Potlatch Fund: Tapping a Civic Impulse to Strengthen Native Communities

Potlatch Fund is a grant­making foundation and leadership development organization that serves Native communities in Washington, Oregon, Idaho and Montana. It supports diverse Pacific Northwest Native communities by providing grants up to $10,000 focused primarily on culture, art and language revitalization, and preserving traditions.

“To understand our work and impact, you have to understand the historical and cultural context in which we operate,” says executive director Dana Arviso. “Some of the challenges our communities are facing are due to a history of federal policies explicitly designed to relocate and tear our communities apart. The inequities are vast.”

“To understand our work and impact, you have to understand the historical and cultural context in which we operate.”

— Dana Arviso, Potlatch Fund

But, Aviso emphasizes, they are not intractable. Potlatch Fund—which takes its name from a Chinook Jargon word that describes a system of social sharing and cultural celebration—has made great strides in building support for the community-based organizations it funds.

A significant number of its grantees have, with Potlatch support, grown their budgets and revenue. “We’re seeing more organizations starting to apply to larger funding sources. It’s not that they don’t need our grants, but that they feel they can leverage [larger grants] and intentionally decide to leave our resources for other native organizations.”

Another marker of success in capacity building: In 2006, more than half of all grantees needed significant help from Potlatch just to complete their grant applications. In 2015, over 90 percent of applicants applied without help. This indicates a clearer understanding of the processes and requirements to successfully apply for grants from any funder.

In early 2016, Potlatch Fund finished a strategic planning process to bring new dollars into the communities it serves. They were spurred in part by data showing that for every dollar of philanthropic money only 3 to 5 cents goes to Native communities.

As a member organization of Native Americans in Philanthropy, Potlatch educates foundations on the historical and cultural context of grantmaking in Native communities. “We create relationships between mainstream philanthropy and our communities,” says Arviso. “We are working to get more foundations to join the circle of funders that have made a deep commitment to funding in our communities.”

Blending the Traditional and Contemporary

Potlatch draws attention to some of the critical issues in Native communities by getting back to tradition—and by blending these traditions with contemporary approaches and technologies.

In 2012, Potlatch launched a focus on preserving Native languages that are at risk of being lost along with the last generation of fluent elders. Many of these languages are oral and not written, and some communities are using their grants to create written dictionaries and pronunciation guides, often with the help of technology. Innovative approaches include training young people to use iPads to interview elders and create a recording and transcription of the language. Other grantees use apps to create digital storybooks celebrating the languages.

Since it launched in 2013, the Language Education & Preservation grant  has provided over $60,000 in support.

“It will take more than one generation, but we are becoming whole and vibrant communities again.”

— Dana Arviso, Potlatch Fund

A second major area of grantmaking is designed to restore Native art to its central place in community and culture. Here too, Potlatch supports a blending of innovative new technology with deep-rooted tradition. “Restrictions on some of the natural resources we’ve traditionally used in our art, such as cedar bark, have created problems. So we encourage artists to explore new machines, methods and materials. Our microgrants help purchase the supplies.”

Each year,  Potlatch supports and Inter-Tribal Canoe Journey that celebrates diverse traditions and educates younger generations. Potlatch works with larger foundations to bundle and re-grant to canoe-building and cultural projects selected by a committee that comprises community members.

“Our work in art and language preservation is rebuilding connections so that people of all ages—elders, middle age, Native youth—are connecting to each other and also back to traditional practices. It will take more than one generation, but we are becoming whole and vibrant communities again.” 

Community Foundations: Changing the Fundamentals of Engagement in Communities of Color

The Denver Foundation and the Community Foundation for Greater Buffalo have each been around for nearly a century. But with their Catalyzing Community Giving grants, both have begun shifting some of the fundamentals of how they operate in order to attract more diverse donors and elevate their profile within communities of color. “We realized that we would be losing out on an amazing amount of assets if we didn’t try a new approach,” says LaDawn Sullivan, the Denver Foundation’s Director of Community Leadership. “It’s about remaining relevant and living up to our identity of being a community foundation.”

“Ultimately, it is about building on existing relationships and encouraging leaders of color to see themselves as donors.”

— LaDawn Sullivan, Denver Foundation

“Engaging donors of color is on everybody’s radar,” adds Sullivan. “We are all trying things, and failing, and hopefully trying again. It really is an iterative learning experience. Ultimately, it is about us building on existing relationships and encouraging leaders of color to see themselves as donors.” Below are three things that both foundations are doing to expand their reach and influence in communities of color.

Organizing for impact. The Denver Foundation does $67 million of grantmaking a year, about $62 million of which is directed by donors through roughly 1,000 funds. But until recently, fewer than 100 of those funds were led by people of color. Rather than make modest tweaks to its donor engagement strategy to attract donors of color, the Foundation created cross-departmental teams—featuring a mix of donor services specialists and program staff—that better reflect the diversity of the donors they hope to engage. While the Community Foundation for Greater Buffalo had great success growing its Communities of Giving Legacy Initiative (CGLI) into a $500,000-plus identity fund, it wanted to raise its profile not just among donors of color but among other nonprofits in the region doing similar work. With its Kellogg grant, the foundation has begun identifying and building a more formal network of regional organizations of color that, collectively, might help bolster everyone’s impact.

Creating events that compel. Both foundations are also (re)introducing themselves to communities of color through new kinds of cultivation events. “We’re building agendas that are incredibly participatory rather than having ‘we talk at you’ kinds of events,” says the Denver Foundation’s Sullivan. For example, the Foundation recently brought together a multigenerational panel of donors of color to discuss how they talk about philanthropy with their partners. These new events—all part of the Foundation’s Elevating Philanthropy in Communities of Color (EPIC) initiative—have drawn more than 80 prospective donors who hadn’t heard of the foundation. “We never had that kind of audience or exposure before,” says Sullivan. Meanwhile, instead of blindly surveying nonprofits and foundations in the region to assess their interest in joining a network, the Community Foundation for Greater Buffalo created a unique community cultivation event, built around a local lecture by NBA Legend and philanthropist, Earvin “Magic” Johnson. “We had 107 respondents but only 100 tickets,” said CGLI director Landrum Beard. “That’s how we began reintroducing ourselves to the community and talking about our initiative.”

Building trusted relationships. Both foundations are also taking a more relationship-based approach to engaging diverse donors. “The strategy of writing a compelling letter and them sending a check doesn’t work in communities of color,” says Beard. Adds Sullivan: “Without a built-in relationship with someone of color that they trust, there can be an automatic distrust of financial institutions.” Working across departments and races has built relationships that weren’t there before, both inside the organization, and with donors and prospects. “Being authentically inclusive has yielded great results,” says Sullivan.