Jobs, Housing and Schools Worth Coming Home To in Native Communities | Joshua Arce

In this episode of the Getting Smart Podcast, Mason Pashia and Jason Cummins talk with Joshua Arce, president and CEO of Partnership With Native Americans (PWNA), one of the largest Native-led and Native-serving nonprofits in the United States. Joshua shares how showing up and following through builds trust with school communities, why leadership training and local jobs help people build a future at home, and how layering culture and language into schools supports the whole student. It is a conversation about what lasting support for Native students and communities can look like, and why hard, physical work in the real world counts as innovation.

Transcript

Mason Pashia: You’re listening to the Getting Smart Podcast. I’m Mason Pashia. Today, my co-host and friend Jason Cummins and I are thrilled to be joined by Joshua Arce, president and CEO of Partnership With Native Americans, or PWNA for the duration of this conversation. It’s one of the largest Native-led and Native-serving nonprofits in the United States.

Jason, would you mind introducing yourself for our listeners? We haven’t heard from you in quite some time.

Jason Cummins: Yeah. We just learned that we started these types of conversations and co-hosting two years ago. So it’s really nice to continue these conversations and highlight a lot of great work going on. My name is Jason Cummins. I’m a member of the Apsáalooke Nation, and I’m currently a professor in the Educational Leadership program at Montana State University. I just really believe that leadership is really impactful in organizations, and so I’m really happy to have a great leader on the show with us, Arce.

So I’ll let you introduce yourself, Josh.

Joshua Arce: Oh, thank you. Greetings and thank you. My Indian name means Bad Thunder. I’m called Joshua Arce. I am Thunder Clan, and I am a citizen of the Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation of Kansas. I’m currently in the Dallas, Texas area, serving as the president and CEO for Partnership With Native Americans.

What Partnership With Native Americans Does

Mason Pashia: Awesome. Welcome. I grew up and spent most of my life in Overland Park, Kansas, Josh, so we have some Kansas connection there. Love it. Josh, just for our listeners who may or may not be familiar with PWNA, can you give us just a pretty high-level view of the reach and impact of the organization and kind of what y’all do?

Joshua Arce: Sure. So PWNA, Partnership With Native Americans, we’re a Native-led, Native-serving nonprofit, and we have a warehouse and distribution center in Phoenix, Arizona, and Rapid City, South Dakota. We primarily serve rural, remote, geographically challenged reservation communities. Under our umbrella, we have six pillars of service. Education, which includes K through 12 backpack and school supply drives, coat drives, shoe drives, those types of things, in addition to a scholarship program. We do vocational, undergraduate, and graduate scholarships, so that’s all in our education. We have a reservation animal rescue program pillar. We have food and water. We have health. We have holiday gift boxes and emergency services and preparedness.

So underneath that umbrella with those six pillars of service, we’re in about nine priority states: four in the northern plains, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, and five in the Southwest, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, and a little bit in California. So that’s kind of that big 30,000-foot view of what we do. We have two arms of work: serving immediate need and supporting long-term solutions. For serving immediate need, we work with tribal program partners in communities. So think about elder nutrition centers, early childhood education centers, domestic violence or survivor centers.

We work with them on some of their immediate needs and requests, and we would get a request from them, and then we would package it up through one of our warehouse and distribution centers and send that out to them. And then we have LTS, long-term solutions, where we’re really looking more at building up leadership and sustainability in communities and really upskilling the members of the communities, so that they are able to continue and have an impact with that longevity in mind and sustainable approaches in mind, with leadership in communities. So that’s really kind of a micro-macro view of the work that we do.

Mason Pashia: Amazing.

Working With PWNA as a Superintendent and Lessons From Haskell

Jason Cummins: I was just thinking, I came into awareness of the organization when I was a superintendent and a principal, and I was really impressed with the ease of working with you. We would receive an informational flyer basically saying what the organization did, and then fill out our student enrollment, and it was that easy.

And then the organization would deliver much-needed supplies and assistance to the school, and it was pretty cool. I’m thinking that was really good. As a busy administrator, it was nice because sometimes you work with nonprofits and it’s a lot more cumbersome. It’s very cumbersome sometimes, and working with your organization was not. The service model was really evident. But I just wanted to share my experience with the organization. And, given your background in education management and leadership, like your experience at Haskell, how can school systems address the systemic barriers that the organization is trying to address?

Joshua Arce: Well, first I want to acknowledge your experience with our organization, and thanks for sharing that, because we certainly try to make sure it’s easy. We don’t want to create tons of hoops or obstacles or barriers for people to go through in addition to what they’re already experiencing. We do have a level of accountability, but we also want to make sure that it’s not overly burdensome or cumbersome for leadership at any of our locations to access the services we have.

So, talking about your question, having had the unique experience of being both a student at Haskell Indian Nations University and then later an administrator at the university, I really was able to see firsthand those unique systemic barriers that we’re faced with as tribal people, as Native people. The beautiful thing about the university was it has a whole spectrum of students, right? You bring together students from an urban setting but also a reservation setting, so you have that whole continuum. You bring together students who are extremely rooted in culture, and they practice their traditional ways, but then you also have the other students who maybe have been removed from their homelands and from their culture and are reconnecting. And then you have the casino-wealthy tribes and also tribes that don’t have a whole lot of resources available to them. So having it all come together in a college setting, let’s put them all together as young people, you really can kind of see the beauty that comes out of that experience, because you get to hear about those true, authentic experiences of what their lives have been like, how they’ve experienced education, how they’ve come to the university.

And then part of the deal while working there was being able to interact with alumni and talk about their experience and what they learned. Haskell might have been their first university, but not their last university. There was also the recruitment phase, where we would go out and recruit new students to come to the university, and you’re really selling what the university has to offer and what made the school unique. So when you bring that perspective, and you’re coming from a Native perspective, and the students see you and they hear you, they look like you, so they kind of think like you, we have some common threads, and it really helped to bring them in and start to unpack some of those systemic barriers that they’re altogether unaware of.

And I think that level of modeling the behavior of education matters. At Haskell, they had a really great layer of professors, and then the partnership with the University of Kansas, where you have your tribal college, but they also share the city with the University of Kansas, which is a major D1, R1 school. And the Native professors and Native programming there created a bridge program where Haskell then becomes a launchpad or a stepping stone, and it can just rocket you to the next level of your professional career like you wouldn’t imagine. Or you’re just using it to get your undergraduate core classes out of the way and get into a master’s-level program. And so I think tribal colleges as a whole, the TCUs, not Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, but tribal colleges and universities, bring a lot of that understanding and awareness, similar to HBCUs. And so it becomes a place where Native students feel comfortable, they get confident, they see that even their traditional education has value.

And so they’re able to bring their whole selves to the classroom in a way that’s very different from just being one of a thousand people in a math class.

Building Trust With Communities and BIE Schools

Mason Pashia: That’s impactful work. It sounds like you kind of just answered this question from a higher ed perspective, which is, how do you go about building this authentic trust with families and communities? But from a PWNA perspective, for K-12 systems or places, maybe like Jason’s community, how do you go about building that level of trust?

Because again, something Jason and I keep uncovering on this podcast is that it’s not a monolith, right? Every community is going to be super different, and a flyer is a way to make a first impact, but then you actually have to go about building that trust and relationship. Ease and efficiency is one thing that Jason shared that I think is a really easy way to trust someone, if it’s easy, and it’s comfortable, and they’re there to help you. But what are some of your other strategies on that?

Joshua Arce: Well, I think showing up is one of the big components: showing up and following through. So doing what we say we’re going to do, showing up where we say we’re going to show up, delivering on what we say we’re going to deliver. That also helps build the trust that we really want to maintain with the community. Right now, for example, we have over 119 BIE schools in our index, so schools that we’ve worked with for years. And those are through relationship building, and the relationship building is where the trust is built. And if you know anything about BIE schools, there can be a revolving door of administrators. And so we are continually trying to make sure that we are viewed as a resource and making sure that we’re getting back out and in front of people to say, “We’re still here, we’re still willing to provide those resources and deliver. Help us help you.”

Because currently there is a new organization called the National Fund for Excellence in American Indian Education, kind of a mouthful, but it’s the nonprofit arm for BIE. Similar to how the National Park Service has the National Park Foundation, the Bureau of Indian Education now has the National Fund for Excellence in American Indian Education. So we’re working now with the National Fund to understand where the need is, and once we can identify the need, then we help bring a solution to the table. So again, we don’t come into communities cookie-cutter style saying, “We know what’s best.” We are meeting the community where they’re at with the request that they have, and then connecting them with the resources that we can get. So it’s being a good relative, always being a connector, and making sure we deliver when we say we’re going to deliver.

Identifying and Rebuilding Systemic Barriers in Schools

Jason Cummins: Definitely. I like what you said earlier about LTS, and you’re addressing some systemic barriers that I think the larger system is contributing to. What do you think schools and school leaders can do to address systemic issues and causes of these barriers, as well as promote healthy economies in their communities?

Joshua Arce: That’s a great question. And from that LTS perspective, what we do with our programming, and I think it can be modeled in schools as well, is you have to identify it, and then you have to deconstruct it. And once you identify the problem and you can deconstruct it, then you can build around that.

So after you break it down, it’s kind of like, I guess, the way the military operates in some ways, right? You deconstruct this idea down to its basics, and you go to the core, and then you rebuild around it. And so you want to be able to systemically rebuild healthy things around those individuals and how to overcome these obstacles and barriers, because there are always workarounds.

There’s the saying of being like water, whether it’s over it, under it, through it, around it, you figure out a way to get it done. And Native communities have done that. That’s why we’ve been in this resilience mindset and survival that we’ve been through, but also understanding our own deficiencies, to say, what has that caused or created for us in our communities? And so it’s being willing to go through that as an exercise. And there are a lot of really talented people, some super smart and educated Native people, and we use Native-led instructors for our courses. So we know we’re going to bring in folks who have the experience in finance that are Native.

And so they’re able to connect with the group in a more meaningful way, because you bring somebody in, and they’re on their ladder of understanding, and they’re way at the top. Sometimes we have to bring people down to a little bit lower level and say, “Let’s build people up.” Let’s not talk about them at this super high level and executive level. We do things like understanding why credit scores are important, how to get a good credit score, how to deal with lateral violence in the workplace, how to write a grant, how to manage a grant. And so those are all things that we look at as developmental pieces for LTS programming.

Entrepreneurship, Brain Drain and Local Opportunity

Mason Pashia: That’s great. Those are skills that could be applied in a lot of different contexts, right? Some of those are life skills, some of those are a little more specific to a sector or industry. How do you all think about this? I think there are two questions here, and you can pick which one feels better.

One of them is around entrepreneurship. How do you teach that kind of skill, which is sort of this exponential opportunity engine where you can spot a problem and try and solve it? And also, how do you all message opportunity to communities? Something we’re seeing in communities across the country, especially in rural contexts, is this double bind of staying in the community and making it thrive versus leaving and going to seek opportunity. And I’m really curious how you all try to bridge that gap or that world, and if you play a role or if you really kind of leave that to the communities to figure out. Not in any way saying that you’re shirking the responsibility, but just saying it’s not your place.

So I’m curious how you all think about that.

Joshua Arce: So I think, and we’ve talked about this with some of our colleagues at the college fund, there’s the brain drain, where the best and the brightest from the community leave, and then they don’t come back. We encourage them to go get these educations, advanced degrees. I think the challenge is really explaining to the community that they have to have the opportunity for them to come back to. And so we spend a lot of time encouraging, even at the tribal council level, setting up a framework or a strategic plan where there are just going to be some things that are permanent in their strategic plan that won’t change.

Education, housing, early childhood care, elder care. You have to develop some pillars that are going to stay consistent. Now, if you want to go and argue about the cost of a hot dog at the bingo hall, you can do that. But let’s make some things constant pillars that don’t change. That way, the community members who leave know they have something to come back to, or come back to work toward. The other part is, and I’ve seen this happen with professionals, they want to come back to the community, but there isn’t a job available for them. It’s not at the pay scale that they need to be successful to raise their family. And so we really have to work at closing that gap, where people love coming back, they want to come back, but there has to be the employment opportunity available for them to come back to.

I think on the entrepreneurship perspective, that’s where a lot of creativity in community comes from, because they are living, seeing, working, breathing, and they’re in community. If we can, sometimes we have funds available called CIPs, Community Improvement Projects, where it’s basically a $10,000 award for whatever idea you’re working on. So when we get the funds available, we can do a call-out, and then we’ve helped organizations really build up their inventory or build up their capabilities in order to be a better serving organization. And that’s where we’re investing in the local sustainable ideas that are coming out of that community.

So I think there is a place for both of them, because there are really good examples. One of them is Makoce out of South Dakota. Nick Hernandez has done a fantastic job developing a center, an idea, in agriculture and in community. We’ve invested in him multiple times on multiple occasions, and we would bring him into a food conference to share how he’s doing it and how he’s being successful in that space. But there are other entrepreneurs that we also use as presenters, and their story is very different, because they have to talk about all the roadblocks that they hit, but how they overcame them and how they’re successful. And so I think both of those are super important to communities, because it can create jobs. It’s visibility, and then there becomes access to new markets.

Staying, Leaving and Coming Back With Gifts

Mason Pashia: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Jason, I’m curious, if you don’t mind sharing, how you feel about that first part personally, because you have kids in community right now that are probably thinking about some of these things. You left for a little bit and came back for a while, and that I’m sure has made you feel certain kinds of ways. So I’m just curious how you are navigating this idea of staying versus seeking.

Jason Cummins: I think we weigh the costs, so the narrative of leaving the past behind and never looking back is a settler narrative: the old country, explore this land. Whereas we’re connected to place, connected to people, and so that idea of leaving is better served if it’s temporary, I think, because when I was a kid, teachers would say, “You need an education to get out of here.”

And I was thinking, “I don’t want to get out of here. Why would I want to leave everybody I love and everybody who knows me?” But then if it was presented as, through traditional teaching, that when you do leave, you always come back with gifts. And I think a lot of our families do that without knowing it’s a tradition. Even if they’re going through the airport, they’re always bringing something back for somebody, a T-shirt back from Vegas or something. But that balance there, and the idea of empowering the community, I think is really deep within all Indigenous tribes, where success is not individual, but success is what we give to the community or the people we care about. And I’m just speaking to that. But with that kind of in mind, what’s something that you really enjoy about your work? What’s something that gives you hope?

What Gives Josh Hope: Food Sovereignty and Community

Joshua Arce: Exactly what you said, for me. Here in Dallas right now, because of the way this operation has evolved and is set up, I love going back to community. Any chance I get, I’m trying to go on a program, go on a delivery or distribution, or I’m trying to get back in community. That’s the part that gives me the most hope, because when I see communities thriving, when I see all the beauty that’s still there, and communities that are just making their world better in so many different ways. We had a distribution that I went to in Shiprock earlier this year, and I mean, it was cold.

It was, I think, in March, and it was freezing when we got up that morning. We go and we distribute six pallets of pet food. And to see the community, RezRoads Rescue, Chantal Wadsworth, to see her get together some volunteers and facilitate that giveaway in the morning, 150 cars came through the line at the Shiprock chapter. And that, I mean, that’s one of the things that I really live for. Putting on my beanie cap, putting on my gloves, putting on my coat, slinging bags of dog food, horse food, cat food, you name it. Those are the things that I love being in community for. We did a program in Moenkopi recently, and we partnered with Chef Pyet, Stephanie DeSpain, and she came in to do a youth program and an adult program. And to see the kids really interact at a level with somebody like her, and her caliber, and cook. It’s a food program. It’s a food sovereignty program, and so we’re cooking together. We’re cooking traditional foods in a more modern way, so we’re really trying to influence that diet. So being able to work with professionals like that always gives me hope. The things that Chef Sean Sherman’s doing out of Minneapolis, and working with him on several different occasions. They’re consummate professionals from a Native perspective that I think are worth that admiration.

And in some ways, you put them on a pedestal, because they’re doing the damn thing at a professional level that is making an impact. They’re spreading the word. They’re teaching people. And I think our young people need those sorts of resources out there that they can turn to and say, “Man, I didn’t know I could be a chef. I didn’t know that was an option.” But now we have tribal colleges with culinary programs. And so I think everything trends in the direction where we’re building up our capabilities again, and we’re not limiting ourselves from our own dreams.

Advice for Starting a Nonprofit

Jason Cummins: To bring it down to just a really concrete example, sometimes people are going through hard times, and in actuality a lot of our families are doing well, and they’re figuring this out and are self-sufficient. But every now and then we would have those certain families who were, “I don’t have any school supplies for my kid.” And so that’s where your organization came in with, “You know what? We have some tablets here. We have some school supplies.” And that just really lit up those little kids’ eyes. So it’s pretty powerful, the work that your organization is doing, and just reaching across, I think, the nation. And it’s that, or career development, graduate support. It’s just doing good work there.

And following up on that, do you have any advice for any other Indigenous people looking to start a nonprofit in their community?

Joshua Arce: The nonprofit work is hard, right? It’s grueling. And in this era, it’s kind of like COVID, where not every nonprofit survived COVID, right? A lot of them closed up shop, or they had to converge. They merged services. And currently this administration hasn’t been super favorable to nonprofits. And so it’s a hard, hard space to be in. I think that if you’re going to be in a nonprofit space, what will carry you is your mission. The mission and the people you serve.

And so what we’ve seen through that up to this point, and this is the part that in some ways really surprised me during COVID, because it could have gone one of two directions for us. We could have been added to the list of those nonprofits that didn’t survive. But fortunately, we have positioned ourselves in a way that we were very successful, because of the mission and the community that we serve. And so we’ve never relied on federal grants. We’ve never relied on huge galas. We rely on donors to fund the work that we do. And so, exactly what you said, with what we do in community in providing school supplies, the care boxes that we provide to elders, the nutrition boxes, the holiday meals. When you see community members and you see people, right? Let’s talk about the holiday dinner. We’re giving people a dinner that includes a turkey, the sides, and we know that meal is probably going to serve five generations of family members, right? Because of the way our communities are. But providing that brings so much more value to the dollar that people give, because you’re right.

I mean, the amount of school supplies that we distribute, the amount of scholarships. We gave away 160 scholarships this year, but we had over 2,000 qualified people, so it’s like we still have an unmet need. We really want to be able to do more, and when we have people that are willing to donate to an organization like ours, we’re able to. But key in on what your nonprofit is doing and how they do it, and you can’t be all things to all people. We are considered a mega nonprofit in our category, even here in Dallas. And it’s better to have a singular core focus, the work you do, the community you serve, and you can be very successful there, but it is hard work. It is hard work with seeking the grants, soliciting funds. I’ve worked with several organizations that never had to before, but now they have to start up a fundraising and development department. And it is a monster. It is a huge monster to try to spin up a donor base when you didn’t have that before.

Schools as Ecosystems and Closing the Gap

Mason Pashia: Something you said there, Josh, that I think is interesting, this idea of being too many things rather than just one thing, right? I think this is actually a problem that is maybe plaguing our schools across the country at the same time. If you ask 20 people what school is, they may have different reasons why it’s valuable to them, whether that be opportunity, whether that be access to broadband, access to food, access to health supports, just general learning, social, a place for people to meet, daycare.

There are so many things that a school provides, and your organization is doing this really interesting kind of supplemental piece where it’s like, hey, if you as a school have the capacity to do three of these things well, we kind of can fill some of those gaps, or we can try and help. And I think that’s really important in thinking about these schools as ecosystems and these places where essentially you’re able to leverage all these different networks and assets. I’m curious about what success looks like for you all as an organization, because I could see, on a roadmap, if you’re 10 years out, you’re like, “Hey, if nobody needs us anymore, we did it.” That’s amazing. So I am curious about, one, maybe what the vision looks like for the organization, and two, how you build that internal capacity for these organizations to either year to year need less, or year to year do some more in-house, or find new ways to leverage you all. Kind of a messy question, but I don’t know if any of it lands for you.

Joshua Arce: So I think a couple of things, tying together to some of the earlier conversation. We have these systemic, deeply rooted issues. And so when we’re talking about some of these things, they all blend back into social determinants of health, right? One of the things is that a healthy community is education and access to education, quality education. And so I think it’s a bit altruistic, and I was talking, I don’t know if I was doing some writing or I was talking to a colleague this week, but a few well-intentioned millionaires aren’t going to solve our problems. They may make a small impact, unfortunately, because systemically it’s a billion-dollar issue.

It’s a multi-billion dollar issue. So you look at solutions coming out of USET, United South and Eastern Tribes, and they have this Native Marshall Plan that talks about the investment of billions of dollars in Indian Country. Those are the types of things that really would put us out of business in maybe 10 years, because that is the level of investment that’s going to be needed to help close that gap. What we do in schools and what we encourage in schools is, like you said, I mean, it’s a social conditioning, some core educational components. But what we’re seeing also is schools like the NACA Inspired

Mason Pashia: We talked with Kara Bobroff a few months ago on here.

Joshua Arce: Yeah. And Kara’s also on the board of directors for the National Fund that I referenced. So these circles start to shrink, right? And they get smaller. Indian Country, I think, is fairly small. It’s like three degrees of separation for people to know each other. But you get into these professional levels, it starts to get smaller. But I think the NACA Inspired schools, the way they layer in culture and language, is critically important to the whole person, and that is what’s going to heal the community.

Unfortunately, it’s a longitudinal study that I’ve encouraged Johns Hopkins to pick up the mantle on. Start now, because the schools that are doing these changes in communities, what will they look like in 20 years? We know that they’re impacting them at the kindergartner level, but follow that throughout the course of middle school, high school, and college, and see how they grow professionally from the things that they’re doing now. And in a broader sense, I think that’s where public schools are failing, is they don’t have a culture component to build into schools. What is the public school identity? What is the American identity? Whereas Native Americans, we’re pulling from historical identity, stories, relatives, connections to place, plants, animals, environment.

We have this level of culture that we’re bringing as our whole selves. One of the big things that we talked about when I was at Haskell was the things that are red flags for students, when they could start doing badly, or we’re looking at them, they may fail out, right? So you have some early flags or warning systems that are baked into your student information system. Financial, academic, the fourth thing that we tried to reference most often was cultural. If schools aren’t including the cultural component, that’s a potential cause for a derailment for a student in school, especially at a mainstream school. As tribal people, as Native Americans, there are cultural responsibilities that we are tied to with our community.

And so that may mean a break in community looks different, a break from school looks different. It may mean that we need a few extra days for ceremonies, for a funeral service, for a holiday, for different seasonal ceremonies. And layering those things into education at the elementary level, like at a NACA Inspired School or those types of designs, really creates that core development of community responsibility. And so I think there is some great programming taking place, and yeah, if we can be a supporter to one of those schools or help ease the burden, whether it’s not just school supplies, but maybe if we have to outfit a school with new furniture. It’s like you can’t have school because you’ve got a new building, but there are no desks or blackboards or whiteboards or filing cabinets, computers, all the things that are needed. That’s where we’re just trying to close the gap.

Funding Systems and Barriers for Native Students

Jason Cummins: I like the work that’s going on. I’ve already said that, but I don’t know if our listeners really understand that your organization’s work is really located at an intersection between federal, state, local, and tribal laws and funding sources. And a lot of times that intersection, legally, is the cause of underfunding in Native reservations.

Anybody can Google how the federal government keeps reservations poor. Forbes magazine, you’ll find a couple of articles pop up. But there really are some regulations, some big systems in play that do keep students from accessing that quality, and your organization is working to meet those needs.

Are there any current efforts that you’re engaged in that you want the listeners to know about so they could possibly support?

What’s Next for PWNA and Why Physical Work Is Innovation

Joshua Arce: So I think we’ve got a really big project that’s coming together, and I can’t completely let the cat out of the bag now. But if you follow us, whether it’s on our socials, through our website, our blogs, you’ll see where we’re going to be closing the gap real soon. That’s going to be really huge. It’s going to be a pretty big project. It’s exciting. We’ve got to keep a lid on it until all the T’s get crossed and I’s get dotted. But we’re steadily on the grind with projects. We’re looking at some really neat programming coming out of Hopi for next year in the conservation, farming space, and so working with lots of different partners.

And it’s really bringing these different teams together in a meaningful way that can provide where the community has more control over the solution. And it’s not just wholly resting on one federal agency or one state agency. We’re trying to have everybody bring resources to the table and network that together better. So I’m always excited. This time of year, Native American Heritage Month is right around the corner. So it’s a great time for us to share our story and the work that we’re doing. But we also want to remind people that we’re Native in Indian Country 11 other months out of the year, so it’s not just Indigenous Peoples’ Day in October. The other 364 days out of the year, we’re still Native Americans, and we’re doing these things. We have lots of different projects. We have some really amazing grant partners. Like I said, we’ve worked with Pyet DeSpain, Nick Hernandez, Sean Sherman. We want to continue the momentum in those spaces with those individuals because, like I said, they bring that caliber, a mainstream caliber, to the table, and recognition that we really want to make sure that we can echo.

Which I think is the visibility component. I get excited for the seasons of new shows. Online has been a great resource, I think, for folks. But there are others out there that we continue to support.

Mason Pashia: That’s awesome. Well, being mindful of your day, I think we need to bring this to a close, but I think this was an awesome conversation. Jason and I, when we were talking to Kara, we asked a question about innovation and how she would define innovation, and I think what this series for me and the conversation today is doing is it continues to complicate this idea of what innovative practices actually are.

I think our audience a lot of the time can get distracted by shiny objects and AI this, AI that, new tech tools that make things easier. But doing physical things in the physical world is so hard, and the fact that you have been able to do this and distribute and have this impact and this commitment is fundamentally an innovation, and it’s one worth celebrating and highlighting.

So I’m super grateful that you’re here today. I hope our educators can listen to this one and take some stuff away from either leadership or new ways to leverage assets. And, Jason, any closing thoughts for us before we jump off?

Jason Cummins: I would just ask everybody to look up the organization. It’s worthwhile work that they are engaged in. They’re the real deal, authentic. They don’t pat themselves on the back enough. They’re doing some real work that educational leaders like me and all my colleagues and our students have benefited from.

So I’ll just say that. So look them up if you’re looking for a group to donate to and to give to. We don’t do plugs that much, but

Mason Pashia: Never.

Jason Cummins: That, never. They’re involved in. So

Mason Pashia: Our first plug.

Jason Cummins: Our first plug.

Mason Pashia: Well, Josh, thank you so much for being here. Really appreciate the time.

Joshua Arce: Thank you.

Resources

Joshua Arce bio
Partnership With Native Americans:
America’s First Cuisine (Pyet DeSpain in Moenkopi):
Pyet DeSpain
Makoce Agriculture Development (Nick Hernandez interview)
Kara Bobroff on How to Make School Serve the Broader Community
National Fund for Excellence in American Indian Education
Marshall Plan for Tribal Nations (USET SPF):
Jason Cummins