainly were disappointments along the way and times when you tried something and you know bill for example in that ten here vision when you couldn't fill the cup all the way can you talk about that a little bit absolutely one of the things that  what they want to fund i made a point frankly to say we have the answers for our community we know what's best for ourselves as indian people here's what the answer is to whatever the issue we're facing one we set out on his ten vision realize i came to little or thirty years a very different time and i came fresh off the reservation in south dakota and i'd had no clue what it meant to be in a city or live in a city i had tele never been to see my life before i took this job here and i came had to within our community is to find a solid footing me how do we stabilize our community and i knew coming in that i didn't have the lesser of the skills that are the answers to do that but i had a belief in the community belief in indian people that we deserve better as a community so i went out into little or i went out and talked to the people and it was the residents themselves who set that that foundation down as a reza some selves said ok we can't live this way anymore we're tired of burying our  creating a vision for the community is a vision that emerged not for me or not or border for anybody else frank that vision came from little to came from the people and it was bold and it was i think it showed all the things that are good about in a people all the val vision and say here's what here's where we see ourselves in ten years so then the ten year plan was taken the community's vision it was staff and the board members are born is a blend of community members and extra professionals it was taken the community's vision in drawing that road map k we knew where we were today right we knew our starting point we knew the vision we knew where the community wanted to be so it was our task then to put together is ten year plan how we have achieved the people's vision  it's been a journey it absolutely has some of the things that the community was visioning in dreaming of frankly in two thousand and five seemed out of there weren't real there's no way in hell that we would be able to build a single staged approach we took in his vision i think the smartest thing we did number one was listening to the community listening to the people who was there vision and a second thing was we understand relationship it's a virtue in every native community it's a co conversations and they've all heard me curse and probably shouldn't be doing that but you would but it's building that relationship with people and helping them understand it help them see that vision and helping to fund foundation  get excited about the vision that we have within our community so we've been successful there the kind of half empty side that is a capacity issue of so many things that we need to do within our communities and we just don't have the full capacity to do them but we just keep working so that's a good that's a good answer and cheer when i hear when you were elected and you became the chairwoman of your tribe you it's amazing how much it kind of mirrors your work over at little earth in terms of you know where are we now what does the community want we undertook a fairly comprehensive membership wide strategic planning effort even our offer as your ollie's were able to have employed and we set forth they set forth goals for tribal government to actually focus on two areas one promoting personal responsibility and self sufficiency and to access to and promoting language and culture you know in the implementation of all of that half of my enrollees do not live on the final act reservation half live on or near half are spread out all over  we were also heavily recruited into the relocation program so we have many tribal members who live in the twin cities they live in chicago they live all over the world and the challenge for us as a kind of a home rule community we have a land base the found a lack reservation that our homeland and our primary responsibility has to build service delivery there it's fairly rural closest town is duluth we have a lot of our tribal members living there they have access to us there are services in duluth and they're able to come back to the home community and we do have regular meetings down here and the minnesota chip are trying to embassy building right down the street that members of the minnesota  offices here and referred to an awful lot of you folks to meet the needs here to talk a little bit about half full path empty now i'm on the other side of the coin going from a nonprofit serving a largely native american community in duluth to now the tribal chair and i feel all these little fingers trying to come into the tribal coffers so i want to talk a little bit about you know the access to tribal res gaming is new to try we've only been doing it since the late eighty's we have two hundred fifty years of trauma to overcome in our own communities gaming is a surrogate tax base it is not unlimited  wealth i mind a budget just like ali you guys every year i project revenue and i need to live within it i don't have the ability from the home community to recreate all of the services offsite and all of the places my tribal members are for tribal serving nonprofits they it's almost like people want to always say well you need to serve your own community wherever they are will guess what they're your citizens too and you don't get to abdicate your responsibility to your citizens based on race and you also can't rely on us to be the sole funder of your operations because as a community need based non profits you need to raise your own funds and implement omission and develop your own leadership because guess what if we're going to pay from it from the tribe we're kind of funny about it if we paid for it we wanna run it people ran our crap for years and did a really bad job at it right so we're kind of funny about our own self governance and self determination do you know what i mean tribal communities had had been done for three years by the federal government like i said fairly poorly so we get ownership issues you know if we're going to be over half your budget then we want to have tribal employment employment rights ordinance apply and have tribal preference in hiring we want it folded into our strategic plan and our goals you know we demand some level of you know cultural competency in meeting our own community goals so you know it's i remember dealing with some philanthropic requests and i actually started making people fill out a form and they actually i ask you how many native americans do you serve how many of those are fond du lac band members because funnily enough not all indians are my indians there are eleven tribes in minnesota this is a service hub for the relocation program they come from all over the country i also mcconnell to my tribal membership my citizens will ask me how are we using our resources and they're ok with serving tribal communities in general but not exclusively but they're to want to know their primary part of the population that's been served and also that found a lack band members themselves are utilizing those services it's big kind of like we don't expect wisconsin to throw money over here for any of their residents that might  minnesota right we don't go say you're from wisconsin and you need to find some money for most people in wisconsin so kind of the misunderstanding of people of tribal communities is not being panned in the end we're from different nations you know and then also they're there dual citizenship they although they are members of tribes they don't abdicate their citizenship in the community they reside with at the moment but we do need to have those partnerships and fond du lac has tried to figure out ways to meet some of the and service delivery that might be available for example many of you may or may not know that you know one of the big gaps in the twin cities was health care services we have to native american primary serving clinics but there was no pharmacy  so we came in and we've been self delivering pharmacy service as we like to call it the only pharmacy in the state that doesn't have a cash register you know any member of any enrolled tribe in hennepin and ramsey county can come there and receive their their pharmaceuticals for free under our i just delivered services indian health services so you know we're doing what we can to help build capacity but also within what is a priority for us serving tribal people in our home community men where making referrals and trying to connect to have those connections the hardest part for me is i don't ever want to see a tribal member who has built a sense of community here a sense of family and a network where they'll feel comfortable comfortable comfortable excuse me i don't want them to ever think that they have to come home to get what they need so the health of the sector is important to us too because people are most successful when they have that circle of support around them and i don't want them to have to leave because they need health care because they can't find housing services because they you know the whole litany of needs tribal community members may have as they live in the urban area they should also get to choose where they live and be successful without saying go back where you came from to get what you need so little bit from a tribal perspective i've seen it from both sides of the calling the balance is always going to be tough because i could  actually start five more businesses and still not meet the needs in the home community so that tension between meeting people with their ad as well as assuring the health of the home community is something that i'm sure every tribal leader deals with on a daily basis  and yet we have this need to be joyful the need to feel better and the creativity and tell us the story of how we want to we want to know about resources and i know that's something that you struggle with but tell us the story of how you came to be in minneapolis with this wonderful wonderful new native theater yes  they're there i think there are a lot of factors for native people when they're interested in going into the arts and i think arts that aren't necessarily traditional arts the arts that we every day consume and the stories we see every day that tell us who we are as native people we don't have the luxury of accessing stories every day every moment to reflect back to us the story of who we are and that's why i think it's so important to do arts in the contemporary sense while being informed with traditional arts and culture so m path to this i was you know i always wanted to do performing arts and being and being a native person you know i i guess i'll generalize but i was very shy is very shy and so instead of being an actor or something like that i ended up being a playwright and because like i could do without people criticizing me or looking at me and so i studied playwriting and i went to the university of southern california and started to get myself going there and then i found this organization the playwright center right here on franklin avenue and i got a fellowship to be a playwright full time in minneapolis and so i thought oh minnesota minneapolis so many needs people there in minneapolis is where it's happening for urban native there are so many theatre companies here there's one hundred theater companies and i thought well that's a perfect place to be a native theater person so so i come here and expecting to see art  people doing theater and there wasn't anything and you know going to the playwright center i would develop plays i couldn't get native actors to be in my plays imagine if august wilson couldn't get black actors in his plays could he have ever developed his work his voice in that way that's why i started to look beyond myself and and so naturally this this idea of creating a theater company started to happen because i saw it so many creative native people in the community who you know from my experience and my lens they were all actors and performers but they just weren't doing it they were sort of hidden away and doing social service jobs and which is wonderful but the thing is  that arts is a social service arts arts is the way that we learn about who we are and if we as native people don't have those images to inform us it makes about much harder i think for the social service sector to reach us because you need you need that marriage of the two because if ninety nine percent of any image you've ever seen about native people was created by a non native mind and you're a young native child growing up in this environment how are you supposed to figure out who you are and then you're supposed to weed away colonial with traditional thought and the thing that helps every other person in our country and in the world figure out who they are is they have a very strong community of artists who reflect back our own stories and tell us who we are so that's why i do theatre and and so doing theatre just coming down to the practical end of it being in minneapolis i need i needed lots of people to help because it's a collaborative are for me so i started off with going to places where people performed like karaoke at the wolves dead and and i i found i found quite a few actors their end  we have this we have this great video on our facebook page somebody who wife i met singing ac d c s great balls and i thought he was an actor nobody was  the thing the next step was you find these wonderfully these wonderful diamonds in the rough but they need they need the training and the experience and the reason they didn't go into theater in the first place to learn was because of that cultural barrier and the fact that performing arts is something you just have to put yourself out there and so it's a double layer of you know coming coming from a culture that values humility and humbleness and then at the same time being thrown into a pit me of western culture which is individual ism and look at me and and you're supposed to as a native person find your way through that and become a theater artist and then tell our stories as native people it's kind of tough so i started this an actor ensemble it's all native actor and sambal and so in that there is safety and security for people to begin to express themselves and so we've been doing this for three years and we just culminated so far in november we did a musical completely native musical brand new song book and actors and it was called twenty twelve the musical and there was a lot of humor in it because when we as native people tell our own stories we present ourselves and so that means there's going to be a lot of humor which is the best kept secret in the native community people outside of our community don't know how funny we are and don't know how funny we think we are so so this so this play as it evolved we you know looking at it we're thinking it's super important for me to be telling stories that reflect back the experience of us as native people and if people and if folks who aren't native or don't have the experience of being around native people if they come to the play that's great but what i really need to do is strengthen that nervous system inside her own community and when you strengthen the nervous system you strengthen it by seeing positive images of yourself you see by things being reflected back to you and so we had this this great this great musical we wrote we wrote a song called franklin avenue and we had characters all all throughout the community in the play the character i played was a grant writer and she fell in love with the aim patrol member or was an aim it was arm that's a whole other story i had to censor that but so you know  thing that has been consistent for us it's been difficult to get grants from the private sector and from family foundations and so and right now  still we're still in the process of getting that five hundred one c three and so other foundations we haven't quite been able to get to get funding from yet but i think the thing  is that with native theater i really do it's my job to spread the gospel of native her tell you why it's so important and why it's it's important to have healthy and strong artists within the native community who are who are there to tell us what our stories are and i think that's well i just have that my daughter is a you know the american indian community you know and i mean one other thing is some native funders don't fund this sort of performing arts and i was excited to look at the native arts and culture foundation grant tha call for grants or fellowships that just come out again like yes look at it we will not fund playwriting or theater at this time a little bit of a letdown but but that's such an important thing because it's telling stories center we're going to turn thirty next year i've been there about ten years now and we have we get about forty five percent of our funding from government contracts those are state and county contracts and they've been very consistent over the ten years that i've been there and another very consistent theme is that we have not gotten a cost of living increase in most of those contracts in the ten years i've been there my staff continues to get raises and we continue to provide benefits but we don't get cost of living increases in our government contracts that's a problem we also have a lot of united way money we have a contract with the public housing authority for our section eight units we have a partnership with the final leg fan for our treatment program for native women w disorders we have a partnership with cummins power generation to have a corporate partnership so what we've done is really try to expand our partnerships and then i have to fundraise a whole bunch of money every year from foundations individuals and other smaller corporate it was easy because it thank you to this pot of money appears it's like oh man we could do that and there's a need for that but is it within our mission is it within our capacity is it stretching too far what a bar operational functions are we s id do we have a good strong organizational core which i call organizational pull audience so we had to really focus on our core our administrative team our billing processes our finance our governance our board and really look at how we were doing that before we could stretch out and take on new opportunities so a couple of just a couple things about resources we are pretty creative and we are pretty nimble and we are able to take advantage of opportunities  as they arise to a good extent i mean we weathered the economic downturn of all way through ten nobody we didn't freeze salaries my staff got at least a two percent salary through all of that i did have to layoff some staff in our child care program during that time because so we're a little over three million dollar organization and i have one program that loses almost a half million dollars every year that the children are learning center accredited forest r rated infants are preschool absolutely critical every year the board and i discuss this it is absolutely vital to our mission that we provide the service for our children and yet the state reimbursement rate has been frozen since two thousand and one essentially we got another cut last year and my costs  it's a business model we look at as a business model so i fundraise that every year with accreditation for star rating we've got additional revenue coming in but it's a structural problem complicating that are sort of the environmental shifts with some of the big foundations in the last few years it's it's difficult to keep up when the you know bush foundation mcknight foundation are shifting their priorities you know we understand that it's not our decision what they're going to fund but it's very destabilising when several of them are shifting at one time so we know we have to get smarter about diversifying our revenue and looking at fee for service revenue and earned income revenue and trying to build a more sustainable and diverse forward we're much more nimble we're much more able to move quickly when opportunities present to sell present themselves so we're trying to get more organization into a sixty forty stands part of the challenge around that is the requirements on the nonprofit sector to to do all the due diligence that we need to do to be accountable for the resources we have to be accountable and that requires a strong financial team human resource administrative services it requires a maintenance research you know receptionist there's an administrative function that nobody wants to pay for and yet there's a whole lot of requirements of what we need to do so last year we were able to work with our corporate partners and get a three year grant to hire a director of operations which is helping us now explore how do we get a new data system that will help us accurately capture the data more effectively we have to move to electronic medical billing system by twenty fourteen we need to integrate those systems how do we upgrade our website to do more social media fundraising and more web based fundraising how do we market the organization to potential individual donors large gift donors so we're really working on some of those tools right now with the director of operations on board we have been able to you know in fact do things like risk analysis emergency preparedness you know is the sorts of organizational strengthening things that we all need to do but there's so few time and resources to actually get that work done we do have that opportunity to do it now but it's a three year grant and if we don't have new revenue streams securely in place by the end of the three years the position goes away and i'm hoping that that's not going to happen because ideally from an organizational planning standpoint keeping that position in intact within our structure is very very important to our strength our core strength as an organization once we have that core strength in place we are able to look at where can we partner more effectively with other organizations who are doing the work we shouldn't do everything and i've got a couple of board members in the room in the back me up and we can do everything but who's doing the work that needs to be done that we can partner with and find out where that opportunity is for us to get a grant that we share or that they get the grant and we just provide some training or some referrals or whatever that is so that we begin to look for those opportunities to say other organizations are doing very important work and we need to find those resources for all of us to deepen the work that we can do in the community together so i thought about well suzanne as long as i hear you i think we're going to move to the next section which is leadership and governance what's your opinion not necessarily just your organization the value of leadership and governance what does it bring to the organization loaded question it's if there's no way to i don't think there's any way to accurately capture how important it is to have american indian women in leadership throughout the organization so my board is majority american indian women the officers are more jury a majority american women my staff etc so one of the things that we're doing right now is really trying to build internal leadership i've got great staff and great staff and there are some young native women in there who are emerging leaders so where how can i provide those opportunities for them to build their leadership within the context of their day to day work so we get a small grant from the noble foundation to do our organizational capacity building project which is  designed to provide leadership opportunities and professional and personal development opportunities for all staff and they'd identify that so if one person wants to create a powerpoint presentation and apply to a conference to go do this presentation we've got a little pot of money we can send it to that conference and she can begin to practice her presentation skills and her present her public speaking skills somebody else wants to go to a healing conference because they're doing a lot of trauma work a lot of direct trauma work and many of my staff are survivors of lots of things and so how do you make sure that staff are not being demised by secondary trauma well we need to make sure that we provide an environment they are able to go to ceremony whatever they need to go to get access to healers whenever they  need to go to healing conferences that are on their reservations or home reservations so that a low pot of money to do that that's really really important so building the leadership internally and we also are trying to explore what is a more shared leadership model look like how do we flatten out that hierarchy into a more culturally kind group leadership framework i mean we operate within an environment that still says who's in charge who says the contract who's responsible that's me but within that context there should be ways for us to flatten that out and make it a more circular leadership model and so i have a leadership team we're really good at delegating at saying you know i don't need to make that decision you make that decision or we'll make that decision together  or there's you know sort of four different levels of decision making that go on but part of the internal leadership building that we're doing is finding out where the frontline staff can now come into that and as part of our strategic planning process we identified things like recycling i don't have to do that but i got to staff who really want to take the lead on it great go do that i don't have to be the one to do these things so where does the opportunity for frontline staff to identify where they want to have the most impact where they want to grow their own skill set and then i need to be able to provide you know very much so you know we've got we have twenty two hundred employees i managed to grow fifty five departments you know we have for profit subdivisions as well as government and service delivery and then all the normal stuff you see in a government public or you know and all of that kind of stuff so the job is awfully varied you know i economics major that spend time in the nonprofit sector you know what do i know about anything you know what i mean i'm i'm a bureaucrat so but i have got some smart and great people running these departments a lot of home grown leadership and a lot of up and coming leadership and one of the things we've been very good at at fond du lac and with the organizations we've worked for is to really say you know recognize that the career ladder and needs to be there within the organization we have here it's so strictly to tribal employment rights ordinance that we promote it in appropriately you know just because you've been an entry level employee doesn't mean if you're there long enough that you're ready to be a supervisor so we've done a lot to really internalize a lot of our training functions we were a founder of the fond du lac tribal and community college we have an excellent scholarship program i do not ever want to be an organization where i see a bunch of non natives in a supervisory role in a lot of worker bees from our own community that's not healthy and needed to be that way for a while but it doesn't need to be that way anymore whether it's promoting you know education and seeing our first indian doctors come through the door  nurse practitioners in our nurses in our our public health community we wouldn't have made the inroads within our own community if we were not a culturally competent organization and unfortunately you can have our lives you can have friends you can have people i care but to see a face that looks like yours or know who their grandma was matters the trust relationship being able to step over all of those barriers quickly matters in terms of service delivery so you know one of the things that university of minnesota duluth has been working and they now have a master's in tribal administration in government and you know my my little challenge back to them when they were thinking about this is you know it's really fun to think big thoughts around governance but you need to bring it down to the practical level i need people who are not only trained in their field whether that's social work early childhood whether they're happy whatever they are whatever their passion is for their work we need to turn them in managers do they know how to manage people do they know how to manage a budget do they know how to set goals and implement them and have some vision long term so more institutional capacity in people thinking about their own leadership and how to practically do it on a day to day basis and you guys who are tribal members in here you know this we get tons of big talkers and indian country you know what i mean we did we can talk talk talk around everything but can get do anything you know and that's where the rubber meets the road it is an implementation right  not the theory and not the ideas and you know that's what's been a challenge for me is don't just talk about it how do we teach our people to do it you know and i think as we make inroads and as people get experiences you know both outside tribal communit and what then you know we start to build a home grown leadership the other part of it is you know a bit of the you know the practical part that we have to be comfortable with a culture of cultivating leadership you know we have this whole generation out with their and they're at the forefront they fought the hard battles and and you know they got kind of happy where they were you know but we got new people coming up and they got new ideas how to do it and so a part of it is really kind of owning i think  are our willingness to share that leadership and cultivate it not be threatened by it and you get these young bright kids and you know they're just ready to go and you have to be ready to let it happen and accept what comes with it and that means our older generation being somewhat adaptable and being willing to change and happen bringing them into the fold so i see it in the nonprofit sector with young people you know coming in and they come back home with you know great ideas on how to contribute and it's just being ready for it we were resilient people we've adapted that's how come we're still here and in the home community you know it's like oh well they're coming from outside and bringing in these new ideas you know they just you know you know a part is sixty thousand plus and then when you fold in those who are indian and something else one hundred thousand there's a lot of population which means there's a lot of ideas and there's a lot of capacity for innovation last piece that we're going to talk about because i think it really leads to that because it is sort of a crossroads between next generation and innovation not new ideas or good ideas but the good ideas that get through a lot of convincing you talked about gathering the community together and saying we're going to have a five year vision this is what we're going to do and you went down the road and you built housing for ownership which this is you're going to think this is weird but there's some small part of me that really misses the good old days a little earth when you stabilities drug gang members around i don't get to do that more so things are good little boring in the community you know what i think it is it is it's really about with what i brought boy bring to the table primarily a little earth is because i was raised in a way the traditional way on my reservation and i heard the stories from mike and from my grandmother and decisions and the understand how to build a consensus within the community one of the things that i did immediately at little earth was a i did have to understand that i was coming in i was thirty two years old i took the county young and there's all this amazing leadership within the twin cities and i often say that i'll never forget that i stand on the shoulders of giants in many ways so many organizational culture and as a community we've really adopted that you know as a community culture in the second thing and this is the point of why i think the homeownership has been successful and why we've been able to drive crime in our community down by over seventy percent why we've seen our graduation rate go from less than five percent to zero percent eighty five percent within a three year period because we understood in our community that as native people whomever or whatever institutional system is victimized victimized just they'll never make it right right so as native people we have to understand ok yes that happened but we're going to refuse to continue to allow that have power over us we're going to stand up as native people and we're going to look towards that vision that we've created as a community and we're going to put in our work towards that vision and that's what we've seen a little earth and put simply it's no or the question is how do we collectively create a school going culture so my sister dropped out shot five kids not no one for children graduate from high school i grew up with there's ten siblings my  the indian community in really trying to understand why why are we so resistant as indian people to the education system is simple look at historically education was used as a weapon of mass destruction guess native people education the education system was used to it was a theory of kill the indian save the men so it's all that the historical stuff persists today so a lot of our families our young mothers may not understand why successful obviously we still have issues within our community and we're always working on things but if we only focus on the child in that that child's educational journey will continue to fail we have to look at the entire family we have to look at the entire home and and if the if mom's in school if mom's taking college courses she's more apt to see the value in education and push education monster family  unearthing i think we have to figure out how to overcome and i think overcome that again by make sure the parents are educated when i went off to college i was a first my family and you all have no idea how guilty i felt but i was in college my brothers were doing their thing and some were in federal prison and so why me oh why am i the lucky one turn my back to my family and turn my back to my people by by doing this white man thing right out that was my thought process and all of our families still have that and that hang up for that number one reason was not to save money but to continue to build the relationship of those tribes in connection with economic development so i think end makes the decision on whether it wants to go forward now the the nation of the tribes did say that this was something they were interested in because telecommunications was something that was really needed but infrastructure is also needed and that it would the it would have been in the millions and millions of dollars and so it  also non profits and some of the organizations like that was developed just to do that to get organizations to work with one another on projects and and i you know just personally would have to say that i think the cultural corridor is a terrific piece of work so we had somebody else  need first i want to address the tax code issue although you know it's already kind of codified it's not as well i'm known there the i r s is actually undergoing rulemaking right now they should it should be published i would expect within the next quarter that takes care of the five hundred one c three issue because it has been confusing tribes are treated similarly for tax exemption purchase purposes it also services within reservation communities between tribal governments and their people and were finally figured they finally figured that out that that's a part of actually like what we feel we're supposed to do for citizen really something that's being taken care of a pretty much a different view then of regarding kind of home community nonprofits our goal with our own revenue is to turn it over in our own economy as many times as possible and also do it for the primary benefit of our tribal members and unless we could absolutely assure that tribal members were being hired and that there was preference for  that and that it matched the values and you know direction of the home community were accountable to our home community in a different way than an independent organization they can kick me out they can not reelect me if they don't think i'm doing what i want and so to the kind of remove that away from the purview of the people takes it a step outside their direct control and the other part of it is i've not met anybody who's wanted to start a nonprofit in our home community that hasn't expected us to pay for it primarily and it's just right now with the people that are there that's just really not going to happen if you want to  community things like that you figure you know i've got one hundred thousand acres that i have to watch in our reservation the whole rest of the country is available for the nonprofit but work in a home role within our borders it's the only last piece we have left so where maybe a little bit more funky and a little bit more aggressive in our search than just the lack but it's what we have and we're going to run it to the best of our ability another side  of this conversation is nonprofits have built businesses within the organization so the fire one c three will own a business in operated and then that becomes  part of the identity of the organization are there any non profits in the room that own businesses means to own a business and is that an advantage absolutely and mostly i'm a huge believer self determination and i got to learn we are managed by an all side non into property management company they were great at every other property that they managed they sucked at little and i think they didn't tension but they lowered the expectation within our community they'd managed worse because we're just idi took us took me six years to convince hood minnesota housing my own board of directors that we need to do this i could do just as bad as this company i'll tell you it to me and i would have to pay them one hundred eighty thousand dollars to do it i could do just as bad with that's not our reservation you have to be american in it to live in our community to be had so we start this company we took from financial perspective our previous proper management company  deficit to a sixty thousand dollar surplus for two years running within our community we have put up surplus cash at the end the year we've had a less than one percent vacancy loss rate history standard is over five percent we have five hundred sixty families that