Native Women Lead snags big grant

Native Women Lead, the rapidly accelerating launch of the first initiative intended to prepare Native women for asset management and advance Native American women entrepreneurs, snagged a $650,000 grant from the Comcast NBCUniversal Foundation. The donation will support both the Rematriating Economies Apprenticeship program, which is designed to qualify 10 indigenous women for positions in asset and wealth management or related roles, and grants to seed start-ups by Native women.

The Comcast gift is part of a $1 billion program that the foundation launched in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic to shore up small businesses with cash, digital marketing services and local advertising to offset pandemic-induced isolation. Foundation leaders zeroed in on Native Women Lead specifically because they wanted to reach beyond the standard grant application process to ensure that Native American communities were not left out.

“When we saw that there were low application rates in the Native community, we [learned] that they just didn’t trust that they would actually receive services,” said Dalila Wilson-Scott, executive vice president and chief diversity officer at Comcast Corp. and president of the Comcast NBCUniversal Foundation.

In proactively looking for those who weren't represented among grant applicants, Comcast applied a scaled-up version of an emerging talent development strategy. Often organizational leaders pick the most assiduous self-promoters for coveted developmental assignments. But that often rewards the skill of self-promotion more than aptitudes and potential relevant to the job.

Sometimes less-obvious candidates refrain from nominating themselves for a variety of personal and professional reasons. Just as with self-sidelining employees, Native Americans don’t always put themselves in the mix for grants because in the past, they’ve come up empty, Wilson-Scott said.

To identify Native Women Lead as a strong candidate, Comcast used a method that consulting behemoth McKinsey calls “trawling.” To find high-potential but overshadowed employees, McKinsey recommends asking others whom they trust and who they think would be a good fit. Comcast applied that technique to search for communities that were absent among its grant recipients, which reinforced its impression that a donation to Native Women Lead would reverberate through Native communities.

“There are a lot of people in positions of privilege and power, who say, ’I’m offering these resources and people have to step up,'” Wilson-Scott said of the standard process of open applications. “But you have to ask yourself, am I actually presenting this opportunity to people who can truly benefit from it? Are you going where the gaps are? If that’s your intent.”