Announcing Blue Deer Grants ! A a new invitation only grantmaking program in partnership with NDN Fund for Indigenous narrative change strategies for climate, land and labor justice.

This initiative is dedicated to funding critical strategic narrative work led by displaced and diasporic Indigenous communities, fostering a deeper sense of place and belonging through their connection to the land. The program focuses on repair, healing, and advancing a climate-just future.

Blue Deer Grants provide essential communications support for Indigenous peoples working to ensure community climate resilience through ancestral agricultural practices, traditional medicine, and storytelling. By prioritizing narrative change, power-building infrastructure, and digital storytelling, this program ensures that Indigenous voices are at the forefront of shaping our future.

The Blue Deer Grants program is inspired by Wixárika tradition which tells a powerful story about an ancestral teacher whose role is to draw people to the path of knowledge and remembering. This teacher appears when humans forget their purpose as stewards of the earth. In one iteration of this story, the teacher tricks humans by transforming into a blue deer when they are hungry. As it runs from the hunting humans, medicinal and nourishing plants grow where its hooves touch the ground which, in their hunger, the humans eat. The chase results in the humans being lured back to a sense of place and belonging through their connection with the plant ancestors. The humans remember their responsibility and re-commit to their duties of being in balance with ancient powers in all parts of nature and all relations. In essence, Blue Deer reminds us of the importance of being in right relationship with the earth and all that it provides us.

Blue Deer Grants & Recipients

Blue Deer Grants are being made available to displaced and diasporic Indigenous communities that reside in the U.S. This includes Indigenous land-based practitioners, healers, farmers and grassroots organizers across the world who are ensuring community and climate resilience through ancestral agricultural practices and traditional medicine. 

Blue Deer Grants range from $5k - $50k and are available by invite-only to Wildseeds Fund grantee partners and NDN Fund loan relatives. 

“In a world where displacement continues to cloud our horizon, we anchor ourselves to the land through our practices of medicine, well-being and nourishment. Our ancestral ways root us and help us craft our own belonging. The stories that hold and share this knowledge weave a tapestry of resilience and a future for our next generations.” -Esperanza Pallana, Wildseeds Fund

“We are honored to partner with Wild Seeds in the Blue Deer Grants Program.  Funds for Indigenous land-based businesses to document their impact through communications can be hard to obtain. Blue Deer Grants allow this critical narrative change work to proceed. It will also let us lift up the stories as models of what is possible in other Indigenous communities for others to learn from." - Kim Pate, NDN Fund

In 2024, we welcomed four inaugural recipients of the Blue Deer Grants. 

• River Rose Re-membrance is dedicated to re-membering, reclaiming, and restoring baladi (local land-based) ancestral wisdoms and indigenous paradigms of practice.  Their approach is rooted in healing relationship, unveiling stories, and awakening embodied memory/resilience/knowledge in collaboration with the natural world and our cultural practices. This grant supports a podcast series hosted by Layla Feghali on "plantcestral" knowledge, cultural resilience, and liberatory movements for climate resilience and eco-cultural regeneration (decolonization) around the world.

• The Palestine Heirloom Seed Library (PHSL) works to recover ancient seeds and their stories and put them back into people’s hands. The PHSL is an interactive art and agriculture project that aims to provide a conversation for people to exchange seeds and knowledge, and to tell the stories of food and agriculture that may have been buried away and waiting to sprout like a seed. This grant supports the creation of a virtual storytelling platform that will serve as a living, participatory archive of bioheritage, ancestral agricultural knowledge from the Levant, and stories of human-plant relations of heirloom seeds.

• Freedom Community Clinic (FCC) works towards a Whole-Person Healing Future-prioritizing care for the bodies, minds, and souls of Black, Brown, and immigrant communities in the Bay Area. The FCC Ancestral Healing Farm is a 1-acre plot dedicated to the cultural preservation and cultivation of medicines of the global diaspora, including but not limited to: Native & Ancestral medicines of the African, Latine, Asian, South Asian, and Arab diaspora. This grant supports a bilingual docu-series and quarterly seasonal publication that focuses on cultural storytelling videos from medicine elders, farmers, medicine makers, and cultural strategists of the diaspora that highlight ancestral stories and uses of herbs.
• Sol Root Farmer Collective approaches farming as a healing arts practice, where we create spaces to cultivate connections between land and people. The 3 core areas of Sol Root’s work are farm, apothecary, and education. Sol Root incorporates art, ceremony, ancestral veneration, spirituality, love, joy, reciprocity into how they work with the land and put their offerings into the world. This grant supports the Medicina de la Milpa project which documents and disseminates stories, recipes, and narratives of how our lineages have grown food in a variety of climates using the agricultural practice of the milpa.

A Reparative Fee Program: Aligning Investments with Impact

Blue Deer Grants are fueled by a Reparative Fee Program, an innovative mechanism that invites impact investors and philanthropic investors to contribute meaningfully to critical narrative shift. Inspired by similar programs nationwide, the Reparative Fee is a 0.5% charge applied to investment amounts and/or originated lending transactions of the investor’s choice. This revenue directly supports the Blue Deer Grants program, ensuring resources flow to Indigenous-led efforts rooted in land stewardship and climate justice.

This creative collaboration between Wildseeds Fund and NDN Fund ensures the inclusion and support of Native-owned resilient and regenerative businesses. By aligning financial resources with reparative practices, the program invites funders to actively engage in building a more equitable philanthropic landscape.

Join Us in Supporting Blue Deer Grants

Currently an invite-only program, we are seeking additional investors to amplify the impact of Blue Deer Grants. Funders interested in learning more about the Reparative Fee Program and opportunities to support this initiative can contact Esperanza Pallana, Executive Director of Wildseeds Fund, at esperanza@wildseedsfund.org.

Together, we can support the essential work of displaced and diasporic Indigenous organizers and communities as they lead us toward a climate-just and resilient future.

About The Partners

• NDN Collective: Based out of the beautiful Black Hills on Oceti Sakowin Territory, NDN Collective provides the most ambitious systemic approach to empowering Indigenous communities in the history of philanthropy and impact investing.
• Wildseeds Fund: A visionary philanthropic national organization advancing frontline organizations and narratives that build power and embolden transformative change to our food and agricultural systems through climate, land and labor justice.

In solidarity, 

Wildseeds Fund & NDN Fund