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Native American Development Center presents amendment seeking set-aside, workforce and incubator funding
Summary
Lorraine Davis, founder and CEO of the Native American Development Center, urged the Appropriations committee to add a Native American set-aside and funding for workforce and small-business supports to the Commerce budget, proposing specific loan and program amounts and a one-time capital request for a cultural center and incubator.
Lorraine Davis, founder and CEO of the Native American Development Center, asked the Appropriations — Government Operations Division committee to amend Senate Bill 2018 to allocate dedicated funding for Native American financial and workforce programs.
Davis said the Native American Development Center is a Native community development financial institution (Native CDFI) based in Bismarck and has operated since 2015. "We're just a loan fund. We have no depositories. We're not trying to be a credit union or a bank, just purely a loan fund," Davis said, describing micro-business and credit-builder lending and required financial-literacy services.
Davis requested a set of line items for the 2025–27 biennium. She asked for a Native American set-aside totaling about $1,280,000 for the biennium, restoring or increasing prior support (the center received $350,000 in the prior session for an economic development summit). Her proposal also included a $300,000 revolving loan fund to support micro-business, consumer and credit-builder loans (micro loans $5,000–$20,000; credit-builder/consumer loans $1,000–$3,000, with rare exceptions to $5,000), a $130,000 biennial FTE for a workforce-development specialist, and a $500,000 one-time appropriation toward a cultural center that would include a small-business incubator and gymnasium.
Davis said the work ties to partnerships with Bismarck State College and the Bank of North Dakota and noted that about 78% of Native Americans nationally live off reservation, and nearly half in North Dakota are off reservation. "Native Americans are the highest, or the most disproportionate represented in poverty and in health disparities and it makes sense they correlate to one another," she said, arguing workforce and small-business supports complement financial services.
Committee members accepted Davis’ request to add her amendment to the list for later consideration during the Commerce budget discussion. Chair Wanzek said the committee would add the amendment to other submitted amendments and return to it later in the process.
Davis’ full amendment, line-item dollar amounts, and her written submission were added to the committee’s amendment list for follow-up; the committee did not vote on the amendment during this hearing.
