Foggy California Northern Valley landscape at sunset. VOICES Beyond Land Acknowledgement: How CDFIs Can Support Land Justice Catherine Howard, President of Community Vision; Rebecca Tortes, Director of the California Tribal Fund; Camille Clinton, Senior Content Developer at Community Vision Community Vision’s Reparative Land Fee Program partners with Indigenous communities to redistribute power and address the wounds of colonialism and systemic racism. Read time: 8 minutes In 2021, the California-based CDFI Community Vision launched a Reparative Land Fee Program directs financial resources to Indigenous communities and offers a step towards healing the historical and ongoing theft of life, land, and culture.

30th
April

2024

Beyond Land Acknowledgement: How CDFIs Can Support Land Justice

Catherine Howard, President of Community Vision; Rebecca Tortes, Director of the California Tribal Fund; Camille Clinton, Senior Content Developer at Community Vision

April 30, 2024 –

Community Vision’s Reparative Land Fee Program partners with Indigenous communities to redistribute power and address the wounds of colonialism and systemic racism.

Read time: 8 minutes

In 2021, the California-based CDFI Community Vision launched a Reparative Land Fee Program in partnership with Sogorea Te’ Land Trust and the California Tribal Fund, a First Nations Development Institute project. This self-imposed fee on Community Vision’s real estate lending directs financial resources to Indigenous communities and offers a step towards healing the historical and ongoing theft of life, land, and culture.

This piece is part of OFN’s series about promoting equity, inclusivity, and accessibility in lending. Catherine Howard and Camille Clinton from Community Vision and Rebecca Tortes of California Tribal Fund explore the significance of intentionality and how CDFIs can help heal the wounds of colonialism and systemic racism by investing in justice.

Read more about the movement toward formalizing equity in lending in Operationalizing Racial, Inclusion, and Accessibility (REIA) into Lending Practices toolkit. This resource was developed under OFN’s Career Meets Purpose initiative, which aims to help CDFI practitioners and partners expand their knowledge and skills to achieve the most significant impact.  

Rooted in the U.S. civil rights movement, CDFIs were created to address the systemic and institutional economic exclusion of Black and Indigenous people and communities of color.

As mission-driven lenders, we need to reflect on those roots and hold ourselves accountable by asking critical questions: How are we meeting our core purpose to redress the ongoing impacts of racial and economic injustice? How are we being partners and allies in the communities we serve?

Over the last few years, several movements and pivotal events inspired Community Vision to take a deeper look at how we advance our mission and the role capital can play in healing systemic injustices, including in Indigenous communities and land justice.

Exploring Hard Questions

In 2016, Indigenous youth started the #NoDAPL movement at the Standing Rock Reservation in North Dakota to halt construction on the Dakota Access under the Missouri River. The movement brought awareness nationwide to the ongoing fight of Indigenous people to protect life’s essentials — water, land, and air.

Since then, recognition and support of Indigenous communities have become increasingly prominent in public consciousness and conversation. In recent years, Indigenous-led solidarity funding projects have been launched across the country to direct financial resources to Indigenous communities.

Some examples include the Shuumi Land Tax in the San Francisco East Bay, Honor Tax Project in the Humboldt Bay region, Kuuy Nahwá’a in Southern California, Real Rent Duwamish in Seattle, Manna-hatta Fund in New York City, and the Honor Native Land Tax in Albuquerque.

As a partner in social, racial, and economic justice, Community Vision works to advance community ownership of community assets. We support community-led nonprofits and small businesses in acquiring social-purpose real estate — spaces facilitating access to vital programs and services and serving as valuable financial assets for building economic empowerment.

In 2017, we deepened our examination of our work, acknowledging that our efforts to address systemic racism occur on unceded land. As we evaluated Community Vision’s role in racial healing and justice, we began exploring ways to partner with Indigenous communities to continue to fight colonialism and land theft.

Creating Our Reparative Land Fee Program

Community Vision began by acknowledging that we’re not the experts. We prioritized listening to and learning from Indigenous leaders as we worked to be intentional and transparent.

In 2017, we began working to understand Indigenous perspectives on humanity. In a training facilitated by Patricia St. Onge of Seven Generations Indigenous Business Consulting, we learned about the Medicine Wheel as a way to understand identity, relationships, and power.

This experience, among others, informed our reparative economy work, which is founded on the knowledge that the financial wealth amassed in this country was amassed through the theft and exploitation of land and people.

The California Tribal Fund launched in 2020. During its first year of operation, the organization hosted a short webinar for Tribes and tribal nonprofit organizations working to access and steward their tribal ancestral lands. Community Vision partnered with the Fund on this webinar, which sparked robust conversations about funding equity.

Committed to leveraging capital to create racial and economic equity pathways, Community Vision launched our Reparative Land Fee Program in 2021 in partnership with Sogorea Te’ Land Trust and the California Tribal Fund.

The program is funded by a self-imposed fee of 0.5% on all land transaction loans, with a yearly guarantee of at least $40,000. The revenue from our fee is disbursed every six months as grants to Indigenous-led organizations driving community-centered projects in the geographies Community Vision serves.

We consider the fee a core and ongoing business expense essential for amplifying our mission and acknowledging our part in continuing to commodify stolen land. Since October 2021, we have disbursed more than $143,000 in grants.

California Tribal Fund on Regaining Access to Stolen Land

According to the California Wilderness Coalition, more than half of California’s land is privately owned, while the rest is primarily under federal (46%) and state (2.5%) control. State and federally controlled land is divided among various agencies, such as the Bureau of Land Management. These agencies manage approximately 15% of the state’s total landmass.

For Tribes to regain free access to their lands, they must negotiate with numerous private landowners or engage with the federal government. In California and in states across the nation, Tribes often must navigate a complex web of systems and stakeholders to regain ownership and access.

Acquiring and maintaining land is a multifaceted process that demands specialized training, expertise, and knowledge. To navigate the intricate web of policies, procedures, and laws governing land management, tribal personnel must have access to ongoing training in current practices.

The fund’s partnership with Community Vision illustrates the importance of building and maintaining strong partnerships with non-Native stakeholders.

Funding from Community Vision enables California Tribal Fund to help Reparative Land Program grantees finance technical assistance, such as legal support for land acquisitions, development of cultural management plans, and capacity building for board and staff.

Cultivating Solidarity with Indigenous Communities

Community Vision and California Tribal Fund encourage other CDFIs to consider solidarity projects in partnership with Indigenous communities in their areas.

Many resources can help guide the work, including the “Resource Guide for Indigenous Solidarity Funding Projects: Honor Taxes & Real Rent Projects,” developed by the Indigenous Solidarity Network and representatives from Sogorea Te’ Land Trust, Real Rent Duwamish, and the Manna-hatta Fund. These organizations inspired Community Vision’s program, and the guide helped shape our core values:

Cultivate strong partnerships. Relationships are the basis of this work and need care, transparency, and accountability.
Go slow and be intentional.
Prioritize building trust and commit to long-term relationships.

The guide offers key questions to consider:

Who is Indigenous to where you live?
What Indigenous communities currently reside there?
Who has strong relationships and a good reputation within local Indigenous communities?
Who is well-placed to use the resources to benefit local Indigenous communities?
Who do you have strong relationships with?
Who is interested in partnering with you? (Not everybody will want to.)

Additionally, Community Vision asked the following of our work as we built the Reparative Land Fee Program:

Who is Indigenous to the land where Community Vision conducts business?
Who is cultivating and strengthening the voice and position of Indigenous women?
Who is leading the land conservation work in our footprint and can leverage financial resources for long-term stability and growth?

Our staff deliberately and considerately built relationships with Indigenous communities in the geographies we serve. We’ve made missteps, been rightfully called out on them, and changed our approach, which is part of the work of decolonizing wealth.

This work isn’t just about financial transactions; it’s about redistributing power and addressing the wounds of colonialism and systemic racism. A vital aspect of this program is fostering deeper relationships to forge pathways to racial and economic equity and inclusion.

Continuing the Conversation

As this work gains momentum in the financial and philanthropic sectors, it’s important to emphasize that Indigenous communities have been stewards of the land since time immemorial. Non-Native communities are supporters and partners in this vital work.

Working with the Indigenous communities on whose land we live and work involves more than acknowledging colonization. It requires action and investment — of time, talent, and capital.

Our collective commitments can and will make a difference. Will you join us?

Learn More

Download the Operationalizing Racial Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility into Lending Practices toolkit.

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