Sustainable Native Communities DesignLab

Joseph, a citizen of the Northern Cheyenne Nation, is the Director of the Sustainable Native Communities Design Lab based in Santa Fe, New Mexico operating within MASS Design Group. As a community designer and educator, his work explores how architecture, planning, and construction can be leveraged to positively impact the built and unbuilt environments within Indian Country. Joseph’s early work focused on the research of exemplary Native American Indian housing projects and processes nationwide. This research work has developed into emerging best practices within Indian Country, leading to an online Healthy Homes Road Map for affordable tribal housing development, funded by HUD’s Policy, Development, and Research Office. In 2019 Joseph was awarded an Obama Foundation Fellowship for his work exploring how to create transformational change through design processes that align with indigenous values and honors the worldviews of indigenous populations within North America.

Indian Country is in a housing crisis, which under the current Federal funding model will take 120 years to address. The Sustainable Native Communities Design Lab was formed to meet this need, introducing a new model for housing creation that promotes tribal sovereignty, celebrates community identity, and addresses the needs of Native American populations. By accompanying tribal leaders, housing organizations, and community members throughout the development, design, and construction process, we are creating a new model for housing creation in Indian Country that is not only dignifying and context-specific but also a wealth-building engine for communities.

Centuries of land dispossession, cultural genocide, and violence toward Native populations have produced a striking wealth gap: one in three Native American people lives below the poverty line, compared to 11.8% of the American population overall. While home-ownership has provided an engine of wealth creation and upward mobility for millions of Americans, Native American communities were largely denied this opportunity by discriminatory policy and forced migration. Indian Country is in a housing crisis, facing a deficit of 200,000 housing units per year. The challenge of housing in Indian Country is not solely financial, but sociopolitical. The meager funds that are designated through federal avenues are often deployed in misguided, one-size-fits-all development efforts: standardized government designs that are agnostic to culture, climate, or context; complex finance models that take years to assemble; or bureaucratic procedures that rely on outside, non-resident expertise. The result is a cycle of inequity, in which poor living conditions are exacerbated by housing that neglects and thereby degrades the history, culture, and ambitions of its residents.

We need a new system that positions housing, and the process of design and building, at the center of cultural preservation, wealth-building, and tribal sovereignty. The mission of the Sustainable Native Communities Design Lab is to close the wealth gap in Indian Country through culturally-responsive housing development and Native homeownership. SNC Design Lab creates opportunities for philanthropic investment in the housing value chain through a process of accompaniment with strategic partners: tribal community development corporations, housing authorities, and other critical Native and non-Native stakeholders. We work with these partners from the early visioning stages through construction, directing philanthropic dollars toward the creation of pre-design and development packages that can be leveraged to unlock additional capital. Through this work, we assist designers, developers, and the philanthropic community to bridge gaps between community ambitions and capital investment. This upstream model seeks to redistribute power back into the hands of Native communities and together create a new model for housing creation in Indian Country that will not only be dignifying, contextual, and culturally-specific, but also a wealth-building engine for communities.

There are over six million tribal members in the United States, belonging to 574 federally recognized tribes and hundreds of non-recognized tribes. Today, over 32% of people in tribal areas live below the poverty line, which is almost double the US average. In a HUD survey conducted from 2013-2015, it was found that between 42,000 and 85,000 Native Americans were living in overcrowded conditions with friends or relatives because they did not have a place of their own. Through collaboration with Native and non-Native partners we anticipate positive impacts for tribal members nationwide, and more immediately in communities including: Crow Creek Sioux Nation, Northern Cheyenne Nation, Akwesasne Mohawk Nation, Spokane Tribe, Isle de Jean Charles Band of Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw, Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, and several of the Inland Salish Nations. In every project and partnership, we prioritize proximate accompaniment and community-driven design solutions. We leverage public workshops, an extended predesign phase, and participatory design processes to ensure that the ultimate project mission addresses community needs.

Historically, Native Americans have been stripped of their agency and voice in the design of their communities. To rectify this, we must deliberately redistribute power and restructure points of access to promote self-determination. Because of its direct adjacency to power, the architecture profession—the training, design, construction, and market values that create our built environment—can serve as a critical intervention point in the path toward Indigenous sovereignty. The Sustainable Native Communities Design Lab centers Native voices, insights, and building practices in the creation of just and equitable living environments across Indian Country.  

Growing up between New Jersey and Montana I’ve seen and experienced how Natives and non-Natives live. This experience of seeing those who have access to western forms of capital and those that don’t seeded this idea. Through college and graduate school, I started to form ideas of what it meant to build culturally relevant housing, and how to design in ways that respect and lift up people. But it wasn’t until I started to practice in Indian Country that I understood how housing is financed, and learned of the systemic issues and generational damage that had been done to our Native populations. The framework and concepts laid out in this project idea address these issues and aim to solve, and more importantly start to heal the wrongs done over the past 500 years. The Sustainable Native Communities Design Lab is a small team of natives and non-natives, those who are designers, and planners to those focused on financing and development. It’s a team that is ready to take on such a challenge.

I am a citizen of the Northern Cheyenne Nation, a member of the community, and have seen that the issues that plague my community are issues we see all over Indian Country. As a young kid visiting my grandfather, uncles, and aunties, I could see the critical need for housing. While I didn’t understand at the time all the nuances and roots of the housing issue, I understood that the Northern Cheyenne people needed housing, and that it needed to be well designed and constructed. This motivated me to pursue an undergraduate degree in engineering and a graduate degree in architecture, thinking that it was a technical problem that could be solved through innovation. As I started working in the field directly, I started to learn there were complexities for which engineering and architecture were only a piece of the solution. Hence where I find myself today, designing methods to solve the housing crisis in Indian Country through the lens of justice, wealth, and genocide.

I’m positioned to deliver and lead this project because I’m me. I’m a citizen of the Northern Cheyenne Nation. I’m native. I’m Indigenous. I’m trained as an architect. I’ve been practicing and working in tribal housing for the past 10 years, working and researching ways to provide our Indigenous populations with exemplary, culturally relevant housing opportunities that respect community, culture, and place. I’ve worked directly in tribal housing development, where I managed a small team that planned, designed, and constructed a 41-unit affordable housing development, along with a 3,000 SQFT community center. Through this process, I learned how to leverage various sources of federal, private, and philanthropic capital, and continue to explore opportunities to share this knowledge with individuals and organizations who seek to create change in Indigenous communities.

Working in Indian Country you face challenges every day and it is very likely that overcoming obstacles will become part of your resume, as it is mine. Throughout the four years of development for the 41-unit affordable housing project I worked on, I faced a range of challenges and setbacks, some of which were from working directly with a tribal government which wasn’t my own. I spent many long days in tribal council, working to ensure tribal leaders that the work we were doing was in the best interest of the tribal leadership and the community. I worked day and night with our general contractor to educate the tribal housing board and housing staff. Despite all these efforts, towards the end of the project, I was forced to leave the housing authority and continue working as a consultant. As this project neared completion I realized that solely focusing on the end product, i.e. building homes, was not the only issue at hand. I was tasked with building relationships, and this is where I failed. Since then, in every project I engage in I focus on developing deep and sustained relationships with community members and all project stakeholders.

Over the past ten plus years I have been working in my community on Northern Cheyenne lands, with  our youth to develop the next generation of leaders. This is some of the most important work I believe I’ve done. Now is the time to be looking forward to the next generation of leaders, focusing on hard areas that plague Indian Country, including conversations that lift up education, programming that focuses on drug and alcohol abuse, and the creation of safe spaces around suicide prevention, understanding that suicide is an epidemic within our Native American youth populations. This youth development comes to fruition through the Northern Cheyenne Basketball Clinic (NCBC). The NCBC is a week-long youth development program that combines basketball fundamentals with physical fitness education, higher education, healthy nutrition mentoring, and youth leadership activities. The clinic brings the community together at times when there are few youth programs, to over 100 tribal youth each year.  Outside of the clinic, I’m working to support the development of Native American designers, architects, and planners, knowing that changing narratives within the design profession requires more representation from our Indigenous communities from across what is now known as the United States.

The Sustainable Native Communities (SNC) Design Lab utilizes accompaniment, community engagement, and interdisciplinary advocacy to transform the built environment within Indian Country. Our approach contrasts existing trends of affordable housing development that prioritize scale and prefabricated units over sustainable, culturally-responsive building practices. We believe that a transformed model of tribal housing development is possible, and urgently necessary. SNC Design Lab leverages design partnerships and philanthropic investment to catalyze mission-driven capital projects that respond to the unique contexts and histories of Native communities. Getting proximate is necessary to understand constraints and opportunities, uncover questions we didn’t know need to ask, build relationships, and develop a shared vision for how design can achieve a project’s unique mission. “Accompaniment” is an expanded concept of engagement: immersing our team in a community, collaboratively working through each stage of a project’s development with our partner organization’s key staff, and meaningfully engaging a broader group of stakeholders into the process. This long-term presence builds trust, organizational capacity, and the technical Native/non-Native partnerships that communities rely on. The Énóvo Fund, a financing entity of the SNC Design Lab, will leverage private philanthropy to amplify the work of Native-led organizations and deepen funding relationships across Indian Country.

Our theory of change rests on the understanding that the built environment is an essential asset in Native Communities and has historically been overlooked. We believe that Native communities hold the knowledge and answers needed to cultivate thriving livelihoods. When tribes are put in charge of how capital is spent and invested within their communities, the results are new economic opportunities, respect for Indigenous traditions and lifeways, and sustainable solutions that prioritize human and planetary health. At its core, the Sustainable Native Communities Design Lab aims to elevate these insights and strengthen the capacity of Native communities in stewarding sovereign futures. This begins with an equitable access to wealth building and home ownership. Our work focuses on accompaniment throughout this process, to both partner with tribal community development corporations early in the pre-design and engagement phases, and unlock private capital to bridge gaps within federal funding models. The outputs will be new, culturally-responsive housing units and resilient community infrastructure where it’s needed most. Our theory of change calls for new partnerships between Native and non-Native entities—funders, designers, community organizations, local municipalities, and more—to support a wide network of investment. And in addition to forging new project partnerships, we will also prioritize training and employing the next generation of Native design leaders to advance built solutions at a global scale.

To date, we have worked directly with over 25 Tribal communities. Our research and design resources have reached a wide audience through online circulation and free downloading, serving both Native and non-Native designers, developers, planners, and contractors. In one year, we plan to expand our partnership network to include direct work with 50 Community Development Corporations (CDCs) and Tribally Designated Housing Entities (TDHEs) that serve populations ranging from 500 - 50,000 people each. In five years, our goal is to have a direct impact on all 329 Native American reservations, both directly through the provision of new housing and community infrastructure, and indirectly through capacity building grants through the Énóvo Fund.

Within the next year, we will advance partnerships in housing and COVID-19 recovery with the Navajo Nation, Spokane Tribe, Standing Rock Sioux Nation, Crow Creek Sioux Nation, Northern Cheyenne Nation, Akwesasne Mohawk Nation, Santa Clara Pueblo, and several of the Inland Salish Nations. In light of new challenges presented by the coronavirus, we are compiling and publishing a series of context-specific design guidelines and resources to facilitate rapid response and renovations for infection control across Indian Country. This year we will also launch the Énóvo Fund, which will direct philanthropic resources toward Native-led organizations. 

Over the next five years, our goal is to build housing in eight communities that represent each distinct bioregion in the U.S., teach three design studios on collaborative design, grow a team of Native and non-Native architects who are trained in mission-driven designing processes, and open an exhibition that showcases best-practices in Native-led design and construction. We will compile research and lessons from the field into a publication that can be used as a toolkit resource for emerging designers, community leaders, and policymakers alike. With momentum in each deliverable scope, the SNC Design Lab will move towards a revenue-generating portfolio of work sustained by project fees and unlocked capital. At the macro level, our goal is to influence the design and construction industries to value participatory design, in turn opening up avenues and opportunities for others to pursue related work. 

Indian Country has never had access to conventional ways of developing wealth. Homeownership and the ability to purchase real estate through debt financing, a western form of wealth building, has never been an opportunity for Native Americans. For centuries the planning, development, design and construction of housing on tribal Reservation lands has been controlled by the U.S. government. Then in 1996 the Native American Housing Assistance and Self-Determination Act (NAHASDA) reorganized federal funding into annual block grants and loan guarantees. A decade and a half later, a second act - “Helping Expedite and Advance Responsible Tribal Home Ownership” (HEARTH) - was passed, enabling tribes to lead the change of land title status themselves rather than seek federal approval. While NAHASDA and HEARTH have been important steps towards Tribal Self-Determination and empowerment, many Native-led organizations tasked with housing development have been unable to effectively maintain existing housing stock while simultaneously creating new housing units. Facing insufficient federal budgets, housing organizations would typically turn to philanthropy and private capital to fulfill unmet community needs. However, currently only 0.3% of U.S. philanthropic dollars are directed to Native-led organizations. These inequities in public and private sectors present challenges in accessing capital in tribal housing development, and stymie market opportunity. Our projects and partnerships create new revenue streams and advocate for wider shifts in the culture and processes of wealth generation within Indigenous communities.

We are creating new financial and development mechanisms to advance solutions locally, and investing in advocacy initiatives that inspire empathy and action around Indigenous sovereignty. The Énóvo Fund - inspired by a Cheyenne term meaning “you are home” - is the engine behind our effort, deploying catalytic resources to the organizations that need them the most. The Énóvo Fund will invest philanthropic resources in Native-led organizations in three ways: as Catalyst Grants to provide access to essential design services; as Bridge Capital Grants in order to maintain momentum once a project is started; and as patient “Flywheel Equity” investments to jumpstart new housing development projects for CDCs with successful teams and track records. Framed as an urgent call to action for philanthropists and foundations to right centuries of wrongdoings, the Énóvo Fund will spark cultural and economic shifts in how capital is accessed and used throughout Indian Country.

• Spokane Tribe: We have partnered with the Spokane Tribe in a comprehensive planning process focused on connecting a tribal housing campus to nearby community facilities while amplifying climatic and cultural resilience within a fire-prone community. 

• Isle de Jean Charles Band of Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw: Over the past several years, we’ve been working with the Band of Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw to preserve the ecological identity and sovereignty of their ancestral land following forced resettlement due to climate change. Together with tribal leaders, we have developed plans for a Living Resource Center that will house a seek back and seed-cutting library. 

• Standing Rock Sioux Tribe: Currently in development, the Mní Wičhóni Community Health Clinic will be a 14,000 square-foot health clinic on the Standing Rock Reservation and a model for healthcare delivery in Indian Country. The clinic seeks to decolonize medicine through an approach to healthcare delivery that incorporates Native American healing traditions to reduce health disparities and increase sovereignty among Native American populations.

• Northwest Tribal Leaders Design Institute: We developed a three day Tribal Design Leadership Institute to support tribal leaders in the City of Spokane, Washington. The goal of the Institute was to provide design and technical assistance for early-stage housing and sustainable community development projects.

The Sustainable Native Communities Design Lab offers architectural services, predevelopment, planning,  technical assistance, and construction administration to our partners and their community members. SNC Design Lab is housed within MASS Design Group, a nonprofit design and architecture collective with 125 staff members working across the globe. Our business model reflects that of MASS Design Group; we provide services through donated, subsidized, and fee-based relationships, depending on the project’s budget scope and partner capacity. After a decade of work in Indian Country, we have developed and maintained close ties with tribal housing leaders nationwide. Most of these partners already have investment-ready projects underway and are in need of access to essential design services and capital to move them forward. We leverage philanthropic resources to seed these initiatives and unlock additional capital, either through private funding or federal housing block grants.

Our work is supported by a combination of earned income and philanthropy. This joint revenue model allows us to pursue mission-aligned, fee-based work, as well as transformative projects that fall beyond the scope of what the current market supports. This structure has been informed by the global operations of MASS Design Group, and successes of our Catalyst Fund investments. The Catalyst Fund is a base of unrestricted philanthropic capital that we invest to effectively “catalyze” a project’s path to completion. We distribute and leverage this capital to have the most impact—at the final stages of construction, during immersive pre-design that produces an initial concept, or towards impact evaluation to inform future iterations. By accompanying partners early on to clarify a project mission and develop a compelling vision, we are able to unlock additional capital to support the project’s later stages. SNC Design Lab functions with this same model for growth and financial sustainability. We aim to create a business model that other organizations can replicate, adapt, and grow on their own, to amplify this mission-driven work and bring in Native and non-Native developers, contractors, and investors alike.

We received our first philanthropic commitment from the Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux Community, a federally recognized sovereign Native American Tribe located in Minnesota. Their $100,000 grant in 2019 kicked off a series of predesign engagements and research initiatives around equitable housing development. We have received additional support from the McNulty Foundation ($10,000) and the All Together New Mexico Fund ($5,000) to support SNC Design Lab’s COVID-19 response work. Typically about 80% of our annual operating budget is earned income derived from technical assistance, design services, and research grants, and the remaining 20% comes from philanthropic sources that support outreach and advocacy efforts.

Our fundraising initiatives are centered around the Énóvo Fund. Over the next four years, we seek to raise $100M for the fund, to invest in Native-led organizations and tribal housing development. Énóvo Fund income will come in the form of grants.

SNC Design Lab’s expenses for 2020 total $375,000. This consists primarily of labor for architectural services, community engagement, and research. We allocate about 15% of our operating budget to support overhead expenses for our Santa Fe office and ongoing fundraising efforts.

The Elevate Prize is a dynamic platform from which I can amplify, refine, and deepen the impact of my work. After over a decade of working on community projects and cross-sector collaborations, I have the tools and insight around what’s needed to transform this systemic, urgent issue. Now, we need the outreach capacity, exposure, and network support awarded by the Elevate Prize to scale SNC Design Lab and Énóvo Fund to the next level. The Elevate Prize will help us to shift the narrative around Indigenous sovereignty and equity. The two-year structure of the Elevate Prize’s capital support, mentorship, and campaign guidance exactly aligns with our growth trajectory and program needs. Ours is a mission that would greatly benefit from the shared lessons and collaborative capacity of the Elevate Prize Global Hero cohort.

We are especially interested in the campaign support and mentorship scope of the Elevate Prize to help bring our mission and offer of services to new audiences.

We are working to grow our network of partner organizations and communities, with the recognition that systemic change throughout Indian Country requires intervention and collaboration across social sectors. The Énóvo Fund will partner with mission-aligned organizations who want to amplify Indigenous voices, including the First Peoples Fund, NDN Collective, National American Indian Housing Council, The Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development, Change Labs, and the National Council of American Indians.