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Transcript

The Flour Mill · Difference Makers

• 0:05
  Brian Edwards: For years, major economic development deals in Indian country have been happening on the field, tribes working with banks, tax credit, investors and large institutions to finance projects worth 10s of millions of dollars, but many native CDFIs, the community lenders working closest to native entrepreneurs and tribal economies, have been left sitting in the stands. They can see the deals. They know the communities, but they haven't always had a way to participate at scale. That may be starting to change in this episode of difference makers, Pete Upton and I talk with Ted Piccolo and Steven Nunes from mission driven finance about a deal that offers a glimpse of what that shift could look like. It's a flour mill on the Umatilla Indian Reservation in Eastern Oregon, but more than that, it's a new way of weaving native capital together. First, here's a look at the project and the collaboration behind it.
• 1:09
  Kevin Morse: I'm Kevin. Hi.
• 1:09
  Kevin Morse: Kevin. Hi. This is really happening. (Laughter)
• 1:29
  Brian Edwards: On a summer afternoon outside Pendleton, Oregon, a small group of tribal leaders, native lenders and project partners walked through a construction site on the Umatilla Indian Reservation across the road, wheat fields stretched towards the Blue Mountains. In front of them, excavation crews were carving out the foundation of what will become the Blue Mountain mill, a regional flower facility designed to process wheat grown across the Pacific Northwest.
• 1:59
  Brian Edwards: For generations, farmers here have grown some of the highest quality winter wheat in the world, but most of that grain has left the region the same way it was harvested, shipped away as raw commodity wheat. This project aims to change that.
• 2:14
  Brian Edwards: Cairnspring Mills CEO Kevin Morse looked around at the group gathered at the site.
• 2:21
  Kevin Morse: Who would have ever imagined that building a flour mill could weave together so many people and communities?
• 2:28
  Brian Edwards: The mill carries a $65 million capital stack inside that financing is a story about how native finance is beginning to evolve. Eight Community Development Financial Institutions, native CDFIs, came together to finance a $9 million piece of the project Ted piccolo of mission driven finance helped organize that collaboration.
• 2:52
  Ted Piccolo: Well, it's it's not new to our culture. We caught salmon and we would trade it. We would go over the mountains and be trading it with buffalo tribes shells would make it from the Washington coast all the way to the east coast. So it's not new. It's just we're doing it again, and we're using capital.
• 3:11
  Brian Edwards: Piccolo calls the structure a capital weave native lenders from different communities pooling capital to finance a project larger than most could support on their own.
• 3:21
  Brian Edwards: Lauren Grattan, co founder of mission driven finance, says projects like the flour mill can transform regional economies. We know
• 3:30
  Lauren Gratten: how important it is to have this value added processing facility. The ripple effects from creating that kind of infrastructure are huge.
• 3:38
  Lauren Gratten: Doing it on tribal land with the tribe. This is what's not charity. It's building long term economic development, sovereignty, self determination, and it is good for everybody,
• 3:53
  Brian Edwards: For the native lenders involved, the deal also meant stepping into a more complex kind of financing. Dave tuvey leads, Nixyáawii Community Financial Services on the Umatilla reservation.
• 4:06
  Dave Tovey: We've always been wheat country. Most of the revenue or income from that's fairly passive by leases on tribal lands. So when we were able to do a grain elevator, that was like, Ooh, we're kind of moving up into that food chain. Yeah, exactly, food chain. And then this comes along, like I said, almost simultaneously with the with the burning down of the local flour mill.
• 4:32
  Brian Edwards: Native CDFIs have long financed small businesses, housing and community projects across Indian country, but deals like this signals something larger, native lenders, pooling capital, sharing risk and building experience with bigger transactions. Pete Upton, an investor in the project, also leads the native CDFI network.
• 4:54
  Pete Upton: We need to mimic this model nationwide.
• 5:04
  Brian Edwards: Back at coyote business park, trucks move across the gravel lot as crews prepare the foundation where the mill will soon stand for a region that has grown wheat for generations, the Blue Mountain mill represents a chance to keep more of that value close to home and for native lenders who help finance it, the project offers a glimpse of what becomes possible when native financial institutions start weaving their capital together, project by project, deal by deal. I'm Brian Edwards for tribal business news.
• 5:40
  Brian Edwards: And now here's our conversation with Ted and Steven.
• 5:43
  Brian Edwards: Ted, share the stadium anecdote.
• 5:43
  Brian Edwards: Like a year and a half ago, I was interviewing you on stage at NCN, and you brought up the stadium right. Share that anecdote.
• 5:53
  Ted Piccolo: There's been this game happening. These big deals are getting done in Indian country and native lenders, native financial institutions, haven't been allowed in to play, haven't been allowed to play.
• 6:06
  Ted Piccolo: And I experienced that back when I was running a CDFI and they were happening in my backyard, and I couldn't get at the table.
• 6:15
  Ted Piccolo: I couldn't even get in the room you're talking a 10.. 20.. 30...
• 6:20
  Ted Piccolo: $60 million project, and you know what I had was $300,000 to put into the deal, and that's just not enough to get anybody's attention.
• 6:33
  Brian Edwards: What change that allowed Native lenders to get on the field?
• 6:39
  Ted Piccolo: Well, a couple things. Can I be audacious a little bit here?
• 6:43
  Brian Edwards: Please.
• 6:44
  Ted Piccolo: I think a big change. One of the big changes was mission driven. Finance kind of jumped into the fray with being willing to be creative and take some chances and and another thing, it's not really a change, but it was out there, and that's the there's been this latent willingness for native lenders to be in these deals. It just needed the vehicle, right?
• 7:09
  Ted Piccolo: Native lenders have got pockets on their balance sheet that they could put into these deals.
• 7:14
  Ted Piccolo: There's just, there wasn't a vehicle. Nobody was willing to create a vehicle.
• 7:21
  Brian Edwards: So just to recap the situation, I mean, the the borrower had, you know, the tribe looking at doing equity, there was senior debt kind of coming into place, but that middle of the capital stack wasn't coming together. So what, what was that gap that needed to be solved when you first started looking at the deal,
• 7:42
  Stephen Nunes: Cairnspring Mills was a borrower who we had worked with in the past on the first mill that they constructed. This was their second major mill project, and they came to us with this dilemma where they had 33 million in senior debt secured from Native American bank and steward lending, regenerative agricultural lender, and about 20 million in equity and new markets tax credits that would sit kind of at the bottom of the capital stack. And they needed nine to 10 million in the middle to close it out, to get to construction, to get to groundbreaking, and they couldn't find anyone who was willing to step up and take that position. The first thing Ted said was, I think this is something that we the collect, the we being the native CDFI industry. Ted's philosophy was, if the native CDFI industry is going to do this or be a major part of getting this done, they need to be the first, the first seats at the table, and so we started with reaching out to native CDFIs. Started local with the tribe's own native CDFI to make sure that this was a project that had buy in. We knew the tribe was part of the equity in the project, so we knew there was an aligned partnership there. But started local and rounded up again, this was a $9 million check, rounded up commitments of $250,000 from some of the local CDFIs, small commitments, but really powerful statements of the importance of the project locally. Then we started expanding nationally to other native CDFIs that had a broader mandate. And before we knew it, we had interest in the project greater than the 9 million that was needed. And so that was really the impetus to then say, Okay, let's go deep.
• 9:28
  Stephen Nunes: Let's underwrite this project, and Let's initiate a process, a collaborative process with everyone at the table for structuring and putting this deal together. I think it really was the conviction that Ted had, and the approach of starting with native CDFIs that led to a place where we felt like this was something that could be done, when there really was no other lender willing to step up and do it, Ted.
• 9:53
  Brian Edwards: I mean, you did.
• 9:53
  Brian Edwards: You rounded up Native CDFIs from not just the Pacific Northwest.
• 9:57
  Brian Edwards: Past, but from different parts of the country to talk us through that part of the project.
• 10:07
  Ted Piccolo: Well, as Stephen mentioned, kind of the philosophy was to start local, like, like, like, ripples right on a drop of water, where you just start local, and then kind of work your way out and and honestly that, I wish I could say there was some, you know, science behind it.
• 10:32
  Brian Edwards: There was magic, though, right?
• 10:33
  Ted Piccolo: There was there was magic. Yes, there was magic. And there were very little science on my part, but some magic in in the relationships, right? I thought, Okay, let me start calling some of these folks. And as Steven mentioned, they were ready. You know that their conviction was there to be in these types of deals. These native lenders are used to lending in Indian country, right? They're used to the the cadence, the flow, the difficulties, the politics, the relationship, they're used to that. And so they're able to come in to something like this.
• 11:10
  Ted Piccolo: And they knew, in this case, the local lender, Dave, right, the call goes out kind of, hey, we've got a project in Dave's backyard. This will help Dave.
• 11:25
  Ted Piccolo: And it's like a family, yeah?
• 11:29
  Brian Edwards: I mean, I'm curious a couple in particular.
• 11:31
  Brian Edwards: I mean, Pete, he's from Nebraska, you know they, I don't know. Do they have wheat in Nebraska? Pete, you know, citizen, Potawatomi Nation, Cindy. I mean, they're in Oklahoma. So it's like, how do you get an Oklahoma native CDFI to invest in a flour mill up in Oregon?
• 11:54
  Ted Piccolo: Number one, it's a relationship.
• 11:55
  Brian Edwards: But the deal's got to make sense.
• 11:57
  Ted Piccolo: And that's what I was going to say. Number two, the economics and the deal has to make sense.
• 12:02
  Brian Edwards: So Stephen walk us through the structure of how this came together, and all the parts of the process that had to happen for this deal to come to fruition with the native CDFIs.
• 12:16
  Stephen Nunes: We started in April of last year, so we put a deal sheet together, so just a three page summary of the deal and opportunity. And Ted took it and socialized it with first local native CDFIs, and then went beyond that. And we, we had conviction that there was enough interest in the deal to move forward with underwriting. And so we then moved into full underwriting. We've got seven or eight different financing partners around the table. We needed to negotiate sort of what being a subordinated loan look like and what our exclusive collateral rights were, and make sure that they were reasonable and represented something that would protect our participants balance sheet investments, and there was a lot of public financing involved as well.
• 13:03
  Stephen Nunes: There was a new markets tax credit component to this, and we were actually helping to bridge to financing from an EB five program that provides financing for rural projects as well. And so through that process, we knew that this was going to be a complex deal, and we didn't want to be underwriting in a silo. So what we started to do was these sort of weekly group lender calls, where we would bring all the interested participants together and share updates on our diligence, share our credit memo with them, share what we were learning from diligence in different parts of the deal, creating a forum for those lenders to ask their questions and for others to hear, you know, the other lenders questions and concerns, and for us to all sort of collaboratively learn on this journey. And I think that was really important to us to say, like, you know, we're leading this deal this time around, but that, you know, other native CDFIs might want to lead a deal in their own community in the future. And so how can we share what we're doing with them and bring everyone along on this sort of collaborative sharing journey? So that diligence process took us through the end of the summer till about June or July, where we finally got to a place where we were comfortable with a structure, completed our diligence, and then switched over into sort of the closing process. And this closing process was particularly complex because we were not just putting documentation together for the deal itself, we were also putting documentation in place for how the different participating lenders would interact on the deal, and particularly what we wanted to build into that master participation agreement that we put in place that sort of governs the relationship between us as the lead lender and the different participating lenders was governance rights.
• 14:45
  Stephen Nunes: Effectively, that this was a shared governance model, and when we make any decision on the loan over the life of the loan, that that decision needs to be one that's democratically made.
• 14:55
  Stephen Nunes: Effectively, we need sort of very. Notes by a majority of the participants to change anything about the loan on an ongoing basis. And so what that means on an ongoing basis is we're continuing to check in on the loan, providing quarterly updates and any time or hopefully this doesn't happen, hopefully you don't run into a situation where the loan needs to be modified or we need to change terms. But, and if that does happen, that'll be something that will be done as a collaborative so we closed the loan in in September. So from April to September, it really was a sprint, just given the complexity of the deal and the number of parties involved. And, you know, I just it just took constant communication, these sort of weekly calls and and transparency, shared transparency.
• 15:44
  Brian Edwards: So Pete, you kind of had a unique seat here because you're CEO of native CDFI network. But native 360 which you run native CDFI, also was one of the native CDFIs participating in the in the deal. From your seat, with all the stuff that Steven and talking about that's going on, like, what did that look like from your seat was, what was your experience with it? Our experience
• 16:09
  Pete Upton: At native 360 we looked at it maybe a little bit more, a little bit different.
• 16:12
  Pete Upton: The powerful thing was just the strong leadership that the tribe had, the Confederate Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation, very strong in their leadership.
• 16:26
  Pete Upton: And then I think when you brought in the component of Blue Mountain mill, very strong company. And then you brought in mission driven finance, very strong intermediary. It was a combination of those three that really we looked at reducing the risk, because you had very qualified partners in this thing that we were going to be partnering with the tribe Blue Mountain and mission driven finance. So at the end of the day, it was, it was a community based project that supported tribal economic development, and that was number one for us and our board of directors. But, you know, then at the end of the day, you look at the numbers, and, you know, Ted always puts the capital weave model together. And I do like that word Ted. I know there's others that say it's capital stacking capital weave, but I kind of like the capital weave myself.
• 17:26
  Pete Upton: It's, you know, Tribal Equity, native CDFI debt, impact investment, capital, philanthropic investments and new market tax credits, and then the community investments. So, long story short, Brian that you know for us, it was about the strong partners that were coming together,
• 17:47
  Brian Edwards: take off your native 360 hat for a minute, and put on your native CDFI network hat for a minute, and talk about for these other native CDFIs that are part of the deal, what does it mean for them to put$250,000 into A deal, or up to a million in at least one case, I think, compared to the kinds of loans that they usually do.
• 18:04
  Brian Edwards: Like, what does that mean for a native CDFI? What does it do for a native CDFI to be part of a deal like this?
• 18:12
  Pete Upton: You know, I think the biggest thing it does, it's it's a learning curve that we're kind of going through. You know that this is common in the banking industry, so this might have been new to a lot of the native CDFIs, but it gives our native CDFIs the ability to invest in a very well structured deal, and it's something that a model that we can leverage to continue to build The capacity of our native CDFIs and bring additional capital into the native lending component, so as a learning experience for our native CDFIs, and it gets just gives us a track record to grow go into larger transactions down the line, and it builds some credibility for Our federal programs and banks to invest in us and institutional investors.
• 19:04
  Brian Edwards: So one phrase that kept coming up during my interviews and at the summit was this notion of experiential capital. What does that mean in practice?
• 19:14
  Stephen Nunes: Well, I think Ted coined the phrase, so I'll do my best Ted impression the way, we think about it is, you know, the best way to learn how to land, particularly on these complex, you know, more innovative projects that do require a little more sort of structural lifting, is, is kind of to just be at the table alongside Another partner to learn by doing. To a certain extent, I think we, you know, our model.
• 19:44
  Stephen Nunes: We think about it as working with, particularly more emerging native CDFIs on initial deals.
• 19:49
  Stephen Nunes: We start with, you know, I lead you watch, and the goal is to get to you lead I watch. And.
• 19:59
  Stephen Nunes: We've had that happen with several Native CDFIs that we've worked with on smaller deals where we start, we underwrite it, we share what we're doing, how we're thinking about things, share our analysis, and they follow as participants in the deal. And then, you know, six or 12 months later, they have a deal, and they say, You know what, we want to take the lead in this and and we're able to watch and see and coach and develop capacity building is critical for the industry to scale. I think our perspective is in lending. The best way to have your capacity build is to do so experientially, by being at the table, being with a lender that isn't being protective of their credit box and calling it their IP but rather, you know, is freely sharing how they think about things, sharing their analysis.
• 20:45
  Stephen Nunes: And so we feel that conviction to do that. We will share our full credit memo. We'll share all our loan agreements. We will explain, you know, where we find our conviction in a deal, why we structure things in a certain way. And you know, we're working with brilliant leaders at these native CDFIs. It doesn't take a lot of reps for them to see it and then say we're going to lead on the next one. And we've seen that happen.
• 21:13
  Brian Edwards: Yeah, Ted, explain what a credit box is to me.
• 21:17
  Ted Piccolo: I'm not going to explain what a credit box is to you. I'm going to say that participating in one deal like this, though, each deal changes the dynamic of the playing field more and more. This particular type of vehicle allows the smaller, native city of ice that don't have might not have that experiential capacity to still be in a larger deal.
• 21:44
  Brian Edwards: Tease that out a little bit for me. You know, one of the things when Pete and I were talking out in Pendleton was, you know, this, this transaction needs to be mimicked. But what makes this more than just a one off?
• 21:58
  Ted Piccolo: Well, number thing, one of them, trust. I think the trust now, trust is built all the way through everybody that's been doing business together at conferences and stuff over the years now they're doing business together in deals, right? So you've got that now, this is kind of, this is more mechanical. And Steven can probably speak to this if, if we want to get that that deep into the dirt, the participation agreements that were developed, what we threw it out there. And Stephen can describe this process and legal having everybody look at it, come up with, you know, comments where each native CDFI had their own little wrinkle. Some have more than others, and it comes back in. You get legal little work.
• 22:50
  Ted Piccolo: How do you make this fit? You know? Okay, you got some trapezoids over here, and this tribe wants a circle. And how are we going to make this thing fit? And we came up with one, right? And I can't even explain how that happened, but it exists.
• 23:08
  Brian Edwards: You have a million analogies too. I'm surprised the phrase hurting cats didn't come out of your mouth right then. But yeah, I mean, there certainly were lots and lots of moving parts. And it sounds like it wasn't just what was happening, it was how you all were doing it, right. Like the spirit that you that was brought to this, the openness, the trust building, the patience.
• 23:31
  Stephen Nunes: yeah, yeah. And I think it takes time to build.
• 23:33
  Stephen Nunes: And often we were across from external legal counsel. And you know, you know, different forms of external legal counsel bring different levels of understanding of these types of transactions. So there was some capacity building with legal counsel that needed to be done along the way. But I do think that like to to Ted's point, going through the process the way that we went through the process, building templates for the process. I think, you know, I got to call out you, Brian, like just the the recognition that the transaction has received in outlets that you know that makes it tangible and real. We've been talking to other native CDFIs and other tribes about additional projects, and we're always able to point to this one to say that it worked, and that's what it takes to go from pilot to scale as a pilot that work
• 24:29
  Brian Edwards: When you're talking with council, that maybe they don't have the experiential capacity, right, or the investors or others, what do those folks need to know and understand about Indian country that they may be missing.
• 24:43
  Stephen Nunes: I think what we see commonly with other investors, particularly investors outside of Indian country, that are considering participating, you know, in weaves or supporting some of our work is there. They sometimes take a black or white view. Do on certain lending issues. I mean, a common one is the ability to take collateral on trust land and like the inability to do so and use that to justify not lending into Indian country, when the reality is there's a lot more nuance around that. And native CDFIs have cracked that nut. You know, that was one of the first things I learned working with Ted around, sort of how, how native CDFIs have structured collateralized transactions in Indian country. And so I think there just needs to be an openness to engage and recognize, particularly that native CDFIs have been around for a while, are good lenders and have figured out how to solve a lot of the structural challenges that traditional lenders sometimes associate lending in Indian country with.
• 25:50
  Ted Piccolo: I think two things.
• 25:50
  Ted Piccolo: Number one, Indian country is not scary. Get over that. And then number two, if you don't get on board, right? The native city of eyes and the native finance industry, they're going to do it. We're going to do without you. We've shown that we can do it. We're going to keep doing it. And eventually somebody is going to look over there and go, Oh my gosh. How do I? How do I get into that party, you know? And because we're going to do it right, Pete,
• 26:27
  Pete Upton: That's right, you know. And I think the thing that I would kind of, I guess, an analogy here, is like, for a long time, I think in economic development, Indian country has kind of been like someone coming into your kitchen and deciding what's for dinner. And what's different about this deal is the tribe now, they own the kitchen, and the native lenders, they are helping cook the meal, and the community gets decide what's on the menu. Compared to in the past, I don't think that was the case. This was kind of like a big native potluck. Everybody brought something to the table.
• 27:02
  Pete Upton: The tribe brought the land, the vision, and the native lenders, you know, we were able to bring the capital, and we had partners there to kind of help set the table. But what we realized is that we we don't necessarily need to have so many outside entities besides tribal or native, we were able to do the deal, kind of cater the meal by ourselves, after all, and I think that's what we realized, is that now we are part of the solution, instead of just being looking for outside components to come in and structure everything for us and tell us how things are going to be done.
• 27:40
  Pete Upton: And it was a learning experience for everybody.
• 27:43
  Brian Edwards: I'm hungry.
• 27:48
  Brian Edwards: One thing I did want to talk about, though, is that, you know, the the tribe is an equity partner on this project, right?
• 27:55
  Brian Edwards: And that's the first time this tribe has done it. It's not, you know, kind of the norm. But how important is it for the tribal governments to be part of the capital stack on deals like this, or to work with the native CDFIs, you know, to provide funding to the native CDFIs so they can be a part of the deal.
• 28:14
  Ted Piccolo: I think having the tribe in as an equity partner for the outside world, it adds a little more credence. It shows that that there's some seriousness behind it, for in this case, especially because there was a non native company that was the borrower. And so there's could be the tendency for the outside world to say, Okay, how's this going to work, this big company moving on to the reservation, what's that relationship even going to be like? And when the tribe comes in and they become an equity partner in that company and say, okay, okay, this that's how it's going to work, they're going to be partners and and the success of the deal is not just dependent upon the borrower, it's that the company itself.
• 29:05
  Ted Piccolo: But now the tribe you got, you got the local government that's that's going to help ensure that this is going to be a successful operation for the tribe.
• 29:16
  Stephen Nunes: Being at the table, I think, is so critical in terms of creating additional opportunities, additional economic opportunities. So since the deal has closed, you know, the tribe and Cairn spring are now partnered in additional ways. So one Cairn spring Mills produces specialty flour, but the tribe was also looking for a distribution partner for its white flour, Cairn spring Mills, in large part enabled by equity investments from the tribe, invested in a marketing team to distribute their specialty flour. And they said, we can just use our marketing team to help you distribute your white flour as well, so that the tribe now has an exclusive distribution agreement beyond this. Dope of the mill. The tribe also, you know, the mill.
• 30:00
  Stephen Nunes: Karen spring realized, you know, we need, we're going to need warehouse space. This is a big mill, and the tribe said, you know, we'll go ahead and build that for you, and we'll lease it back to you. And so I think just being at the table, you know, their board seat, being part of the governance structure of the organization has created additional opportunities for the tribe
• 30:25
  Brian Edwards: Ted, What do things look like to you as you're kind of looking at additional deals? What kind of deals like make sense for this going forward? What industries, what sectors
• 30:36
  Ted Piccolo: I think, if I had to narrow it, if you had to pin me down, I think some of the energy. There's, you know, clean energy projects, they tend to be larger. And there are some multi faceted aspects to each deal, right? I I'm looking at Steven like, you know, some of the ones that we're looking at now, you've got federal programs coming in, yeah, state programs coming in. You've got, again, private debt coming in. You've got equity. So some of the Clean Energy stuff that's out there, I think is well suited for native CDFI capital, leave Ted.
• 31:27
  Brian Edwards: Let's do the vision exercise here. So if, if I'm interviewing you five years from now, what? What are deals like this? And what are native CDFIs participation in deals like like this? What does that look like?
• 31:42
  Ted Piccolo: Well, five years from now, I think you're going to have some native CDFIs quarterbacking a deal, right?
• 31:53
  Ted Piccolo: Regardless of whether they've got the capacity to pull the weave together themselves, they're going to have the confidence to walk into tribal council man, I know my tribe, right? I can go into my tribal council chambers when they're talking about building the next health facility, and I can go in there and say, Hey, before you start looking to the outside, or when you start looking the outside, I want to be in the room, because I can bring $9 million to the table. And honestly, that outside lender, they're going to have a gap, because banks are traditionally conservative, and they're afraid they've got gaps that they're going to leave. And you know who's going to fill that gap?
• 32:40
  Ted Piccolo: I'm going to leave that tribal council chamber and I'm going to pick up the phone. I'm picking up the phone, Pete, we're building a health facility.
• 32:49
  Ted Piccolo: You're going to see more of that.
• 32:55
  Brian Edwards: What Ted and Steven described here today wasn't just a financing structure, it was a way of thinking about trust, about relationship, and about how native lenders can bring together different strands of capital to hold something bigger than any one institution could carry on its own. The flour mill on the Umatilla reservation is one project, but the larger idea is that native CDFIs do not have to sit in the stands while major deals happen around them. They can be in the room. They can help shape that capital stack, and increasingly, they can help lead it. That's what makes this episode feel less like a one off and more like a sign of where native finance may be headed next. In our next episode of difference makers, we're going to stay with the future and look at the next builders, the new generation of emerging native CDFIs and the leaders working to expand native lending into new communities and new kinds of opportunities. That's episode five. The next builders, Difference makers. 3.0 is a co production of the native CDFI network and tribal business news thanks to Pete Upton and his super excellent team at the native CDFI network, Kristen Wagner, Shauntel Hogan, Pamela Boivin, and Stephanie Prater.
• 34:24
  Brian Edwards: And of course, thanks to the native story lab team, especially Kristin Lilya, a proud citizen of the Bois Forte Band of Chippewa. She's our project manager, wrangler in chief, and on the ground recording expert. Thanks also to Elyse Wild, who's working behind the mic this season as our sound editor and our podcast Maven.
• 34:44
  Brian Edwards: Check the show notes for links and more. Thanks for listening.
• 34:48
  Brian Edwards: See you next time you.