Seventh Generation Fund for Indigenous Peoples (SGF) is a Native-led, Eureka, California-based regrantor dedicated to Indigenous peoples’ self-determination and the sovereignty of Native nations.
Since its establishment in 1977, it has received funding from Margaret A. Cargill Philanthropies and the MacArthur, Ford, Packard and NoVo foundations to support women-led community projects, strengthen Indigenous cultural identity and fund groups on the front lines of the climate crisis. SGF also played a pivotal role in providing COVID-19 response across Indian Country, and its 48-year trajectory suggests that while philanthropy writ large has underinvested in Native-led causes and organizations, the tide may be turning.
“There have been times when we’ve been very lean and times when we had more funds,” said board Vice President and Treasurer Deborah Sanchez (who has Chumash, O’odham and Raramuri ancestry). However, thanks to increased support from its funders in recent years, SGF has dramatically boosted its annual grantmaking from pre-pandemic levels. SGF’s success is all the more striking because, as Sanchez noted, “we don’t accept any state or federal government funding and we’ve always been like that.”
I caught up with Sanchez and SGF Board Chair Helene Gaddie (Oglala Lakota) to discuss SGF’s mission, key takeaways from its recent report, titled “Self-Determined Philanthropy: A Four-Year Reflection,” and their efforts to educate philanthropy about how its work benefits Indigenous communities and the wider world. Throughout the call, the pair returned to SGF’s mission, which is reflected in its name, to execute a long-term vision to support Native communities and organizations.
“One of the biggest questions we ask ourselves whenever we’re making decisions is, ‘How are we going to answer to our ancestors?’ Gaddie said. “‘What are we going to say when we get there? How did we help?’”
An overview of Seventh Generation Fund for Indigenous Peoples’ 2020-2024 grantmaking
According to SGF’s report, from 2020 to 2024, it provided over $19 million in direct support across 465 nations and peoples.
It disbursed $6.2 million in fiscal year 2023-2024, during which it awarded 175 grants across three program areas —Thriving Women, which supports Indigenous-women-led, community-based projects; Community Vitality, aimed at enhancing Indigenous cultural identity through creative expression; and Land, Water and Climate, which seeks to to protect “Mother Earth through stewardship and traditional knowledge while advancing Indigenous peoples’ right to free, prior and informed consent.”
Through its affiliate program, SGF serves as a fiscal sponsor to Native community-based organizations that are usually less than five years old or lack the capacity to run as an independent nonprofit, providing them with technical training, program oversight and other services.
Gaddie cofounded Generations Indigenous Ways, an organization that enhances the Lakota culture through Indigenous science, and became an SGF affiliate. Similarly, Sanchez was previously the co-chair of another SGF affiliate organization, the Barbareno Chumash Council.
SGF also sponsors events on topics like conflict resolution, financial management and sustainable agricultural practices. Its core offering is Keeping the Homefires Burning, ”an international gathering of Indigenous culture bearers, artists, organizers, activists and community leaders in renewing and strengthening our purpose, healing, responsibilities, and love for our communities, peoples, and lands.”
Gaddie and Sanchez have attended previous gatherings. “It was the first time I was surrounded by people where I didn’t feel ‘too radical’ or ‘too Lakota,’” Gaddie said. “It was the most inspiring feeling.” The May 2023 gathering brought together over 325 participants from 12 countries, “with our youngest only six months of age and the eldest 98 years old,” according to SGF’s report. The next convening will take place this September on the Akimel O’odham Homelands (also known as Pima), located in Arizona.
SGF has provided key support for the Anpetu Wi Wind Project
“Self-Determined Philanthropy: A Four-Year Reflection” provides a deep dive into SGF’s work across multiple areas from 2020 to 2024.
For instance, it explores how, in March 2020, SGF responded to the pandemic by launching the Flicker Fund, providing emergency support to crisis-impacted Indigenous communities. The funding, which included $260,000 to 25 communities in the fund’s first three months, was all the more critical because the Trump administration had delayed the delivery of $8 billion in aid to tribal governments and communities that were among the hardest hit by the pandemic. All told, the fund disbursed 452 grants totalling over $2 million from fiscal years 2020 to 2023.
“We lost a lot of family members in the pandemic,” Gaddie said. “But we also learned how to depend on our own Indigenous cultural teachings and how to reconnect with our ally tribes.”
The report documents SGF’s history of providing capacity-building grants, recoverable grants and administrative support to SAGE Development Authority, a federally chartered Section 17 corporation created by the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe as a public power authority. SGF has provided funding for what SAGE calls its “top priority” — the Anpetu Wi Wind Farm, a 100% Native-led, renewable energy commercial project in Standing Rock Indian Reservation in North Dakota, honoring Native land stewardship and community wealth-building.
The project has raised over $498,000, exceeding its initial goal of $400,000, to complete predevelopment studies, operationalize the SAGE Development Authority management organization and prepare for full project development. The project is now shifting to the phase two goal of $1,000,000, which, according to its planners, “will be instrumental in bringing the Anpetu Wi Wind Farm to life.” Other funders include the Bush, Northwest Area and Kataly foundations, and NDN Collective.
Sanchez participated in the project’s initial planning meeting and told me it embodies the kind of work that aligns with SGF’s expansive purview. “We talk about everything from traditional farming to home birthing to rekindling language to the climate crisis,” she said. “No solution is perfect, but this [the project] seemed like a good way to bring energy into the reservation, and possibly provide an opportunity to store and sell energy.”
The project comes as experts are increasingly turning to Indigenous solutions to the climate crisis. Last year, the United Nations Development Programme noted that “many Indigenous traditional practices offer effective climate solutions, such as sustainable agriculture systems and climate-resilient water management,” and that achieving goals of the Paris Agreement was impossible “without full and effective participation of Indigenous peoples and their free, prior and informed consent.”
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Navigating clashes in “worldview” with the philanthropic mainstream
My discussion with Gaddie and Sanchez turned to philanthropy’s long-standing underinvestment in Native causes and communities. Reasons for this disparity range from a lack of Native voices on foundation boards to the fact that major funders are located in wealthy coastal enclaves far removed from Indian Country.
Sanchez, who was a Los Angeles Superior Court judge for 18 years and taught an American Indian Studies course at California State University, Long Beach, said that one of her biggest challenges in her role at SGF was “worldview,” the idea being that “what is important to us may not be important to the mainstream.”
To illustrate this point, she noted that SGF funds efforts to restore Indigenous languages. “Someone may say, ‘What’s the utility if only 300 people are speaking the language?” said Sanchez, who recently went back to school to study linguistics. However, studies show a strong correlation between the use of Indigenous languages and positive health outcomes in those speakers. “So the utility is that we’re now talking about health.”
It also goes without saying that just like Indigenous groups’ broader work to address the climate crisis, SGF’s other grantmaking priorities, which include traditional farming and midwifery, benefit communities beyond Indian country. “The biggest challenge,” Sanchez said, “is to convince philanthropy that it’s worth the investment.”
Fortunately, SGF stakeholders have been increasingly successful in making the case to funders. “As I mentioned, we had some very lean years,” Sanchez said. “But in recent years, and especially in these last few years, I feel that philanthropy has really stepped up, and because of that, we’ve been able to make bigger grants.” “Self-Determined Philanthropy: A Four-Year Reflection” corroborates this takeaway, showing that SGF’s annual grantmaking increased 94% from $3.2 million in fiscal year 2020-2021 to $6.2 million in fiscal year 2023-2024.
Gaddie shares Sanchez’s optimism that philanthropy will be increasingly responsive to SGF’s transformative work and appreciative of how the Indigenous worldview can address urgent challenges.
“In Lakota Country, we carry our people with us,” she said. “It’s not just the nuclear family or the people in your extended family, and the name says it — Seventh Generation Fund for Indigenous Peoples. We’re always finding solutions for the next seven generations and being proactive, because if we have to react to something like climate change or anything that comes with colonization, because it all does, we have to be prepared.”
