December 16, 2005

"Hopi Foundation"

Welcome to Leadership Talks with Barbara A. Poley and Loris Ann Taylor of the Hopi Foundation. Questions and answers will appear below starting at 1 pm EST on December 16, 2005. You may need to hit refresh periodically during the interview to see the latest responses. Read background

Leadership for a Changing World
Thank you for joinin us for today's Leadership Talks with Barbara Poley and Loris Ann Taylor of the Hopi Foundation.

Loris and Barbara, how did you each get into social justice work?

Loris Ann Taylor
Loris: I was deeply influenced by events during my childhood. When I was 10 years old, federal enumerators came to my village and surveyed the economic status of each household. A few months later, the results were shared with each head of household and my father was told that not only was he unemployed, he was below the poverty level. My father, a farmer for most of his life, immediately went out and got a minimum wage job. My mother was left to raise the children and the fields became difficult to manage. Overnight, my diet went from vegetables to spam and I rarely saw my father after that. I learned that policy, although well intended, can have devastating and harmful effects if the people for whom the policy is sought, do not have a voice at the table. Social Justice must therefore not only be about getting people jobs or housing, it must be tied to policy making if we are to make long term systemic and transformation change. In my work with torture victims today, I see an incredible need to address their creature needs of food and shelter. But I also know that in order to make long term change, we must be proactive on the political front as well and get their voices heard.

Barbara: Well, I’ve lived now on the Hopi reservation for about 15 years, but my background is living a short distance off the reservation and growing up in a little community called Winslow, Arizona. I have been married for my husband for at least 42 years, and I have two children. I spent many summers traveling to the Hopi reservation to visit my grandparents and other relatives, and so by doing that and learning from my parents, my path to social justice work and also philanthropy was learned from my family. And the concept of giving since childhood—we were all taught within our immediate family to help our clan family and any others who needed assistance in some way. And learning also came from my understanding that it was my responsibility to contribute and assist with cultural ceremonies, which included volunteering time, making food for many, many people, and providing funds, if needed. And I learned that the Hopi giving way is about reciprocity, and these Hopi teachings have become my foundation for developing successful relationships. I remember family teaching me to be respectful of all people, plants, animals, and the earth; to also maintain a good heart; to think positive thoughts; and not to speak with anger.

Washington, DC
Have you drawn your model from one used by any Native American groups?

What are the specific features of your work that are most likely to be adopted by others, that you could collaborate on for greater impact?

Thanks for your insights on these matters.

Loris Ann Taylor
Well, the model for the Hopi Foundation is very much a home-grown idea. And the structure of the Hopi Foundation really developed out of a discussion around the kitchen table by local community members who felt that there were better ways of addressing social issues on the Hopi reservation. And so initially, the idea of a foundation was far removed from their ideas of convening. The idea of a foundation came much later as a result of the kitchen table talks and reaching a consensus that a more formalized structure that was Western in nature could represent their desire, their vision, and their mission to develop solutions from the home front.

Barbara: I think it was a way for them to come together, which is a normal setting in our society, from Hopi teachings of talking about some of the issues that were happening and how do you resolve them. So it was just a natural convening of these people to do that. And I think that’s what provided the strength to the model that we just carried on.

Denver, CO
What do you see as the similarities and differences of starting a grassroots organization within a tribal nation vs. elsewhere?

Loris Ann Taylor
We share the universal challenges of having to build philanthropic capacity from scratch. And I speak primarily of the Western model of philanthropic practices, learning about 501(c)3 practices, sustaining an office and the operations of the organization. The practice of philanthropy is not new to Native communities. We have reciprocity, bartering, potlatches, giveaways, and sharing that is a long time traditional practice among Native peoples. But the challenge of sustaining a modern Western nonprofit foundation requires a balancing between the foundation work itself and the local traditional practices.

Barbara: I think the way we’ve had to work in educating our communities is also a challenge that we share with other Native tribes and maybe others in other communities, but it’s a challenge of utilizing some of the Western language or phrases on philanthropy that the word has been most difficult to comprehend, and how do we help our people understand that what they already have been doing has just been given this title of philanthropy.

Washington, DC
How do you work to grow the next generation of leaders in the Hopi Nation?

Loris Ann Taylor
Loris: Succession is very important to our work. At KUYI Hopi Radio where I was General Manager, I hired a young Hopi woman as the Station Manager with the vision that she would take my place one day. Over a period of two years I (and others in the radio industry) served as her mentors and had her assume greater responsibility in overseeing the daily operation of the station. In December 2004, I handed the reins to her full-time. Our other projects follow this same model of leadership succession. When you work in an environment where capacity, in radio for example, is absent or not a part of the culture, you must grow the capacity from scratch. This requires a certain amount of focus and concentrated effort because your role becomes that of an educator in a school without walls. We have learned that we if we surround ourselves with the best people, we acquire the skill of leading the performance of the next generation.

Barbara: We have consistently been growing new leaders, and these are individuals that have been working for various projects under the Hopi Foundation. We had one of our early young people that we brought on board, who was a young man, very intelligent, and when he finished high school, he was trying to decide on going off the reservation to school or staying at home and taking care of his grandparents and continuing learning his culture because he was already so much involved with what he needed to do with Hopi. He decided to stay at home, and we brought him on board and started training him to become a new leader. And he became a manager of one of our very difficult projects called the Preservation Project that preserves more than 100-year-old buildings in our communities. And he knew the teachings of what are in these type of clan homes that needed to be renovated. And he could converse very well with the males of these homes. He was able then to learn how to manage people, and we put him in charge of a project where he supervised 13 to 15 people, some of them older than him. He currently manages a microenterprise called Gentle Rain Designs, a project in which seamstresses from our community design and make apparel from recycled two-liter pop bottles made into fleece material.

Ada, OK
You are located pretty far from major cities in Arizona, what are some of the difficulties of working in a rural location?

Barbara Poley
A major one is transportation. Being at least 100 miles from a town where people have to do their laundry, to do their banking, to get groceries at a decent price—those are the major problems that we have. I think with the gas prices what they’ve been, even though they’re coming down somewhat, gas prices on the reservations stay higher for two to three weeks after they come down in a city. Low pay in rural settings is another situation that we have to work with. Many of the community people are excellent artists, and with the tourist season now over with, we don’t have enough tourists coming out, they have to try to travel to off-reservation communities to sell their artwork. Many people always tell us, why don’t you put your products on the Web? Well, many people don’t have that capability out here. Having good phone service is also a great need for us. But we have some really great strengths, and I think that having the Hopi way of life where we care for one another, and during the times of ceremonies that take place, because we are somewhat isolated, we are still able to carry out the ceremonies in a respectful manner.

Loris: Let me just emphasize one huge difficulty that we have on the Hopi reservation and on the Navajo reservation, which is adjacent. For many years, we have been experiencing the digital divide, and that chasm has grown over the years. We still have areas in northern Arizona where families do not have telephone service that the rest of the country takes for granted. And in many areas, we do not have Internet penetration, so access to the Internet is not available. And so in our work, communication has been very central through radio broadcasting.

Now, there are a number of other challenges, ranging from depressed economies to distance to isolation to cost factors because of the distance, but I think what we’ve tried to focus on instead is the strength of our community. Instead of looking at our cup as being half-empty, we’d rather see it as being half-full and have asked ourselves what are the resources available in our communities, what are the communication systems that are present, what are the community practices that can advance our interest forward. So in short, we see our communities and our people as being capable, strong, intelligent, and self-determining people who can develop their own solutions, even under the most dire circumstances, that even without the most basic technology that they can over come some of the most pressing issues. Sometimes we have to remember that Native societies historically have existed and survived and displayed enormous leadership and societal strength having to do with little in terms of what we see today as technological advancement. If you look at the Mayan and Aztec societies, if you look at the Hopi tribe, these Nations had a world that consisted of art and music, sophisticated political systems and governance, they had storytelling and a very, very rich culture that had contributed to the modern world. And so while it’s easy to focus on the deficits, it’s much more productive to focus on the strengths of the local people.

washington, DC
Are there folks on the reservation who are not trusting of the foundation? If so, how do you address that?

Barbara Poley
I have not been approached as far as not trusting the foundation. What I think we have ahead of us is to spend some time talking about what we have been doing in the community. We do the work, but we don’t always get the media to come in and ask to do any kind of stories, so there are some people who will ask, what do you do. Then we recognize that we must do more media presentations. But we do have somewhat of the capability to do this through the radio stations that we sponsor on the reservation.

Loris: Community feedback is important to our work, and if you’re willing to listen to the good reviews from your community, you also need to listen to the not-so-good reviews because that’s how you hone your skills, that’s how you refocus your efforts, and I don’t see how you can address your community needs in an honest way if you don’t listen to what the people have to say.

Barbara: We also invite people to come in and sit down with us to talk about what they have in mind, how we could maybe do the work in a good way. As long as they come in with some constructive criticism and some ways to help provide a solution, the door is always open. We also have a good board of trustees who are our ears in our community, and that’s part of their responsibility, to listen to the community and bring those to our attention.

Portland, ME
The Center for the prevention and Resolution of Violence works with people from all over the world. What kinds of lessons or global connections to you see from taking your work to an international level? How has it affected the work that you do on a local level?

Loris Ann Taylor
The Center for the Prevention and Resolution of Violence is the only project we have that has an international reach, but it’s a very local project from my point of view. Our work at the CPRV reaches out to indigenous people who have suffered at the hands of torturers and who come from communities much like Hopi reservations. These are tribal people who, much like the Hopi people, represent Nations that are, in an analogous way, experiencing some of the historic tragedies of Native peoples in this country. But it’s not just the indigenous people that we are concerned about. We are also concerned about the human relationship where economic, political power, resources, can have an impact on people and where individuals can suffer because of their beliefs, their actions, their skin color, and who they are. We think it’s important in the Hopi Foundations to have a position on intolerance in the world and to do what we can to bring healing to those people who need it the most.
Barbara: I’d like to emphasize the development of the youth project from our center, and they are called Owl and Panther, and they started their work by writing poems to assist themselves with their own healing. By doing this, they have become able to get their parents or older relatives to start this type of healing. Not only have they become young people who feel empowered now to talk openly in their community, they’ve gained much leadership skills through this leadership program to go to Washington, DC, visit the Congress, to express what torture has meant to them and their families. And there are many poems that have been written which they are willing to share with the country. These young people have also traveled to the Hopi reservation to work on small projects in writing with our Hopi young people during a summer program that was developed to get this cross-cultural activity going. And while they are here, our young people show them the environment, gain a lot of empowerment from another young person, and there have been many times that our young people from the Owl and Panther would love to stay on Hopi. Some of them because they have fed the land, the corn, and other items grown on the reservation, make them feel like they are at home. This is what many of them had in their own country.

Fairbanks, Alaska
Hi Barbara and Loris. Wondering if the local businesses started by the Hopi Foundation are being operated by local people. How is capacity building provided and coordinated for the managers? Annie

Barbara Poley
The local businesses were provided and still are provided by local people; they are Hopis. The capacity building has been provided by both Loris and I, by taking a look at what strengths they do have, and then assessing what training they might need and assisting in finding the training, if there’s something available locally, or if there’s something that might be off the reservation that could enhance their skills, seeking the funding that will help them obtain that. The other thing is putting them into positions where they are learning on the job, so we have been providing a lot of mentoring.

Loris: Building an economic system requires a lot of concentrated focus because modern businesses were not traditionally a part of the cultural lifestyle of the Hopi people. So mentoring business development includes a variety of approaches that range from drafting a business plan, training business managers, working on the workforce issues, dealing with production, accountability, and everything that a successful business needs and/or requires. The Hopi Foundation has, on occasion, provided the administrative support to these microenterprises until they could be weaned from the support of the Hopi Foundation. We are most proud of our staff and employees who work in developing these microenterprises because not only are they using their creative talent to produce jobs, they are building an economic system that is compatible with the Hopi traditional lifestyle.

Leadership for a Changing World
Thanks again for a great discussion. We have time for one more questions that we like to ask all of our guests.

How do you sustain yourself and your staff to prevent burnout?

Loris Ann Taylor
Unfortunately, we haven't done very much in terms of sustaining our own staff. With only three core staff and several projects to manage, it’s difficult to get away. The core staff has been together for more than 10 years so it speaks to our commitment and devotion to our work. We are open to ideas from our sister and brother organizations.

Barbara: Well, I guess what most of us who are doing the work keep in mind is we are doing our work to uplift our community. And when we have some great things happen among the staff, it is shared, and they are congratulated not only by me and their staff, but it is provided to our board, and when they come to provide presentations to the board, they will provide recognition. I just had a board meeting last night, and the staff providing reports were thanked by our board—of course, they listened to all the good and bad points they had—and they gave feedback and encouragement to the staff. And I saw faces light up, and their response to the board was, thank you, I need that kind of input so that I can do my work better. When we are able to include funds for training at the request of staff, this will at times also help towards getting them away from their day-to-day work for a few days, go off and learn something, and rejuvenate their spirit a little and come home and start again. We hope to do better, and we’re very open to learning from listeners what other incentives could be provided for staff.

Leadership for a Changing World
Thank you for joining us for today's Leadership Talks with Barbara Poley and Loris Ann Taylor from the Hopi Foundation. For more information on the Hopi Foundation:

Barbara A. Poley
The Hopi Foundation
PO Box 301
Kykotsmovi, Arizona 86039
Phone: 928-734-2380
Fax: 928-734-9520
Email: bapoley@direcway.com
Web: www.hopifoundation.org

Loris Ann Taylor
The Hopi Foundation and Center for Native American Public Radio
P.O. Box 3955
Flagstaff, AZ 86003
Phone: 928-853-2430
Fax: 928-734-9480
Email: LorisTaylr@aol.com
Web: www.cnapr.org

Barbara Poley

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