How Vanessa ROANHORSE IS WEAVING THREADS OF CONNECTEDNESS AND SUPPORT IN ALBUQUERQUE AND BEYOND
In 2015, Vanessa Roanhorse found herself in a position many ecosystem builders do at some point in their careers, with a wealth of experience in many careers but no opportunities to do the work she wanted to do. She calls herself a “reluctant entrepreneur” because she never set out to own a business much less have employees. In fact, the founding of her business was simply a way to separate personal finances from her business finances after landing a contract with the City of Albuquerque.
A similar thing happened when she co-founded Native Women Lead with seven other Indigenous women. A need arose to build a community of Native women and she stepped up to help build it. But we’ll get to that later.
Vanessa is the CEO of Roanhorse Consulting, an Indigenous-led organization that focuses on providing access to overlooked communities, specifically for Indigenous communities.
“We support government, philanthropy, nonprofits, and entrepreneurs to help them develop more thoughtful initiatives, programs, and businesses with the intention of making money move more meaningfully towards work happening - not necessarily on the frontlines - but towards work and initiatives that are actually letting community lead,” explains Vanessa.
The first contract that launched Roanhorse Consulting was working with the City of Albuquerque on their mass transit program. Roanhorse now has a staff of five with clients in New Mexico and also nationally. Her passion to work with Native communities and entrepreneurs has been a driving force for the ecosystem in Albuquerque and Indian Country.
As ecosystem builders, we all aim to support entrepreneurs in our ecosystems and to close equity gaps for entrepreneurs. While that work may look a little different across the country, what we know is that removing the barriers to entrepreneurship - whatever they may be - is one of the first steps. One way Roanhorse Consulting has done this in collaboration with the City of Albuquerque is through the Navigator Program.
“Our team here helped develop sort of the model, which we like to call the Backpack Model, based off the promotoral work that was created in Mexico for the health workers,” says Vanessa.
A promotora is a Hispanic/Latino community member who is trained to provide basic health education without being a professional health care worker. They are trusted members of the community who work on the frontlines to provide guidance in accessing community resources associated with health care. They work as liaisons to health organizations as advocates, educators, and mentors.
Access is a big, overarching barrier we see across communities. There are networks and resources that are just not accessible due to geography, culture, and language barriers. The Navigator works to break down these barriers to disseminate information and build strong relationships with marginalized community members (just like the promotoras did with health care).
“We have very experienced, diverse business consultants (called “Navigators”) whose job is to bring all the tools and resources out of the institutions to the community at a block by block effort. That’s why it’s called the backpack model because they throw all this into their backpack,” Roanhorse explains.
“The whole idea with the initiative was to have boots on the ground experts working with entrepreneurs and businesses and startups in a way that’s customized and puts the entrepreneur at the center. Albuquerque has a ton of robust resources for businesses, startups, and entrepreneurs. The challenge is many people don’t know where those resources are, and accessing them has been much more of an overwhelming experience. And so when you build this deep relationship with a Navigator, it’s no longer complicated because their job is to know what’s happening across the ecosystem and work with you.”
This initial program, which was created out of the very first project Vanessa had with the city, continues to grow. They are working to build an intersectional Navigator program to not only support businesses where they are, but figure out how to build and strengthen new relationships across all organizations within the city to give entrepreneurs the long term support they need.
The Ecosystem in Albuquerque
Vanessa describes Albuquerque as a “working city.” It’s the largest city in the state, and has been majority minority since the 2000s with a large Urban Native American population.
“There are a lot of cross sectional/intersectional communities living here. Because it’s a minority majority led place, we have incredible heart and soul around the equity piece - wage equity, paid leave, etc… We have some of the best organizing organizations in the country here [...] We may not look great on the stats nationally for specific things. What’s incredible about this place, is the folks who are here are here. The people who are investing in this place are investing a lot.”
Albuquerque has traditionally lacked investments from Fortune 500 companies and in terms of industry, they’ve relied on oil and gas with most of the job opportunities being in government and healthcare. But that has changed in the last few years. The State of New Mexico has become a film state, and in the last 6 months, Albuquerque has made multimillion dollar deals with NBC Universal and Netflix who are both moving a studio there. On top of that, Facebook has opened a data center and is expanding it in a sister city. The city is also home to a lot of labs - mostly in the high government tech space (like the Air Force).
While New Mexico and Albuquerque struggle with what sectors to push and invest in, Vanessa sees unique areas of growth for the ecosystem.
“I don’t think Albuquerque is going to be “the” tech hub. But what we will have is quality tech companies and tech initiatives happening, and more importantly initiatives specifically focused on folks who often aren’t seen in tech space like women and folks of color. That’s the place where Albuquerque can really be a leader. But also, small businesses are the heart and soul of this place. That’s why this Navigator program is so important. There will be a lot of other economic businesses coming like NBC, Netflix, Facebook but what are we doing to create or strengthen a wider safety net for our small business community? Because we have a very robust one.”
Vanessa sees the creative economy as a big sector with opportunity. There is a ton of creative talent across multiple cultures and types of creative work. Everything from jewelry created out of high tech space gear to Indigenous marketing and comics.
“As an indigenous woman, New Mexico and Alberquerque has one of the largest Native American urban populations in the country. We also have 23 federally recognized tribes across the state. We, here, feel like these are our ancestral lands. This is our home. We want to see New Mexico and Albuquerque be the place you want to come and start a company as an indigenous or native person because we have super connected national resources, we have representatives, cultural curriculum and tools for you that are being developed across the state. More importantly, we are working at multiple levels to get access to capital for Native entrepreneurs.”
Connecting and Building a Native Ecosystem
There’s another level to the work that Vanessa is doing that is both deeper and bigger than Albuquerque. Vanessa’s work to build and strengthen the ecosystem for Indigenous people led to another accidental but very important organization: Native Women Lead. Native Women Lead is a National organization focused on raising indigenous women into positions of CEO and leadership in business.
Back in 2017, Vanessa was asked to put together a panel for the Women’s World Economic Forum being held in Albuquerque that year. She brought together some incredible speakers to talk about the power of mentorship for Native Women in business. Unfortunately no one came to the panel.
“I was so embarrassed. I felt terrible bringing all these incredible women to this conversation and then not even being able to share their story. What started off as a feeling that no one cares what we have to say - that we are truly an invisible community. Instead what happened is we all shared stories. We started asking ourselves ‘Why are we waiting for other people to validate who we are? Why are we waiting for someone to do something for us, why don’t we just do it?’ That was the impetus for what started it. From there it snowballed.”
In a matter of months, they brought together 70 Native women from across the state, Arizona, and Colorado - who came on their own dimes to help co-create a summit for Native women in business. After that convening they fundraised, and in April 2018 held the first Native Women’s Business Summit, which was sold out with over 200 in attendance.
“In our culture, you don’t make an offering without following through. You don’t put something into the universe without saying, ‘I’m responsible for that.”
So they continued building and hosted the second summit, which was 50% larger with over 300 Indigenous women across North America including Canada, as well as sisters from South and Central America. Now, the organization is building a North and South American ecosystem for Indigenous women in entrepreneurship. They are looking at ways to provide more impact, more touch points, and mentorship opportunities. They are also developing a directory for Native Women in Businesses to find each other, to hire, employ, connect, contract, and mentor.
“We know from the physical experience of our events that that magic that happens when these women can find each other is incredible. Since both summits we’ve heard of incredible partnerships from women who met each other and are flourishing. Not only as good projects but some of the businesses have had to hire new people and expand their reach beyond the state.”
Funding for the women in their network is also a goal.
“Native American Women are 2/3rds the breadwinners in the country but only make $0.57 to the dollar. We are the primary people who are driving our local economy. In the last 20 years, Native American women have grown businesses 200% times faster than our white non-Hispanic counterparts. So women are starting businesses. They’re the ones making the financial decisions in their home. They’re not making enough money and yet still starting businesses. What do we have to do? We have to help them by providing culturally relevant technical support skills, help them build their social capital to access more resources, find a community they can put faith in to share in the hardship and challenges that indigenous women face, and finally, let’s get them some money.”
Why She is a Part of SCN
“Eric [Renz-Whitemore] is THE ecosystem builder. When I hear that term, I think of him. He has put his whole heart into this work. He invited me to attend the Denver Summit and got to see what this was about. Doing this work, I didn’t really know what ecosystem building was. I hadn’t thought about what it was like for other people. I’m just sort of a latecomer. For me, SCN was eye opening to see that there is a really big network of people who have been doing this intentional work for a long time. Who have built this organization because they - just as I realized with Native Women Lead - need to help each other do this emotionally, spiritually and professionally because this work is hard.”
As you can see, connectedness is a big part of the work that Vanessa does - and that we all do as ecosystem builders. Connect entrepreneurs to resources. Connect communities of people together. Connect ecosystem builders to other ecosystem builders… One thread can only hold so much tension but multiple threads woven together can be powerful.