Matriarch Revolutionary Fund
About
The Matriarch Revolutionary Fund (MRF) is the first social impact integrated capital investment fund led and managed by and for Indigenous women across the United States. As part of The Future is Indigenous Women, an ecosystem initiative co-created by Native Women Lead, New Mexico Community Capital, and Roanhorse Consulting, LLC, the MRF will support and invest in the development and growth of established Native women entrepreneurs by providing access to patient capital that builds restorative, regenerative, and resilient communities.
Type of actor
Investor
Investment type
Integrated capital investment fund
Operates in
United States
Sectors
Established / Native-led businesses / Women-led businesses
Approach
MRF’s investees are rooted in Indigenous principles that honour and inherently foreground climate justice through their business design, buying, intent, operations, and impact whether directly or tangentially. They also foreground the Seventh Generation principle85 – the approach moves away from extractive forms of financing, and aims to eliminate subjective measures of creditworthiness. Geography- and sector-agnostic, the MRF will provide grant and debt capital to Native- and women-led ventures using tenets of character-based lending to address the systemic racism inherent in current underwriting criteria. The MRF will issue $50,000-$250,000 loans to Native women with a 3-5% interest rate. To do this, MRF is still in the process of fundraising from institutional partners. Currently, the MRF’s target size is $10m, with $1m in loan loss reserves. The MRF seeks a mix of grant and debt capital from funders to capitalise the fund. The MRF hopes to deploy the capital in 3-5 years (as of 2022).
An investee that demonstrates the intersectionality of a gender and climate justice impact investment the MRF fund can catalyse is Tina Archuleta, owner of Itality Plant Based Foods. Tina launched her business after attending Native Women Lead’s 2018 Inaugural Summit. Guided by her community’s needs and her own ancestral plant knowledge, she decided to launch a Pueblo vegan food business to offer plant based, and locally sourced food to her community and customers. Tina understands the challenges of living in a food desert and has been determined to increase food sovereignty while addressing nutritional deficiencies and disease caused by the modern food diet and an inefficient food supply chain system to rural and tribal communities.
Since 2017, Tina has been bootstrapping to refine her strategy and access larger dollar investments to build her dream, a brick and mortar restaurant that can be an intentional food hub for the region.
In 2020, Tina was only able to access microfinance through Native Women Lead’s Matriarch Response fund and accessed additional technical assistance, mentorship, and coaching through Native Women Lead, Native Community Capital, and New Mexico Community Capital. She pitched a few times without winning but got the attention of Food Funded, a collaborative of investors focused on supporting food based entrepreneurs. Here, she was able to get an initial investment to begin building her storefront which recently opened, 10 October 2022. Tina will need additional funding as her business grows to scale, eventually getting her products on shelves in stores and convenience stores across the region.
Tina’s impact is not yet known. However, through her business, she is able to increase visibility and awareness of accessibility to healthy foods, food deserts, and food sovereignty while underlining the need for innovative businesses that address climate change through food sourcing. As the primary breadwinner in her family, Tina’s business growth and success will allow her to hire locally, buy locally, and close her racial wealth gap while offering healthy food options to communities with high diabetes and heart disease rates that ultimately have less environmental impact. This impact is both direct and tangential; however, the need for larger investment and follow-on dollars is critical to ensure social entrepreneurs like Tina have the time, space, and capacity to dream, design, and do. Tina could benefit from an investment from the MRF that meets her where she’s at and works with her cashflow. To date, Tina has met and exceeded her monthly projections while trying to build capacity to meet future growth.
Impact
Currently, Native women are overlooked by traditional investments for many reasons, most of which are invisibility, exclusion, and assumptions that they are too risky for investment. Through this impact investment fund, the MRF will prove that there is another way to measure a borrower’s investability that does not rely on extractive practices, such as the 5 Cs of Credit. Instead, the MRF will apply a new underwriting framework co-created by Native Women Lead and Roanhorse Consulting – the 5 Rs of Rematriation: Relational, Rooted, Restorative, Regenerative, and Revolutionary.
“The process of having lived experience centred so that power, ownership and control sit in the hands of those most impacted are how we address the inherent racial and gender bias experienced when seeking to activate capital.”
The 5 Rs were created because mainstream underwriting is prohibitive and extractive for the majority of founders and in particular, for Native women founders to access and utilise without putting their businesses and families in jeopardy. The 5 Rs were created by Indigenous women for Indigenous women because relationships and understanding lived experience matter when assessing risk and return on investment.
Key takeaways
The MRF acknowledges that Native women are the backbones and stewards of our communities who create companies that are inherently designed to support themselves, their families, communities, and the lands around them. The structure of the MRF centres Indigenous women to be the decision-makers through its governance model that utilises the 5 R’s and ensures Indigenous women are leading and caretaking the process for decision making on who receives the support and what particular wraparound supports are needed to come alongside these women founders appropriately and thoughtfully. The process of having lived experience centred so that power, ownership and control sit in the hands of those most impacted are how we address the inherent racial and gender bias experienced when seeking to activate capital.
It is this very intentional governance design that also impacts the incredible challenges Indigenous people are facing as the climate crisis intensifies.
A United Nations report states that today, 80% of the Earth’s remaining biodiversity is on Indigenous peoples’ lands globally and, as we see the push to address climate change by meeting a 2050 NetZero goal, we have to recognise that while Indigenous people are the last line to ensuring biodiversity and accountability with clear solutions on how to mitigate the climate crisis, there is a direct relationship between climate change and gender based violence. The work by Sovereign Bodies Insitute properly articulates the issues we face today with extractive industries and man camps and the direct impact related to the epidemic of Missing and murdered Indigenous Women and Relatives.
Additionally, from the work of First Peoples Worldwide, there will be a need for the energy industry to move to renewable energy. This will require seeking the essential metals that are needed for this energy transition, however, MSCI found that among these key energy-transition metals, 97% of nickel, 89% of copper, 79% of lithium, and 68% of cobalt reserves and resources in the United States are located within 35 miles of Native American reservations. This means tribal lands in the United States will be again at the centre of defending and ensuring we create protective protocols to access those metals while protecting our communities, natural resources, and ultimately investing in ourselves to develop new enterprises that centre our inherent interdependence, stewardship, and relationship with the Earth for generations to come.
What’s next?
Honouring and protecting Indigenous women’s role as caretakers, stewards, innovators, and problem solvers opens the path for emerging social enterprises that will continue to support well being and economic justice for all people and planet.