Vanessa Roanhorse — Inclusive Capital Collective

Meet Vanessa Roanhorse

Vanessa is an inclusive solutions-driven problem solver committed to liberating all peoples and delivering impactful mechanisms for social, environmental and economic change. She launched Roanhorse Consulting (RCLLC) in 2016, an Indigenous-led think tank. RCLLC co-designs wealth and power building efforts that directly invest in our leaders, support meaningful data collection informed by indigenous research approaches, and helps build thoughtful community-led projects that enforce values that put people at the center.

Vanessa got her management chops working for 7 years at a Chicago-based nonprofit, the Delta Institute, focused throughout the Great Lakes region to build a resilient environment and economy through creative, sustainable, market-driven solutions. Vanessa oversaw many of Delta’s on-the-ground energy efficiency, green infrastructure, community engagement programs, and workforce development training.Vanessa is a 2021 Paypal Maggie Lena Walker’s Emerging Leader Awardee and a 2020 Conscious Company Media’s World Changing Women in Sustainable Business Awardee. She is a 2021 Purpose Fund Building fellow and a 2020 Boston Impact Initiative Fund-Building fellow.

She is a founding member of the Zebras Unite Co-op, and an advisor to Angels of Impact Fund. She sits on the boards of Groundworks NM, Delta Institute, Zebras Unite and is an advisor to Decolonizing Wealth, Angels of Impact Fund,GenderSmart’s JEDI Working Group, and Social Venture Circle’s Restorative Investing Taskforce. She is one of 8 co-founders of Native Women Lead, an organization dedicated to growing Native women into positions of leadership and business. Vanessa is Diné (Navajo) citizen and resides on Tiwa Territory (Albuquerque, NM)

Detach yourself from the idea of perfectionism.

Your mantra moving forward should be,

‘Imperfect action.’ Just get something done every day.

Time will freeze if we want everything

to be perfect. Just get it out there,

get support, start moving. You'll feel

a lot better about yourself.

MISSION

To acquire hospitality industry businesses with strong community roots and incorporate them into an enterprise-scale platform that provides income security, quality jobs and ownership for women, BIPOC and undocumented workers.

01
VISION

To provide small businesses with resources and infrastructure that, in turn, empower and support hospitality workers by recognizing their inherent value and expertise.

02
SEEKING

Hospitality business owners and workers who want to revolutionize the industry.

03

Vanessa’s Story

Vanessa describes herself as an excellent learner but a terrible student, at least in the traditional sense. As a college student, she grew tired of the world of academia and decided she would rather learn from the world instead, so she set off to do just that. She held a variety of roles—including film editor, butcher, and real estate professional—in the years that followed, finally landing in the nonprofit sector in Chicago, almost 1,500 miles from her Arizona roots. After the birth of her only child, Vanessa moved to New Mexico to raise her son alongside her family and amidst the rich culture of her lineage. There was only one problem: no one would hire her because of her non-traditional education and work experience. So, she decided to create her own job, and in 2016, Roanhorse Consulting was founded.

Vanessa has since been able to lend her leadership expertise as a co-founder of several organizations and cooperatives, including Native Women Lead and Zebras Unite. She is Diné (Navajo) citizen and currently resides in Tiwa Territory (Albuquerque, NM).

We’re breaking away from the traditional path of

lending to borrowers without understanding

their lived experiences by going even

further and creating a new framework for

relationship-based lending that builds trust

between borrowers and lenders.

Q & A

We recently sat down with Vanessa Roanhorse to find out more about her passions, her calling, and generally dive in deeper to get to know her.

1

ICC has grown to over 250 practitioners and allies, all deploying a range of debt, equity, and real estate instruments to support BIPOC entrepreneurs and catalyze community wealth. How did you discover ICC and what drew you to become a partner?

I'm a founding member of Zebras Unite. I got to go to the first Dazzlecon in Portland in 2017, and from that point, I began working with all of the founders. Right before the pandemic and the murder of George Floyd, we’d started this conversation around needing to create a collective of folks to come together, to sort of dream about this thing called the Inclusive Capital Collective.

So, a variety of U.S. groups who had been part of the network came together for an event in Denver in 2020, and from that, the steering community came together to hash out, “Well, what does it mean to be inclusive? What is ‘inclusive capital?’ Why does it matter?” And that's how I came into this space.

The ICC was the continuation of what the Zebras have really fostered, which is curiosity, exploration, and willingness to acknowledge that people are the power, and we are the infrastructure and we know what we need. For me personally, the ICC is a community of people that I know I can dip into and say, “Hey community, I have this challenge.” Or, “I have this question,” or, “I just need someone.” I can just go to one of those events and it can do that for me. It’s a place where not only can I find my community, I can amplify it. I can pump it up. I can reach in and say, “Hey, I have an idea. Let’s do this.”

2

What are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced in your work over the last few years?

In the beginning, it was just the fear of financial insecurity. [My family and I] were sleeping on the floor at my sister's house, living on credit cards. The fear of not being able to provide for us was terrifying. Not new, because I had grown up with financial challenges, but still scary nonetheless. Fortunately, that quickly became a non-immediate problem.

More recently, the challenges come from growing an organization in a company that centers the things we center yet still ensures the quality of life for the people we work with and hire. We primarily hire indigenous folks, especially indigenous women, and we work in partnership with Native communities and Native organizations trying to solve complex problems. We also work with a ton of funders, investors, policy makers, government and political leaders. Oftentimes, the challenge is, when are we gatekeeping vs. protecting the people we’re serving? How do we know we’re creating systems and opportunities that center those most impacted?

We also face the challenge of getting people to realize that it takes more than just working with Roanhorse Consulting to get your “checkmark” and get access to these cultures. You have to do the work of getting to know these communities yourself. It took us time to figure out how to get people to realize that so that our staff can be protected and seen, and yet our partners on the ground who are doing the hardest, baddest work don't have to put up with that.

Another barrier to our work is the never-ending “Indian 101” that comes up. It gets to the point sometimes where you want to talk about what you’re doing, the innovations, the incredible things that are happening, but you can’t because you spend all your time just catching people up on the history of the United States and the history of where you’re from, because we don’t learn it. That’s a huge barrier to progress.

Finally, the newest barrier we’re facing today is that we’ve created a company, an ethos, and an organization that centers all of these important things, and now the challenge is growth and scale. We have to manage the fact that everything we do requires right relationship, trust, and the ability to see resources move. So now we’re in the next phase where we’re figuring out how to go out into the world and move the things we want to move with what we’ve built that gets us into rooms with people who want to go.

3

Developing alternative business models to the startup status quo has become a central moral challenge of our time. These alternatives want to balance profit and purpose and put a premium on sharing power and resources.

Why is getting investments in this alternative model crucial for those who seek it?

83% of all entrepreneurs are unable to access formal financing because there are so many barriers to going to a bank and getting access to a loan.The Five C's of underwriting themselves are prohibitory in nature, and this doesn’t even take into consideration racial and gender bias.

Community Development Financial Institutions (CDFIs) are supposed to be the ones who are bringing the gap for funding, but that hasn't come to fruition. So, we decided to really put our energy into character-based lending, the reason being that the process of underwriting an opportunity has to come from people who have your lived experience. It has to come from a place where we’re not asking people to give up their home, their car, anything that provides them financial security. And the last piece is the credit score itself, which isn’t designed to support the majority of people anyway.

We came up with our own alternative to the Five C’s of credit: the five R’s of Rematriation, which are Relational, Rooted, Restorative, Regenerative, and Revolutionary. Since we created this framework and began using it to underwrite investments, we have invested in over 65 women. Our default rate is less than 1%, and our women have paid back their loans almost three times faster than everybody else.

This really isn’t innovative, it’s just that we’ve returned to the concept that you actually have to know people’s lived experiences. You have to be willing to do extra work to figure out how to make [lending] work so it doesn't harm either party and you still get paid back.

4

How do we shift the narrative about the role of capital in BIPOC communities and reframe the perceptions of the risk involved?

First of all, I think the risk is just part of a general, colonial, patriarchal, capitalistic cultural norm that they've created that says we [BIPOC entrepreneurs] are risky people to invest in. You can see that from our history, when they ensured that after slavery ended that Black folks were immediately having to prove their ability to live where they wanted to live three times more. Or when Native people were put on tribal lands, they made sure in the treaties that we actually didn't own the land. We could only lease the land. So there are these deep institutional policies that set the cultural narrative and norm that we are not investable, that we are risky, we are not trustworthy, and that we need to triple-prove that we are actually going to be able to do what we say. That has nothing to do with us. It is exhausting for it to be on us to fix a problem that has nothing to do with us, to have to fight against regulations, laws, and policies that undermine my ability to thrive.

The shifting of that narrative is only going to happen if we see more folks like you and I as the check writers in these institutions. We need to be the CEOs, the trustees, and the board at these large institutions who are writing these checks and approving these things. At what point do we stop validating ourselves to be part of these institutions, and instead let us build our own and you come and support those institutions? Stop getting in the way. Let me build something for us, and if you're really about equity, diversity, and inclusion—if you’re really about breaking down systematic racism—then let us build our own institution that is not built on that same systematic racism.

5

What are the top three pieces of advice you would give to BIPOC entrepreneurs, who are dedicated to both purpose and profit, as they are starting or scaling their business?

Make sure you love what you do, that you enjoy it, believe in it, and that it matters.
Find your networks. Don't ask to be invited, just get in there. Take care of yourself. Build those relationships, because they will come back. Be as authentic and true to yourself in those conversations because that's going to matter over time.
Ultimately, make sure you build your safety net circle of other leaders, CEOs, and folks you have great esteem for. Cultivate [those relationships] and talk to them. Ask them every question you want. Be there for them, cry on each other's shoulders, because that's going to be where you go to refill your cup.

6

What is the call to action for investors who seek to promote social justice through investment solutions?

The biggest call to action, for me, is trust. Don’t ask the people you’re trying to invest in to prove they’re investable. Stop over-researching and having them prove they know what they’re talking about. Take the opportunity to change the relationship to one that I consider a right relationship. Ask, “How do we partner to get where we’re going together?” Not, “Tell me why your investment is worthy.” You wouldn’t be in the room asking them that question if they hadn’t already proven themselves. So, trust is a big one.

Additionally, folks need multi-year investments. They don't just need a one-and-done. Investments should be thoughtful and should support where they're growing. And they should come along with other types of support services, because it's not just money. You're also potentially offering networks, technical expertise…As an impact investor, you probably have tons of good lawyers, tons of great accounting and finance firms. You probably have some of the best like marketing and HR management firms at your fingertips. We need those, too.

Finally, I encourage them to take a look at the Just Transition Investment Toolkit that we got to work on with Justice Funders. It lays out the kind of relationship you want to have and the kind of capital you should be moving. There’s a ton of great resources to help you get started.