Building Tribal Economies Toolkit

This toolkit shares the findings of NCAI’s “Building Tribal Economies” research and outreach initiative, which works to train the focus of Tribal Nations on the strategic, foundational considerations involved with building integrated and resilient tribal economies capable of supporting their communities and citizens today, tomorrow, and for generations to come. Centered on the task of seeding economic prosperity and community transformation, it poses probing questions that tribal leaders and other key decision-makers must ask of themselves, their governments, tribal employees, tribal citizens, and their current tribal economic development activities to craft economy-building approaches capable of achieving their long-term, nation-rebuilding goals. It also equips these stakeholders with the knowledge, tools, best-practice approaches, and proven strategies to understand what building a tribal economy requires and how to approach it.

NCAI developed this toolkit as a collaborative resource for: Tribal leaders, Tribal key decision-makers, Tribal economic development staff, Tribal economic development corporation and enterprise CEOs and senior managers, Tribal citizens, Native small business owners, Tribal college and university staff and students, and Native community development financial institution staff, among others.

Tribal leaders and other key decision-makers can use the entire toolkit to advance strategic deliberations and action around tribal economy building (see link above), or they can select, print, and use individual strategic considerations from among the 11 featured in the toolkit. Links to the individual pullouts (which print on 11x17 paper) are included below.

Individual pullout PDFs: