Jessica Stago knows that in Native American communities, everyone is a creator, but few consider themselves as entrepreneurs.
And to grow a business, sometimes a keen supporter is all it takes.
Take the example of a potter based in the central part of the Navajo Nation. Most mornings, he drives 100 miles to get clay from a riverbed. He then goes to Flagstaff to harvest sap from local trees before driving another 50 miles to get cinders. He then uses these natural source materials to create pottery that he sends to gift shops near the Grand Canyon.
Jessica and her organization, Change Labs, helped the potter see all this day-to-day work through the lens of a business. They encouraged him to keep receipts of his travels for taxes and to save money that he could reinvest. They helped him see his passion as a business.
It was all in a day’s work for Change Labs, an award-winning organization on the Navajo and Hopi Nations dedicated to growing the next generation of Native American entrepreneurs.
Jessica’s vision is to build a locally-owned ecosystem on the Navajo and Hopi reservations.
“Yes, we have the best flea markets, but I'd love to see restaurants on the reservation owned by our own people; tourists staying in hotels operated by our people; Native entrepreneurs able to get investments for brick and mortar locations,” she says. “We want to create economies we can build upon, not just boom and bust.”
Driving Capital to Native Founders
Jessica was born in the border town of Winslow, Arizona, right near the 25,000-square-mile Navajo Nation, the largest Indian reservation in the country. Her father was a White Mountain Apache and she spent her childhood traveling between the Navajo and Apache reservations.
The unemployment rate on the reservation is a staggering fifty percent. People survive by doing anything to make a living. Jessica remembers growing up seeing her mom and aunt leave for a traditional job while everyone else worked from home as jewelry makers and silversmiths. When it was time to go to college, Jessica says her aunt told her “you need to figure out what a business is.” She majored in Economics at Arizona State University before earning her MBA.
After school, Jessica worked for the National Center for American Indian Enterprise Development, where she helped Native-owned businesses land contracts from federal government programs. Around the same time, she also started a medical supply company with her mother and began interacting with government lenders from the Small Business Administration. These experiences helped Jessica realize the challenges of doing business on the reservation. She saw that Native founders had great ideas, but “they could never get the capital or land they needed.”
Jessica set out to address the problem. In 2014, she co-founded the Native American Business Incubator Network (NABIN) to help entrepreneurs navigate bureaucratic red tape and grow their businesses. And it worked. NABIN provided business counseling for 42 existing and aspiring businesses, ranging from bed-and-breakfast operators to fashion designers.
After several years, she met Heather Fleming. Heather is originally from Teec Nos Pos, NM and had founded a nonprofit firm supporting Indigenous entrepreneurs outside of the United States. They had the idea to build NABIN’s mission and create a formal accelerator with workshops about finding a market, building websites, and technical assistance. They also rebranded the organization. The newly-named Change Labs is a fully autonomous, Native-led nonprofit positioned to ramp up its services across tribal lands.
Crossing the River
Change Labs lends money to entrepreneurs who wouldn’t have the opportunity otherwise. They provide Native business owners with training from credit applications and taxes to social media marketing. It also seeks to change the way entrepreneurs see themselves and give them the confidence to grow their identity as a business owner.
Change Labs offers a variety of services for Native founders from 90-minute business coaching sessions to webinars highlighting speakers and information relevant for businesses operating on tribal lands. They also partner with locally owned creative and advertising agencies to help Native founders reach more customers.
“I let entrepreneurs talk and give them feedback and ask them questions,” she says. “They have this desire to make something happen. They just don’t know how to cross the river. We place the rocks in the river, and it’s up to them to jump to the next rock.”
Jessica is particularly excited about Change Labs’ Kinship Lending program. The challenge facing Native founders is not just about business acumen; it’s also about access to capital. People living on reservations face structural barriers to getting a loan. There is no land ownership on the Navajo Nation, so many people didn’t have the physical collateral that a bank requires. Something that would take most business owners a few minutes might take those in her community weeks.
That’s where Kinship Lending comes in. Kinship Lending is inspired by communal lending practices, offering “relationship-based” loans of up to $5,000 that require no credit check, no fee, and no cost to apply. Native founders don’t have to begin repaying the loan until four months after they receive the funds. In just the first year, Change Labs has lent more than $190,000 to 39 Native founders, helping businesses either stay afloat during the pandemic or launch an online presence to scale their reach.
To run Kinship Lending, Jessica hired Kristine Laugher, a former Wells Fargo branch manager on the Navajo Nation. Heather actually saw how Native entrepreneurs did not have access to lending. From behind her desk, she saw the realities of running a business as a Native American entrepreneur.
Jessica sees opportunity everywhere she looks in the Native community. She points out that just a few months ago, one of the biggest power plants shut down, and now “you have this big hole in the local economy.” Entrepreneurs have an opportunity to fill that gap.
“I'd love to see the response to that center Native entrepreneurship working to develop Native economies that are going to be multi-generational and sustainable.”