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Integrating Financial Literacy, Family Asset Building, and Small Business Development

Lakota Funds on the Pine Ridge Reservation has received support from Citi Foundation to recruit, orient, assess, and provide guidance, training, technical assistance, and support for family asset building, individual development accounts, small business development, and lending to prospective and expanding entrepreneurs who are Oglala Sioux Tribal members living on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. Included in the choices provided to meet selected needs of individual clients will be financial literacy, credit maintenance and repair, home buying, and business planning (including dimensions of success, market planning, cash flow planning, operations planning, management and capitalization).

Our business success coaches currently have over 80 clients working on business plans. This project will enable us to include financial literacy, credit repair, and for up to twenty six of them, IDA enrollment. In addition, over the next six months, sixty or more people will complete a business planning course we produce with our local college. All of these people will be recruited to participate in financial literacy, family asset building, and credit building courses. In addition, the business planning graduates will be eligible to have a success coach assigned to them to follow up on and deepen the feasibility, desirability, and viability of their business. For those needing micro loans, artist loans, small business loans, or technical assistance and/or bridge loans to assist in the development of larger businesses, we will help them prepare applications (including loan documents and applications).

The twenty five thousand dollars received from Citi Foundation will supplement funding from the Bush and Kellogg Foundations for the Wawokiye Business Institute (WBI). This support allows Lakota Funds to provide free services to WBI clients.