Last Thursday, Leonard Greenhalgh, the director of Programs for Native American Businesses and a management professor at Tuck School of Business, met with officials in the Department of the Interior in Washington, D.C., to discuss new plans for a program known as "Building High-Performing Native American Businesses." Assessing results from the past year and considering current public policy in the field, Greenhalgh and his colleagues considered potential changes to the program, which teaches business strategies and entrepreneurial skills to members of Native American communities, that would shift the emphasis from individual organizations to transforming a wider range of businesses.
The Building High-Performing Native American Businesses program runs intensive three to four-day educational retreats across the country for representatives from Native American businesses. Greenhalgh founded the program eight years ago and is working to carry on the program's initiatives for the upcoming fiscal year.
Greenhalgh's recent meeting with the Department of the Interior resulted in a rethinking of how the group approaches helping businesses, he said. Rather than focusing on individual businesses, it may be more effective to design business strategies that keep consider local economy as a whole, he said.
"What we've tried to do is help Native American tribes and entrepreneurs become economically self-sufficient," Greenhalgh said. "We teach them how to run businesses that will bring wealth into communities, provide jobs and create positive role models. We're looking at the businesses they have and how they can make the best use of them."
The program teaches businesses to rely on more than a single source of revenue and ensures that businesses are geared toward high revenue-generating sectors, rather than "dead-end industries," Greenhalgh said. He also hopes to teach the business leaders to take advantage of the natural resources, historically controlled by large outside corporations, that exist on reservations.
Greenhalgh and his team, which consists of several other professors and administrators at Tuck, travel to various locations throughout the year to host the program. While the program is often held on reservation grounds, meetings sometimes take place in larger cities, such as Dallas or Boston, to make the conferences more accessible to a variety of tribes.
"The programs are short and highly intensive," Greenhalgh said. "It's more like boot camp. We go to Indian country and we engage residents. It's a little bit of lecturing and a whole lot of coaching."
Overall, the team has worked with Native American tribes in over 20 states throughout the country, with typical participation ranging from 30 to 50 people at each program, according to Greenhalgh.
Greenhalgh is the principle instructor for the programs and is often joined by several Tuck professors, including Joseph Hall and Phillip Stocken. Together, they provide information on accounting, finance and marketing in order to create business strategies that will help Native American communities develop economically.
"On reservations, we're dealing with tribal council members managing tribally owned businesses," Hall said. "In some cases, we're working with independent entrepreneurs, and just like the businesses represented, the reservations are pretty diverse. Some are doing quite well economically, while others are clearly struggling economically."
One of the difficulties Greenhalgh and the government officials faced in trying to develop a new program was the issue of sovereignty, according to Greenhalgh.
Because the reservations are essentially sovereign entities within the U.S., the team has had difficulty helping these communities achieve economic vitality, he said.
Tuck collaborates with the Department of the Interior to support the Building High-Performing Native American Businesses program, with the Bureau of Indian affairs performing outreach and inviting Native Americans from different reservations to program locations, according to Greenhalgh.
Tuck plays a large role in subsidizing the program and providing various funds, including grants used to cover programs costs, while the teaching responsibility falls upon Greenhalgh and the other Tuck professors, he said.
"Dartmouth has a longstanding commitment to Native Americans," Greenhalgh said. "This program is an obvious outgrowth of this mission. I saw that Native Americans were struggling to survive in the business arena, and so my goal was to help them become economically self-sufficient."
Harvard University offers a program that features a similar relationship with Native American communities, known as the Harvard Project of American Indian Economic Development.
This program focuses more closely on nation-building, however, and attempts to address issues within the legal and governmental structures of Native American nations rather than business structures, according to Greenhalgh.
Greenhalgh's vision for the Tuck program emerged as a result of his interactions with Native American students at the graduate school, he said.
"They told me they had some really special challenges and thought that if you could customize a program that addressed these exact issues, it would be the most powerful," he said. "So that's what I did."
Officials from the Department of the Interior and directors of the Harvard Project of American Indian Economic Development did not respond to requests for comment by press time.
