In the 1980’s a group of visionary community leaders assembled and realized that in order to break the cycle of poverty on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, they needed to focus on the key roadblocks to economic development:

• access to capital
• access to technical assistance
• access to business networks
• access to infrastructure

With assistance from Oglala Lakota College and First Nations Development Institute, Lakota Funds was established in 1986 as the first Native American Community Development Financial Institution (CDFI) and began working to break through these roadblocks.

Starting out as a micro lender modeled after the Circle Banking Project in Bangladesh, we began little by little helping entrepreneurs on the Pine Ridge Reservation realize their dreams through $500 loans. At this time, there were only two Native American-owned businesses on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. Eighty-five percent of our clients never had a checking or savings account; seventy-five percent never had a loan; and ninety-five percent had no business experience.

A CDFI, or community development financial institution, is a specialized financial institution that provides a unique range of financial products and services in economically distressed markets that are underserved by traditional financial institutions. CDFIs include regulated institutions such as community development banks and credit unions, and non-regulated institutions such as loan and venture capital funds.