provide higher salaries and offer staff professional development opportunities. 3. Support upstream, long-term, systemic work. In addition to developing ongoing relationships and building unrestricted funding models, we recommend that funders dedicate significant resources to the civic engagement, policy advocacy, and legislative work conducted by NAYA and other Tribal and BIPOC leaders and organizations. These community leaders have fought for and increasingly claimed seats at key decision-making policymaking tables at the local and state levels in Oregon. However, more support is needed to disrupt traditional power dynamics and eradicate white supremacy in its many forms. 4. Partner equitably with NAYA by funding staff time and learning from NAYA. We recommend that policymakers, funders, and community partners continue to invite NAYA to high level strategy tables— principally to learn from NAYA—and pay for NAYA staff to attend these meetings. Likewise, when considering research questions or designing proposals, we recommend that external partners and funders engage potential CBO partners up front and budget transparently to ensure all receive equitable compensation. Many CBOs have described how their hours and perspective at partnership meetings often go uncompensated, and NAYA is no exception. We also recommend creating time for relational work at these tables. Equitable partnerships are based on an understanding of people’s humanity
rather than their positional power. NAYA’s orientation towards community well-being and balance can benefit all.
Lessons for Anti-Poverty Policy and Empowerment Economics As described further in Appendix A: Empowerment Economics, Empowerment Economics seeks to disrupt the western-centric foundation that has fueled decades of antipoverty and economic empowerment agendas in the United States. In its place, Empowerment Economics provides a space for BIPOC communities to innovate, advance, and sustain work that centers the interconnected nature of racial and economic justice. This approach begins with situating each community’s past and current well-being within the context of economic, political, and racial systems and critically examining those systems. A community’s strengths, cultures, values, and programs provide a path for deeper involvement, cooperation, and ownership by the local community. The six core elements of Empowerment Economics— community-driven, culturally connected, narrativechanging, holistic, multigenerational, and wealthand power-building—distinguish this approach from other anti-poverty and asset-building programs. Lessons learned in this section are oriented towards practitioners and leaders in asset-building, financial capabilities, economic empowerment, community development, and anti-poverty fields. 1. IDA and other asset-building programs can do more. The structure and efficacy of NAYA’s IDA program, as illustrated in this case, is unique in comparison to the general field of asset-building programs. The Oregon IDA Initiative’s successes are a result of
Balance and Belonging: Empowerment Economics and Community Development at NAYA
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