Indigenous women step into asset management

Jacqueline Jennings is tired of being a demographic starlet. At times, she was one of the very few – perhaps the only – Native American woman involved in venture capital in the US and Canada.

She is now a resident of a new apprenticeship program that is accepting applications until April 3rd. She intends to involve indigenous women in asset management, private equity and venture capital. Jennings’ goal is to accelerate the influx of indigenous women into the mainstream of asset management, hoping to increase their presence from a statistically insignificant star to at least a number.

As part of the Rematriating Economies Apprenticeship program, 10 Indigenous women will receive five months of paid training designed to gain experience, familiarity and skills that will enable them to work as fund or asset managers. The program is hosted by The Future is Indigenous Women, a collaborative effort including leading indigenous women, New Mexico Community Capital and Roanhorse Consulting. As previously described in InvestmentNewsThe American Indian tribes have a unique investment philosophy and growing economic power.

“You’ll find other types of programs that help people become fund managers and gain technical skills, but they won’t come with a holistic respect for where they as a person come from,” said Vanessa Roanhorse, one of the fund’s leaders. an effort. “We need more people to work in investment funds, so when deals and opportunities come our way, we can better understand how [corporate] founders do it. It’s not just learning how to be a fund manager. We want our women to feel empowered by our history and culture and work with our culture and traditions so that when they are in place, they not only stay, they thrive.”

Working with leading Indigenous women to develop and lead the program, Jennings intends to bring together personal and professional insights from her own experience. Her legacy includes the Northern Cree, Anishinabe and Metis tribes, as well as European settlers.

In previous entrepreneurial incubators and accelerators she designed and managed in the Pacific Northwest, “many of the participants were first-generation immigrants and they faced the same barriers as historically excluded groups,” Jennings said. These barriers included “lack of experience, lack of network, and lack of access to credit”. She now develops entrepreneurship programs under her own Fireweed Fellowship brand.

According to Roanhorse and Jennings, reentrant economies will move beyond the model used in previous entrepreneurship programs that focused on breeding businesses, and will also find ways to invest in individual indigenous companies and quickly start businesses that can scale to the exit point. country limits. investments.