From Policy to Practice

Difference Makers · Feb 26, 2026 · 31m · transcript

How Native CDFIs grew from federal study into a sovereign finance movement

In 2001, the U.S. Treasury Department released the Native American Lending Study, identifying 17 structural barriers to capital access in Indian Country. The report helped catalyze what would become the modern Native CDFI movement.

Fifteen years later, Treasury published a follow-up report, Access to Capital and Credit in Native Communities (2016), examining how the sector had evolved.

In this episode of Difference Makers 3.0, researcher Miriam R. Jorgensen of the Harvard Project on Indigenous Governance and…