For more than a decade, Sacred Pipe Resource Center has been serving urban Indigenous families in North Dakota’s Bismarck-Mandan region. Cheryl Kary, an enrolled member of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, founded the organization in 2012 and it was formally recognized as a 501(c)3 in 2014. The organization runs six community councils, covering Native youth, housing, health, arts and culture, civic engagement, and economic development, on a budget built almost entirely on philanthropy—not Tribal or casino dollars.
From the beginning, the vision for Sacred Pipe was to be a movement organization, not a service provider. “We wanted to be an organization that created action and movement,” Kary says, “that encouraged people to become engaged and to actually do something about the circumstances that require people to need social services in the first place.” That philosophy shapes all six councils, which have moved from civic education into policy work: including an urban renters association pushing back on North Dakota’s ban on rent control, a doula access program rooted in traditional Lakota practice, Sacred Beings which supports foster parents caring for Indigenous children through cultural education and engagement and pushes the state to have the same requirements.
This approach has shown impacts at the individual level too. A woman who attended one of Sacred Pipe’s housing rights sessions reported to Kary that she had recovered $1,600 her landlord illegally charged her. “She told us, ‘I got it back because of what I learned. I knew my rights,'” Kary says. “That’s power sharing. Not us advocating for her — her advocating for herself.”
The same model drives Sacred Pipe’s work with families navigating school resource officers and the juvenile justice system — which is an alarming problem in Burleigh County. The County currently has the highest rate of disproportionate minority contact in North Dakota. Native youth account for 25 to 30 percent of juvenile justice contacts while making up roughly 6 percent of the county’s population.
About 70 percent of the Native population lives outside of Tribal lands, often invisible to both state systems and their own Tribal governments—so the work of urban organizations like Sacred Pipe is essential.
That reality also impacts funding. Despite assumptions about casino wealth, casinos in the region don’t generate much revenue, and even where casino money exists, it flows to Tribal governments, not urban Native nonprofits like Sacred Pipe. Another financial barrier is that less than half of one percent of U.S. philanthropic giving reaches Native-led nonprofits.
“We are at the absolute bottom of the giving landscape,” Kary says. “We know how to revitalize, reclaim, and rebuild. We just need flexible resources and courageous policymakers.”
While the facts don’t paint a pretty picture, Kary does not let that get her down. In fact, it fuels her even more to educate Native American communities and Native American Allies. Earlier this year Kary joined the Alliance’s Native Communities Learning Project: We Are Still Here, as a member of the advisory committee and presented one of the most impactful webinars of the series, on cross-cultural communication.
Sacred Pipe is also a Power Equity Fund grantee, receiving a significant five-year general operating grant intended to strengthen sustainability over time. The fund’s corpus is a $10-million grant made to the Alliance for Early Success by philanthropist MacKenzie Scott, and the grantees were selected by the Power Equity Council.
For Sacred Pipe, unrestricted funding means the freedom to keep building power the way Kary always intended — community-led, community-driven, and supported at the scale the work requires.
Learn more about the crucial work of Sacred Pipe Resource Center at sacredpipe.net