Our Integrated Economic Sovereignty Model

A Manifesto on Indigenous Thought in Theory and Practice

By Lauren Kelly Lester

Recently, New Mexico Community Capital celebrated our twentieth anniversary– twenty years of stoking and nurturing economic sovereignty efforts in our neighborhood and beyond. Twenty years of community-centered, love-driven labor. As we cultivate our vision for the coming years in strategic planning discussions, our team comes back again and again to certain values, values that require structures, systems, and protocols in the same way seeds require nutrient-rich soil.

In any movement for Indigenous economic sovereignty, vision is vital– but we know that vision without meaningful implementation cannot sustain a living system any more than untilled, unwatered soil can sustain a crop. In other words, we are responsible for giving self-determination a way to exist and breathe through us. The infrastructure of a team becomes the living body through which sovereignty moves.

Although “Capital” is in our name, our work is rarely just economic. It does not start and end with cash. Our work is cultural, ecological, and relational. It carries the weight of the generations who came before us and the responsibility of preparing the next generation to thrive in whatever ways we can. To meet that charge, our team must be designed not just to function, but to function in a good way, a way characterized by sustainability, balance, and accountability at every level. Our friends and colleagues Thosh Collins and Chelsey Luger often emphasize that true wellness is interdependent. It requires structures that support both individual thriving and collective resilience. When those systems are healthy, a collective doesn’t just trudge along like a lifeless machine– instead, it breathes, it dances, it nurtures.

It’s commonplace in the nonprofit world (and even more so in the Indigenous nonprofit sphere) that initiatives like ours come under pressure internally and externally to stretch themselves thin: to respond to community crises, deliver programs, manage funding, and still find time to dream big. And many organizations, ours included, have found ways to endure. But sustainability is not found in endurance alone; it’s found in design. Functional infrastructure is the key that allows a team to move with intentional rhythm instead of constant reactive urgency. It creates space for creativity, for cultural continuity, and for the long-term thinking that Dr. Gregory Cajete calls the “ecology of education”: learning systems rooted in relationship, reflection, and reciprocity.

In the spirit of this line of thought, we found ourselves increasingly dissatisfied with mainstream models for organizational infrastructure and metrics. While elements like logic models and Gantt charts have their utility from time to time for specific projects or initiatives, we found ourselves searching for greater integration, purpose, and regeneration in our big-picture view. We began looking to the systems that predate the common or popular models in nonprofit management.

And this is why:

We don’t crave speed, checkboxes, and finish lines.

What we crave is substance. We crave ceremony.

From this realization, our team developed a new model rooted in right timing, regeneration, and good relationship. We call this model the Integrated Economic Sovereignty Model, and it looks like this:

Integrated Economic Sovereignty Model

Our Integrated Economic Sovereignty model is a circular structure– a breathing, organic system in which each role revolves around and returns again and again to a regenerative core. It contains 5 interconnected, interdependent elements:

Culturally Responsive Offerings

For many, our offerings are the first point of contact with us– maybe you’ve attended one of our BME classes or graduated from our NEIR program. Through programming like these offerings, we connect our relatives with fundamental skills, and we deliver those skills within Indigenous frameworks.

Digital Kinship Initiative

We assist communities in assessing and implementing technologies, and we host our own digital infrastructures as well. Our IndigiExchange marketplace offers an online storefront for BME graduates to sell their products, and our IndigiDAO team develops web-based systems for innovation and culturally-informed digital protocol. We emphasize community-governed infrastructure and network development for commerce and collective resource allocation.

Fiscal Sponsorship Services

Our fiscal sponsorship services allow groups without IRS 501(c)(3) status to unlock vital grant funding opportunities. Since 2021, we have managed over $8.5 million for 18 funded fiscal sponsees.

Access to Community Capital

We act as an intermediary, providing direct investments, relationship-based loans, and stipends to Indigenous entrepreneurs while connecting them to broader funding networks. We nurture a kinship economy across ancestral trade routes to revitalize traditional commerce patterns while creating new market opportunities.

The Resilience Hub, Our Physical Space

We come together in our physical space, the Resilience Hub, inside the historic Occidental Life building in downtown Albuquerque. Here, we are able to provide coworking space, a venue for events, and marketplaces, all of which create economic anchors for Indigenous entrepreneurs.

When we think about Indigenous economic sovereignty, we often picture land rematriation, cooperative enterprises, and the reclamation of trade. And, certainly, these are all vital components. Yet beneath all of these lies something quieter but equally revolutionary: the capacity of Indigenous people to work together sustainably, to support one another, and to carry forward a shared purpose without burning out or breaking apart. As Lakota data analyst and author Jesse Gray Eagle models, our most effective collectives are not built on soulless hierarchy, but on trust, creativity, and mutual care working together to create cohesion.

Creating functional, sustainable team infrastructure is therefore an act of sovereignty in itself. It’s how we ensure our organizations can withstand pressure, adapt to change, and keep moving toward balance not as a temporary project, but as a generational commitment. It’s also an act of cultural reclamation; when we engage in this systemic approach we are re-centering Indigenous modes of governance, collaboration, and accountability that were always rooted in kinship systems and the balance of the natural world.

As Indigenous leaders, thinkers, and organizers have shown us, and as we strive to exemplify for our community, strength is not measured in scale, but in integrity. A sustainable team honors that truth. It allows each person to bring their full self to the work– including their spirit, their intellect, their humor, and their heart — while keeping the collective focused on long-term regeneration and cohesion. In this way, building infrastructure becomes ceremony: a practice of tending to the vessel that will carry our sovereignty forward.

And that’s what we all want, really, isn’t it? The knowing that we are working in purpose.

The work of Indigenous economic sovereignty does not end with creating opportunities or pulling off an event here and there– it is the revival of systems our ancestors have always cultivated, contextualized to the worlds we must walk in today. Within models predicated on cohesion, we can move beyond survival toward thriving, and we can do our part to ensure that the structures we build today will still be standing, breathing, and serving our people generations from now.