Five Native Americans have been selected by the Bush Foundation for its prestigious Bush Fellows program for 2025, each with plans to build and enrich their personal leadership skills while forging a vision for themselves and their communities, demonstrating the power of Native changemakers.

The five are among 26 fellows selected in the highly competitive process, which awards up to $150,000 each to support a self-designed leadership plan. The organization received 1,000 applications for the 2025 fellowships.

“Decades ago, the Bush Foundation made a commitment to Native nations, sovereignty and tribal governance,” said Anita Patel, vice president of grantmaking at the foundation, which funds projects and people in North Dakota, South Dakota and Minnesota, and the 23 tribal nations in the region.

Patel said the Native fellowship recipients in this year’s class stood out for several reasons.

“They are so clear not only on who they are but who they are a part of,” Patel said. “The histories they carry with them, the culture within them and how that shows up in the kinds of change they want to see is so grounded, not in serving themselves but in a greater purpose.”

The Native Americans selected for the program include a filmmaker and producer, a director of Native recruitment for a South Dakota university, president and chief executive of a nonprofit that supports Indigenous artists as culture bearers, a tribal official who plans to attend law school, and a tribal court judge who is working to revitalize Indigenous justice.

The foundation’s fellowship program, created in 1963, awards up to 30 recipients annually. It is working together with communities to create change.

“They (fellows) are working together on creating change and coming from the idea that who they are and the community they come from has so many gifts to bring to the change we all need to see,” she said.

The Bush Foundation, based in St. Paul, Minnesota, was founded in 1953 by Archibald and Edyth Bush, who built a company that later developed into IBM. The foundation also funds programs that help entrepreneurs thrive in rural areas, growing the next generation of Native leaders, and creates programs that help build generational wealth. The 2025 fellows were announced earlier this month.

Read the full article about Native Bush fellows by Mary Annette Pember at ICT.