The following is a transcript of the video above, from our webinar “Remaking the Economy: Liberating Finance to Build a More Just World.” View the full webinar here.

Jaime Gloshay: Early in my career, when I was working at a CDFI, it was really around protecting the risk and prioritizing return to the CDFI, as far as the financials. And what I witnessed there in trying to get lending dollars, I was very naive, and I was like, “Oh, awesome, I have access to $30 million. Let’s go start a business.”

The 5 Rs are revolutionary, regenerative, restorative, rooted, and relational. These were the core values that we thought were important.I then learned the nuance of, one, financial trauma—how trauma of people actually affects financial behaviors, how much distrust is woven in communities with financial institutions because of previous harm, the paradigm shifts that need to happen when folks are actually forced to live in economic scarcity and in survival, how that actually limits our brain to be able to step into the space of dreaming and abundance and thriving. So, I got to witness that firsthand.

But we really wanted when we were creating the five Rs of Rematriation from a systems point of view, we were trying to look at how do we transform underwriting?

So, the 5Cs of Credit, I don’t know when it came about or who made the framework, but it was clear it was not designed to include Black, Indigenous, and POC people.

Because with my own community, I was trying to flow dollars to Indigenous people, and I was going through that underwriting framework, and I just kept coming up to barriers and barriers. And really, for a community that may have not had access to financial capacity and education or access to money, you can’t really rely on a FICO score to determine their character.

If folks don’t have inherited wealth or friends-and-family money that they can access, you can’t rely on capital, the other C, as an indicator. And when it comes to tribal or informal or reservation economies, you can’t actually assess what the market viability of their business is, because there’s nothing to relate it to.

[And] I just want to let people know, Indigenous people in the United States do not own our land; our land is held in trust by the federal government. Therefore, we cannot utilize it as collateral or leverage it to access credit personally or as individuals. And we don’t own our land. Even as tribes, we don’t own our land. We can steward our land, and there’s different degrees, depending on treaties, but we don’t actually have ownership of our land. And 99 percent of Indigenous land has been essentially stolen.

Last, capacity: If you have huge pay and equity [disparities]—like Indigenous women make 50 to 60 cents to the dollar—huge poverty rates, Indigenous women are the primary breadwinners and economic stabilizers in their community. And in New Mexico, nearly 60 percent of predatory lenders are around Native communities. Capacity is just not there.

So, we introduced the 5 Rs—really, again, to mitigate racial and gender bias, but we were looking at different indicators around how we were going to provide funding. So, the 5 Rs are revolutionary, regenerative, restorative, rooted, and relational.  

These were the core values that we thought were important to us as Indigenous women, in the lens of rematriation as well as matriarchy and matrilineal society, of how we wanted to fund businesses.

So, is the business game-changing? Is it solving a problem? Is there seventh-generation impact for the communities and the children that we bring into the world? Does it actually help Indigenous women close their racial wealth gaps? Is it rooted in values Indigenous communities need? And are relationships reciprocal and enhanced and honored? Especially when we think from a lender perspective and right relationship, ensuring people have supports and resources when economic risks happen, or political risks happen.

We just want to make sure that we’re relational to a point where people trust us to divulge these things, like, I had a job loss, I had a death, COVID happened, my business fell apart. That actually does help in nurturing a relationship that’s beyond transactional, but transformational in finance.