When Alexander “Brave Journey” Sterling returned to his home state of Rhode Island in 2022, he asked local members of his tribe, the Ramapo Lenape, what obstacles stood in their way in business and community.
“Part of the problem was that there was no funding for the projects they wanted to get done and programs that would help them achieve greater sustainability,” Sterling said.
Sterling, who previously worked in startups, solar, the San Francisco tech sector and tribal work, decided to take matters into his own hands in addressing this gap.
In December 2024, Sterling incorporated Turtle Island Community Capital, a nonprofit financial institution dedicated to fostering economic sovereignty in Native communities. Over the summer, the business plan got off the ground.
The financial institution will work to expand capital access for Indigenous entrepreneurs while supporting clean energy, climate-resilient infrastructure, and food sovereignty and cultural renewal in tribal communities throughout New England.
About five participants were lined up in the intake phase as of early fall. Sterling anticipates that programming will officially launch in autumn 2026. The program is open to businesses that have been established for at least a year or two.
Turtle Island has already held events such as Native Impact Night, which brings Indigenous entrepreneurs, artists, investors and philanthropists together to share a dinner, discuss community goals and use those conversations to inform new programming.
The financial institution is also partnering with Albany, N.Y.-based business advisory JumpScale LLC to participate in the firm’s Indigenous Resilience Circles program, which uses a cohort model to provide mental, physical and business health resources.
The model allows participants to “work in community through their intergenerational traumas,” Sterling said, “and those blockages that show up around how business has to grow can be addressed, instead of [entrepreneurs] having to spend eight arms and legs trying to cobble together that support independently.”
Sterling, who also has Cuban and Black heritage, says that this sense of community will serve as the foundation for broader programming.
“My dream is to have an interconnected system for Native farmers, Native truckers, Native restaurateurs, all able to provide value to each other and make the area as a whole much more resilient,” Sterling said, “and to distribute some of those resources ... to reduce the probability of mass climate impact taking down the whole system.”
1. Do you believe racism is keeping minorities from starting businesses in the Ocean State or succeeding when they do? Absolutely, especially in the current political climate. This regime has encouraged overt and violent racist attacks on businesses and individuals across the country, including here. These actions, combined with the lack of access to regenerative capital and the historic exclusion from traditional investment, create challenging soil for new businesses to grow in. I don’t think that’s an impossible problem to solve, but it’s one we have to own as a challenge to overcome by recognizing that the systemic underpinning of capital exclusion and high barriers to entry mean that only the most determined entrepreneurs can even get started.
2. How dependent is your business on the support of other minority groups? Is that a sustainable business model? We exist to work in community and to build with the people who are closest to their pain points by acting as a force multiplier for philanthropic and mission-aligned organizations nationwide. By expanding access to the opportunities here to help grow the economic engine of the Indigenous Northeast and Mid-Atlantic, we get to lean in with other minority-owned businesses in making each other stronger. Sustainability gets used in a lot of ways in financial sectors. Sometimes it means working to create regenerative models of capital, and other times it means to fit into the “infinite growth” model of individual success. By focusing on the former, we get to see the cycle of business from inception to growth, expansion and retraction or sale as an accomplishment for our mission. If there’s no community need anymore, we get to build something new and enjoy the sustainability of a well-resourced Native economy where our entrepreneurs have equal access to resources, skills and training.
3. What one thing could Rhode Island do to boost the odds for minority-owned business success? Support us at TICC in creating a Rhode Island Indigenous Commerce Association to allow for culturally grounded entrepreneur-support services to have a home, and a backbone of financial support to grow the capacity of our innovators in the Indigenous community for the Ocean State so that our home can become a leader in the sector.
4. Have you had to turn somewhere other than a bank for a loan? Do you believe the state’s lending institutions generally treat minorities fairly? We’re an emerging Native Community Development Financial Institution, which is a whole industry created by the lack of access to bank loans for minority-owned businesses and [Black, Indigenous and people of color] on the whole. The statistics are pretty clear that Native communities are excluded from the banking system. In 2023, 12.2% of American Indian or Alaska Native households were unbanked nationally, compared with 1.9% of white households. And moreover, 33% of Native community members have suffered bias and/or exclusion from the financial services sector while trying to access their services, and 10% are falling into using payday loans at exorbitant rates, again, nationwide. Here in the Ocean State, we still have almost 3% of the state unbanked, and if you’ve been here a while, you remember the junk fees and redlining that hit our minority communities the hardest, perpetrated by some of our biggest banks.
5. If another minority entrepreneur asked you where they could turn to for support, where would you direct them? Depending on their stage and demographics, come to us, to the Social Enterprise Greenhouse (we’re an alumni of its incubator program), to the innovation lab at the University of Rhode Island (my alma mater), to the CIC [Providence LLC], to the folks at R.I. Commerce Corp., to the [Rhode Island] Small Business Development Center at URI, to their local library, to the R.I. Secretary of State’s Office (sos.ri.gov), and then back to us to connect to the right kinds of capital.
