Dustin Goslin
Building Tribal Economy
How can Native values inform economic development? Today, we are talking about building the tribal economy! Dustin Goslin (Pam-Mbwit-M’ko) is a proud member of the Prairie Band of Potawatomi Nation and is the Vice President of Business & Economic Development at the Mille Lacs Band Corporate Ventures.
TRANSCRIPT
Leah Lemm:
Boozhoo. I'm Leah Lemm, citizen of the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe.
Daniel Lemm:
Hau Mitakuyapi. I'm Daniel Lemm, citizen of Lower Sioux Dakota Oyate.
Leah Lemm:
And this is Wisdom Continuum. We are bringing you conversations from awesome Native folks to celebrate Native wisdom for a thoughtful, healthier, more just future. And today we're talking about tribal economy, basically how Native values can inform economic development. We'll talk about that specifically with the Mille Lacs Band. But before we get to that, Daniel, how are you doing?
Daniel Lemm:
I think people don't notice the wardrobe changes that I may go through as part of this recording but-
Leah Lemm:
Well, I noticed that this morning you were wearing a different shirt than you're wearing right now.
Daniel Lemm:
It's true. It's true.
Leah Lemm:
What's the deal with that?
Daniel Lemm:
I didn't have much time. I don't have a lot of time during the day, so I figured over the lunch hour I would sneak in a quick weed whacking, edging the lawn. And so I did not change into my yard clothes for that. So wearing my work clothes, got a few grass stains on it and am now taking care of that.
Leah Lemm:
Yeah, it's kind of funny to see you outside doing lawn care in business casual clothing.
Daniel Lemm:
You know what? I think that's a missed opportunity for lawn companies where what if they did show up in like khakis and dress shirts? What would people think of that?
Leah Lemm:
There should be a clothing line that specializes in business casual lawn care clothing. That's it, you heard it here first. Maybe we'll get some investors. You never know.
Daniel Lemm:
I think we got something going here. We should talk to somebody about this idea.
Leah Lemm:
I know, if only we could.
Daniel Lemm:
Maybe a VP of business and economic development, what do you think about that kind of person?
Leah Lemm:
Yeah, I think that's great. I mean, and knowing that we just came up with this idea just now. No business plan. Yeah. We'll see.
Daniel Lemm:
Yeah. It may not be a novel idea. I mean, here we are, we haven't even done a Google search on this, so who knows what other competitors may exist out there?
Leah Lemm:
Yeah, we got to do our SWOT analysis.
Daniel Lemm:
That's exciting.
Leah Lemm:
See, that's why you love me. Anyway, well, yeah, I'm excited to talk about the Mille Lacs Band tribal economy and Native values when it comes to economic development. Like I mentioned, I know on another program that I host with my brother, your bro, Cole Premo's Native Lights where Indigenous voices shine and we talked to Joe Nayquonabe who's the Head of the Corporate Ventures there at the Mille Lacs Band. I got kind of a little bit of insight on how they operate there, which is pretty exciting. So I think our guest today will do a great job also giving us that view of what's going on and what's that alternate way of operating that isn't like some big investment firm or something like that. Anyway.
Daniel Lemm:
Our guest is Dustin Goslin, Vice President of Business and Economic Development. Dustin is a proud member of the Prairie band of Potawatomi Nation of Mayetta, Kansas. In Dustin's role, he works to build economic vibrancy in the Mille Lacs tribal economy by relentlessly connecting people and capital to leverage sustainable investments in business, workforce, housing, and planned infrastructure. Dustin is rooted in community work and believes in giving back by finding ways to use his role in business to help support and grow others.
Leah Lemm:
And that bio is straight from the Mille Lacs Band Corporate Ventures website, so no paraphrasing there, Dan.
Daniel Lemm:
There's a lot to that. I mean, why would you paraphrase it?
Leah Lemm:
So you're not just like blatantly saying word for word, somebody else is writing, but here we are.
Daniel Lemm:
What excites you about meeting Dustin?
Leah Lemm:
Well, I've heard nothing but good things from you because he's on the board at Blandin where you work.
Daniel Lemm:
That's how I got to know Dustin. Yes.
Leah Lemm:
Yeah. I've heard good things and my dad has been involved with Corporate Ventures in the past and so he knows him as well. I don't know. That's why. He knows two of the most important men in my life.
Daniel Lemm:
He's got a high hurdle here for this conversation.
Leah Lemm:
He's in the waiting room a minute early. All right. My kind of person. Woo. Okay. Ready? All right. So I guess I'll go, I'll start this time. All right, Dustin Goslin, can you please introduce yourself?
Dustin Goslin:
Yeah. So my name is Dustin Goslin. My Potawatomi name is Pam-Mbwit-M'ko, which means "bear standing on its hind legs, looking around." My tribe, I'm an enrolled member of the Prairie Band of Potawatomi Nation which is located in Kansas. If you're familiar with Potawatomis, Potawatomis are spread from Michigan through Illinois, Wisconsin. There's the Forest County folks over there. And then through the Trail of Tears, a couple of bands are relocated to Kansas and Oklahoma. And so my tribe is in Kansas so kind of North of Topeka, the capital city there. And so that's my, me and my siblings tribe, but we grew up in Northwest Wisconsin, near the Red Cliff reservation where my dad's enrolled. My mom and my dad met at Haskell. And so that was kind of the founding.
Dustin Goslin:
So most of my life I've lived in rural places, grew up in, again, on Lake Superior, kind of know Ojibwe probably the most. And so nowadays I migrated over to this side of the border probably in like 2005 for college, kind of stayed here, liked it. Got the missus to move over here from that side of the border, and so now we live in Ocamacua, excuse me. And so that roughly translates to queen city, which we now know today as the City of Brainerd. And so we live here now for better part, almost a decade. We have two kiddos, a seven year old and a four year old. And so I work for Mille Lacs but I've had kind of a fun little journey in life.
Dustin Goslin:
So I think there was a storytelling space I was sharing kind of the, my life's journey. It wasn't really linear at all like there were kind of offshoots that I took, there were kind of right after college. There was what I call the dark years where I got lost, got a little off track. I had some really cool people in my life that helped get me back on track. Went to school, started in business, in hospitality specifically. Made my way around from a small mom-and-pop place to working for Hilton Hotels. Spent a short kind of stint in Indian Health Services up in White Earth. Then migrated back to hospitality, worked for Mille Lacs, first in Grand Casino. And now the last seven, eight-ish years, I think, in economic development. So it's the whole from start to today.
Daniel Lemm:
Thank you for sharing that, Dustin. When Leah and I were prepping for the show here, I was telling her a little bit about your work in conversations that you and I have had, or at least have been a part of as well. One of the things that Leah and I came to the conclusion of is that we're all nerds. We think of being called a nerd as a compliment. Do you have any sort of reaction to that? Do you consider yourself to be a nerd?
Dustin Goslin:
I totally embrace it. We all live and work in rural communities and there's kind of this maybe stigma sometimes around academics and nerdy people. I totally embrace it and I lean into it and I frequently call myself a nerd and I totally own that part of me. Like one thing that I think we can all say is each kind of industry and area has all their own acronyms and way that they speak about things. I think academics are the same. I was just at the Reservation Economic Summit a week ago, two weeks ago, something like that. There was a panel that was speaking and it was a couple of well known tribes. I believe Seminole was up there. San Manuel was there and then Mille Lacs was up on the panel. They were talking about real estate development. And so they were using some of these finance or real estate words like debt service, collateral, loan covenants. And so I was sitting next to one of my team members from our property management team and so he's new to the space.
Dustin Goslin:
And so this was his first dance and learning about economic development. And so as we're sitting next to him, he's like just sitting there, had a confused look. I was like, dude. I was like, what he's saying when he says like, and so I was translating some of these words that were just jargon. I was like, he's just talking about a loan, he's talking about a mortgage. They're like using these big fancy words up there on these panels, I'm like, dude. I was like, in every industry, you get this. Daniel knows in like accounting worlds, there's all these big words. There's easy ways to translate them down. I think academics often kind of get stuck in that space too, where you get in your little lingo and how you speak. Especially economics, oh man, economics are like the worst people to talk about inflation and like all the different cool little terms that we all know but most people are like, what the hell is that?
Leah Lemm:
Yeah, you can really alienate people when you try to speak at some, with this different like coded language. But there are other ways to communicate, especially when you have the assumption that everybody has a pretty good level of intelligence, they just aren't necessarily familiar with your line of work. As somebody who studied economics and then worked in radio, I'm just like, there's so many. Yeah. Like inside ball that we can look at that we can play when it comes to all of our sectors. I'm actually really curious. You said you went from hospitality to economic development, and that was within like the same sentence that you said that. I'm actually really curious how you went from hospitality to economic development.
Dustin Goslin:
I have embraced this idea that I'm an academic, but I also really embrace that I'm an entrepreneur. And so in everything that I've done in the industries and places I've worked, I've brought this idea that things don't have to be the way they are and you can innovate and do things differently. I think from healthcare to hospitality, I've embraced that. And so I think within Mille Lacs, there were folks that saw that. I would go out and ran hotels for Grand Casinos, and so there were just different little cool things did along the way. We bought all these new beds in Grand Casino, and so our guests loved them and recognized like, "Dude, we should find a way that we can build our brand and also make a little cash on the side like let's start selling our mattresses." We went out, called up Serta. We created this whole like deliver your bed campaign.
Dustin Goslin:
One of our vendors make like a little mini bed and put it on display and it was all cute and people loved it, kept trying to buy it. Immediately, that was like one of our biggest sellers. Everyone brought this bed home. And so little by little, all these different little things I would do all the time that were just super fun to me and exciting were just really me being myself and being an entrepreneur. And so the transition from hospitality doing all that fun stuff to like more broadly speaking economic development in this industry, I think was an easy change. The biggest change for me was like looking inside the four walls of our business on innovation entrepreneurship. And then now in economic development, looking outside the four walls of MLCV on like, how do we innovate maybe more entrepreneurial around economic development within the area?
Daniel Lemm:
Dustin, those were some solid examples of innovation. Interesting, I didn't know about that. Did you say build a bed?
Dustin Goslin:
Yeah, it was Serta. We actually got, at the time, we were starting to get really lean into it. I had this whole idea in my mind where I was like, man, people love those dang beds when they stay in hotels. We should have like where people can build their own pillows. How cool would that be? We had like a little shop in our casinos where there's different fills and you can go in there, like Build-A-Bear except for build a pillow. They super love their own pillows and beds, and so we did that. We did a little candy store concept called The Chocolate Loon. We created all these cool t-shirts. We were experimenting and creating our own stuff. There were just tons of cool little entrepreneurial things that we got the pleasure of doing.
Leah Lemm:
I love that, because who walks away from a hotel and is like, you know what? I had the best night's sleep, that bed was better than my own. Like never. That doesn't happen. So when it does, that means you're onto something.
Daniel Lemm:
There's a few chains out there who say that's what your experience is going to be, but they don't necessarily deliver from my perspective or my experience of it.
Leah Lemm:
We're just spoiled.
Daniel Lemm:
That may be. Dustin, I mean, you've shared some tangible examples here of your work. We did do a bit of your bio as part of the intro here. Wondering if we could just take a step back and could you give us an overview of what you do with the Mille Lacs Band?
Dustin Goslin:
Yeah. First off, so I work for Mille Lacs Corporate Ventures. Mille Lacs Corporate Ventures, to take a little journey in history, Leah. The band as you probably know, operated under Reservation Business Council form of governance back in the '80s. And so late '80s, the band decided through their leadership at the time that they wanted a separation of powers form of governance, similar to the U.S. government that has the branches, the three branches of government, executive, legislative, and judicial. And so they moved to that in the late '80s. And then as the next means of the work that they were doing, they wanted to create these special bodies that would do focus areas and govern and oversee them. And so as a part of that whole creation of political subdivisions, Mille Lacs Corporate Ventures was created. Although back in the day, it was called the Corporate Commission of the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe Indians. And so we were chartered under tribal law.
Dustin Goslin:
I read the original charter multiple times. And so in the original charter, it had probably like 40 plus things that we were destined to do in MLCV. And so when you take all of those little things and kind of theme them up, there were these three walking orders that the band gave us. It was people, place, and capital. The people, we were kind of created as an instrument to create jobs and opportunity across the region for the band and its members. The capital sides, we were created to build enterprises that could be profitable, could capture dollars and then distribute them back in the form of capital to the Mille Lacs Band that would power their good work over on the government side. And then there was all of these goals and things that they asked us to do around place.
Dustin Goslin:
And so the band really wanted MLCV to build this vibrant place. The band recognizes a lot of importance to the land that they're on. And so they wanted Corporate Commission MLCV to make sure that this place was vibrant and prosperous and its members were happy and had the economics to live a good life. And so over the past like 18 months, 24 months, we've been working on what we call the strat plan in MLCV. It's a throwback to our original founding, which is we're measuring what we call the three pillars, which are the people, place, and capital. And so underneath each one of those pillars are goals and initiatives, and then there's people under them that do the work. And so my role as the VP of Business and Economic Development for MLCV, I primarily play underneath the first pillar, which is the tribal economy pillar, which is the place pillar. And so a lot of the things that I do revolve around, how can we invest right? How can we build the right types of projects within the geographic area of the tribal economy?
Dustin Goslin:
And so I get to oversee. One of the goals that we have is around data and information. And so we are always doing studies about what makes the economy tick and what are ways that we can leverage our resources to help grow the tribal economy. The second goal is around building an ecosystem of business investment within the tribal economy. And so underneath that goal, we have a whole bunch of work around entrepreneurism. How can we help jumpstart entrepreneurism and wrap resources around people living in the tribal economy to help jumpstart their business and grow it. We also do a lot underneath that goal around workforce housing. We do a lot around what we call transportation, which can be the physical part where we do studies about what can help spur economic growth to more of the virtual kind.
Dustin Goslin:
And so we've been dabbling in broadband as of lately, getting a whole bunch of cool progress and things there. And then the third goal underneath that pillar is around this idea of stakeholder engagement. And so I think for the longest time, MLCV would communicate to its owners, so the Mille Lacs Band members own the tribal corporation. And so we would have regular cadence of intervals or interact through a newsletter, through the annual report, through state of the band, through different kind of mechanisms. And so we've broadened that through our strat plan to understand who the other stakeholders are. And so other stakeholders are like elected officials from cities and towns across the tribal economy. Our workforce is a stakeholder group. There's lots of different little stakeholder groups that we've defined. We want to have more of a regular cadence of not just outward communication but inward engagement.
Dustin Goslin:
And so Daniel was able to come down a couple of weeks ago to our first Tribal Economy Summit in Mille Lacs. And so it was so cool because, well, one, it took a long time to plan it. That was like two years into making. But two, that was our first foray into testing out the strat plan around inviting this diverse group of people that were all over, both from Mille Lacs Band members up to like elected officials of Pine County, to the mayor of Onamia and Wahkon. And so it was really cool. To answer your question, I play really in that place pillar, but I also dabble in the other two pillars, the people and the financial side as well.
Leah Lemm:
I think it's important to highlight what the tribal economy means in this sense. That it extends beyond borders and enrolled tribal members, but it is a much larger bubble, the tribe itself.
Dustin Goslin:
Yeah. That's a super interesting point. And so when I first started my role, we started asking around like... So my role really was defined at the outset of like, you have to find ways that we can build the economy of the tribal economy. My first question was like, what the hell is a tribal economy? And so I started going out in the community and asking people, and most people would define it as like, oh, that's the casinos. Or that's like the quarter square mile around the casinos. That's where all these stuff happens on the tribal economy. It's like, all right, well, that's cool. And so we started doing these individual one-off research studies and one of them was in McGregor.
Dustin Goslin:
And so we were looking at McGregor and we were like, how many people are up there? What are the demographics? What makes the economy tick up there? And we started finding all of these population amounts of working adults who were like commuting long distances into Onamia zip codes and Hinckley zip codes. It was like, wait a minute. How does this work? There's these people that are living like 45 miles away and they're driving all the way down here to these places that have businesses or government operations. And so as we started doing that in different communities, we're finding the same thing. It's like, wait a minute, the tribal economy just isn't around the casino and also just doesn't include tribal members. There were non-tribal people that were within those census counts and information that were also traveling and working.
Dustin Goslin:
And so we actually created this heat map that showed where all the economic activity was across the region. And so you could see these big red dots around the district one, so Vineland, Onamia area, Hinckley. You could see these huge heat maps of employment concentrations. And so we were like, all right, so we know the tribal economy is a lot bigger than just this little zone around the casinos. How do we measure that? And so then we were like, well, what if we did countywide? And so we started thinking that could maybe work. Pine County, it might work because we're the biggest employer in that county. We pay the most amount of taxes. All right, it works over there. Aitkin, not so much. Mille Lacs County, not so much. Mille Lacs County is a long, skinny narrow county.
Dustin Goslin:
Most of the economic activity in Mille Lacs actually happens in the Southern part of the county. The Northern part of the county is really like, the tribe really drives the economics of it. But in the Southern part, it's completely different. And so I was like, all right, well, that doesn't work. And so we were exploring different ways that we could quantify it. We landed on census tracks, which was really, really cool and nerdy, but it worked for us because it gives us something that the other data points couldn't and it gives us trackable data over time. And so now we could really determine like what's the health of our economy by determining the people who live in there, the demographics, their income, poverty, like household, home ownership, all that cool stuff. And so we defined it as then these six census tracks across three counties as the Mille Lacs tribal economy, which we're super pumped, it's now starting to gain ground.
Dustin Goslin:
It was neat in the summit too where initially there's the knee-jerk reaction from some non-tribal people that were like, "I'm not in the tribal economy. What is that?" I was like, "Dude, it's just a geographic description of the region that we all live in. "Do you know you're part of RDZ5 zone?" All these different geographical descriptions. They're like, "Well, no." It's like, "Well, why is it a big deal then when you say you're part of the tribal economy?" "Oh, it's not." And so we've been trying to build this energy around like it should be cool that even if you're non-tribal that you live in a tribal economy, because now you have all these cool things that can happen within the community. And so I think that summit that we went to was hopefully a big first step in building this idea that people across the region are super proud and excited that they live in a tribal economy.
Daniel Lemm:
Dustin, I heard that loud and clear as part of the summit about what makes up the tribal economy and who even is a part of that. I think it even goes back to something that you talked about earlier as a translator between jargon and translating that jargon, industry jargon to anybody. What you said there even at the end was how people didn't see themselves as part of the tribal economy, but if they look at it a little differently, they see how they're a part of it and they understand what it means to be part of the tribal economy. That's a cool connection, a takeaway even for me with this conversation about how we phrase things and rephrase them so that we can all understand how we're part of the world around us.
Leah Lemm:
Well, especially when, sorry, especially when the tribe and the tribe businesses employ majority non-tribal members. Like that I think is just a huge obvious example of how the tribal economy clearly extends beyond any sort of specific border or enrollment status. It reminds me a lot of, even like the pandemic when vaccines were getting rolled out and the tribal IHS places were extending invites, giving out vaccines to not just tribal members but all members in the community. And they ended up being a large part of the vaccination process for non-Native people as well. And the more and more people were realizing that, they're like, oh, my local tribe cares about me and I'm not a tribal member. When we start to see that more and more the importance, the role that tribes and tribal businesses, tribal healthcare can play in a community, and it's more inclusive than we think. I think that's really neat and is great as more and more people realize that.
Dustin Goslin:
Yeah, for sure.
Leah Lemm:
We talked about economic vibrancy and you mentioned the phrase economics to live a good life. Can you expand a bit on what that means for Mille Lacs Corporate Ventures and for you? What does that mean, the economics to live a good life?
Dustin Goslin:
Yeah. I was just visiting with a tribal person in Northern Minnesota. We were talking about a healthy community and a vibrant community, and that word could sometimes be so ambiguous. I shared with her this idea that I learned from some folks in the University of Minnesota Extension, they do a lot of work around community capital mapping, if you're familiar with it. I don't know who started that, but it's kind of a cool concept. They've defined seven types of community capital. And so I wrote them down, they're natural, cultural, capital, human capital, social capital, political capital, financial capital, and built capital. And so I think when most people ask about vibrancy in a community, they'll land on the built stuff. They'll think of the buildings in town or that's like part of the vibrancy. So if they have this building, it's like this, like it's a healthy community. But I think looking at it from that community capital framework, you can have no built environment or limited and you can still have a happy, vibrant community.
Dustin Goslin:
And so I think when I think about what is a vibrant community or a vibrant tribal economy, I think about that. I often get to work in the financial and built stuff, but working in Indigenous nations and tribal nations like for now most of my life, they're just rich in like social capital and cultural capital and human capital. And then on the build capital, sometimes it's not so much. Some tribes have more than others, but I think starting with that framework of it's not just about this physical structure can help set your frame of mind around what makes a happy, healthy, positive community.
Leah Lemm:
So then I think that leads into Mille Lacs specifically, what values and priorities drive this economics to live a good life? This economic development and innovation for Mille Lacs Corporate Ventures and those businesses and the community.
Dustin Goslin:
Well, I think one of the things we always share in MLCV is just how, like we borrow so much from the band. We borrow their Anishinaabe values, so the seven traditional teachings. The honesty, humility, wisdom, respect, truth, love, and bravery. And so we don't just have those on our wall and in our mission statement, we try to live them through all of our work. And so as a tribally owned corporation and as a political subdivision, we want to leave the world a better place than when we started it. And so in all that we do, we always think about, how do we not burn bridges? How do we be good stewards of the resources that were given to us?
Dustin Goslin:
And so you see that even in our strat plan with this idea of the pillars. Like how many companies out there say like, we're committed to these geographic places or to our people and actually do it? Not just window dressing. And so there's a really cool attorney that works for us. He's our head attorney and he's a super nerdy guy in itself. He went and got his MBA. As a part of his MBA, he went through like this, I don't know if it's a history class or what, but it talked about the evolution of corporate governance. We talked a little about in the start about tribal governance. So he shared with me this idea of corporate governance in America.
Dustin Goslin:
And so it all started in the '80s era. It was this idea around shareholder supremacy. And so it was pioneered way back in the day in the U.S. government around this capitalist idea that businesses and organizations only existed to maximize revenue, minimize expenses, and reward their shareholders. And so you saw all of this at the time, people were talking and sharing, there was movies around like greed being good and this idea of extractive businesses and economies are a good thing and everyone should support them. That's the American way to do it. And so for the longest time you just saw where employees were becoming less valued, you see the demise of labor. And so all of that worked well in the minds of people that controlled the capital for all of those years in the greater American public, like most people were supportive of that.
Dustin Goslin:
And then you saw the collapse of it back in the late '90s through all of these big scandals. And so you saw the collapse of Enron. You saw the collapse of these things that were too big to fail. And so then the corporate governance world went to this next generation of thinking of corporate social responsibility where all of a sudden all these big companies and businesses were thinking like, Hey, maybe we should have some type of a social good in our company, but let's just dedicate less than 1% of our revenue to it. Let's create an office of corporate social responsibility and stick someone over there and do press releases around how cool we are and how many good things we do.
Dustin Goslin:
And so around that time you saw all these big Fortune 500 companies and businesses all across the U.S. have these token departments and people where they were like, whenever they would get pressure from people, they would be like, Hey man, we got this over here. We do good. See, they're over here, they're doing stuff. And so that was cool for a little while until people realized it was just like window dressing. The companies really didn't care and they're still extractive. They're extracting profit on the backs of their people. They're extracting from the environment and blowing things up and weren't thinking about the future generations of people. And so then again, you saw this big collapse of the American economy, and so it was basically what created the great recession.
Dustin Goslin:
And so you saw, again, all of these banks and financial places that were doing these subprime mortgages and people were losing their homes. It ultimately resulted in this big collapse and all these banks were just failing all across the board. It was creating this disastrous ripple effect and spun us all under recession. And so then as a result of that, you see this newer thinking. Everyone, like all these smart people are like, oh man, there's this idea that business should be a force of good and let's think triple bottom line. You see articles on Harvard Business Review about net positive companies and these companies that embrace this idea of creating shared value, where again, like they want to leave the world a better place than what it was.
Dustin Goslin:
And then you look at Indian-owned businesses and tribes and they're like, dude, we've been doing this all along. This is what makes us tick. We've always thought we should be good stewards of the land and our resources and our people and we should never do bad things in the backs of all of these like important things to us. And so I think it's just interesting how the world is evolving and how, again, points back to tribes really having this cool idea around the values-based like economy values-based like government and business operations.
Leah Lemm:
Yeah. You're talking about thinking about stakeholders differently. I would assume then that all of our relatives, whether it's water, land, our plant and animal relatives are also, are they explicitly considered stakeholders?
Dustin Goslin:
That's a cool concept. I guess I've never really thought of it like that. Yeah. I liked that. There was a, he was a Mille Lacs Band elder that didn't tell me directly but I heard it through the grapevine. He was talking about, we have this project we're working on in MLCV and I lovingly call it our seven gen plan. It's this big transportation plan that we're trying to pull off. And so this elder said a seven generation plan is actually, it should be looking three generations back, respecting the present generation, and then looking three generations forward. And so the idea is that you got to the place you're at today because of the people and the resources and everything from the people behind you. So you shouldn't not respect the people that came before you into your work moving forward. You should also respect the present and celebrate the good things that are happening.
Leah Lemm:
Yeah. I've been in some conversations with some folks from my alma mater where I studied economics. And trying to think about what could be a more aligned Indigenous economic model that includes all of our relatives that we're trying to maximize for the benefit. And there are some new thinkings too around that, but it's less popular or less mainstream or not at all, I guess.
Daniel Lemm:
I'm thinking here about, so it was Milton Friedman who said the purpose of business is to maximize shareholder wealth. It's like, what if instead of shareholder wealth where you said community wealth? What if the purpose of business was to maximize community wealth? And community wealth being measured through those seven community capitals or seven capitals that you listed off, Dustin. I think that could be an exciting new way of looking at what we all do that's not popular just yet, but certainly could become so.
Dustin Goslin:
Yeah, there was, back in the day, pre-pandemic, we were working on a project in one of the more remote communities within the tribal economy. And so we're trying to figure out this way, we were challenged by the tribe on, Hey, how can you create better paying jobs in this area to help lift people out of poverty? Give people the economic means to pay for the homes and everything. And so we started finding ways. One of the easiest ways that we could do it was through leveraging our supply chain in our core business, which is the casino. I was getting nerdy and digging into like, where do we spend money? How can we spin off something that would produce some good jobs that we could locate geographically within that community?
Dustin Goslin:
And we landed on, we bought a lot of bread. And so we had buffets at the time, a bunch of casino restaurants, and we had resorts all over the place. And so then it was like, all right, well, could we make bread within this community? So we got all nerdy and I learned a whole bunch of stuff that I probably never would have otherwise learned about dough and bread. And so we found out there were 17 different types of dough that we had to produce in order to fulfill what the casinos purchased every year. And so it was like over a million dollars worth of bread that we'd buy every year from places like down in the cities. They would basically either sell it to us already baked or they'd sell us in pucks. And then we'd basically finish it off in the casino kitchens.
Dustin Goslin:
And so then we went through this whole process of, how do we build a factory to build bread within one of these communities? We had this whole logistics challenge of, we have to build a transportation line that goes across 180 square miles every day to deliver this delicious bread. And so we came up, we ended, it was going to be our first net zero building, which if you're familiar with that terminology, it basically is a building that produces more energy than it consumes. And so we had solar and we had this water recycling system. We had geothermal heating and cooling on the production floor so our staffers baking the bread wouldn't be melted alive by the hot ovens and it would still be efficient for us to keep it cool back there.
Dustin Goslin:
And so anyway, so we did all that, there's this big, beautiful project. And then it came up on the financial return on investment was like icky. It was like the business itself, it was still profitable, but when you looked at the amount of capital you had to invest in that bad boy to basically generate the traditional shareholder return, it was like less than 1% or slightly breakeven. And so then it was like, well, I don't know if we're going to get support for this. So we went out and I was like, well, we're not really doing it for returning... This isn't a pillar three thing where we want to return a bunch of capital to our owners. We're doing this to build wealth within this community and that's what we were challenged with. We went back and we were like, all right, so what are the jobs we're producing?
Dustin Goslin:
And so we're able to use economic numbers to know that the area median income of that community was at like, I can't remember. It was like 18,000. The average starting wage of our jobs with benefits was like 45,000 something in there. And so we were able to immediately show the lift that this business would provide in terms of capital going back to jobs within that community. And so then I created this model that all of my fellow bean counters were like, their heads are blowing off their bodies over. So I put the financial returns on one side and then the community returns, which I quantified as the amount of labor dollars that were invested in this community that were above the median income for a household within there. And so then we had like another slide that would show like with this extra dollars that were now in this community, here's what these people, these 11 people that would get these jobs, here's what they can do now.
Dustin Goslin:
And so we're able to trace, like they could buy, build their own homes. They could buy a new car. They could do all these cool things. And so it was this really cool model and people really latch onto it. We found an investor in New Markets Tax Credits that got super bought into it so we were able to recruit a bunch of those. I think it was over four million dollars in New Markets Tax Credits that an investor was willing to contribute to that project. And so it was all great and beautiful and then the pandemic blew everything up because all of our casino, buffets and restaurants were all kind of disrupted through COVID. But it was a cool idea and I was super pumped and excited and I also got to sample a lot of bread, had to learn how to make it, not burn it.
Leah Lemm:
Yeah. Well, I know I'm getting kind of hungry thinking about all this bread, million dollars worth of bread. That sounds like heaven. Yeah. That's very cool. Is there anything else that you see happening at MLCV that is exciting that you're like jazzed for?
Dustin Goslin:
Yeah. I think there's lots of exciting things. I could probably list off a couple dozen. I would say probably the most exciting things are for me, maybe the non-financial. So I see people getting excited over projects we're doing that are tribal and non-tribal and people willing to contribute their dollars, their sweat equity into ideas and projects. It feels like it's growing steam. So I live in the Brainerd community. And so downtown, if you've been downtown lately, the downtown, if you went down there 10 years ago versus today, it's completely different. And so 10 years ago, it was like this decrepit downtown where it was all bars and I'd never bring my kids down there. And nowadays, there's a bakery down there. There's a bath company. There's this dude that makes Kombucha which is really good if you never tried it. And so I asked one of the people who helped, was like the instrument to start that change.
Dustin Goslin:
At the time he was like, it was just a couple people getting together and saying like, there's two ways we can change our narrative down here. We can either do one big project and it's big enough that it generates these ripples that keeps going, or we can do a bunch of little penny things. Those little tiny things, we celebrate the wins and then we move on to the next one. And incrementally, it just creates this monumental wave of positive change. He's like, "So we did the little thing." He's like, "We started with, let's start one new small business downtown that's not a bar." And at the time, they had like 18 open storefronts. And so they got all the local business community and stakeholders and community members all around it.
Dustin Goslin:
They had all these in-kind contributions where people would help paint it and they were offering marketing services and website design and local architect and free hours to help redesign it. And so that business launched. And then since then, they do that same kind of cadence of like an enterprise kind of a bootcamp or entrepreneurial bootcamp where they get people to compete on ideas and they get this basket full of cool goodies and they get to launch their business. And so fast forward to today in Brainerd, I was just talking to the chamber guy and he was like, "There are no open storefronts downtown." So that little ripple rolled really big, and now Brainerd has this revitalized cool downtown where now it's trendy and hip and everyone wants to be down there.
Dustin Goslin:
And so I think about in Mille Lacs, we're doing a lot of that stuff and I feel like the ball is rolling now and the snowball is getting bigger as we do. Even in Onamia, this town of 800 people, we have this new workforce housing project that already broke ground this year. We're embarking on, we just got dollars to do a community daycare there. We also got dollars to do a new business incubator in that tone and like, that's a huge investment in that little tiny town. I was just at an event today with one of my partners in crime. We're talking about like, "Dude, let's really lay into that, how do we keep that thing freaking rolling?" Because there's so much positivity in that little town, like this traditionally non-tribal town that embrace this idea of this tribal corporation, there's tribe located right next to them in the same community. Like let's all work together and create this really cool thing to happen here. It's just super pumped. I guess that's what I think is the coolest thing is just seeing the snowball effect of this positivity and shared wellbeing and forward momentum really creating really cool things.
Daniel Lemm:
Dustin, you talked about earlier about jumpstarting new businesses and you talked about being an incubator of sorts. Leah and I had a conversation and we were going to pitch you an idea for a lawn service company where the uniform is made of khaki pants and a dress shirt. But we don't have a business plan or anything like that. So maybe after this conversation, we'll bring that to your attention and then you can tell us all the reasons why it won't work.
Leah Lemm:
See, that's not even the business we agreed on, Dan.
Daniel Lemm:
Well, I'm innovating here, Leah.
Leah Lemm:
Yeah, on the spot without your partner, without my buy-in. See, Daniel was doing lawn care before our meeting in his work clothes, his button down shirt long sleeve and his nice pants, and then he got grass tints on.
Daniel Lemm:
I'm a busy guy.
Leah Lemm:
I was like, what if we had clothes that were business casual that you could also do lawn care in?
Daniel Lemm:
Leah, I wasn't going to put our best idea out there onto this podcast. I was going to hold that card close to me.
Leah Lemm:
Yes. Perhaps we should stick to what we do best.
Daniel Lemm:
We've got a lot of other bad ideas, Dustin, but we won't take your time over it.
Leah Lemm:
We got plenty of them.
Daniel Lemm:
Dustin, sort of toward wrapping. Oh, I've got so many puns with the bread company. Just like, it takes a lot of dough to make that dough. But I think that's cool how you were thinking about, you were talking about that triple bottom line. Obviously not only the financial returns but also the social returns, as well as returns to people in their individual lives. Awesome, awesome example that you were talking about there. In this conversation, is there anything else that you wanted to mention as we move to wrap up here?
Dustin Goslin:
I can't remember what presentation I was at, but I was sharing like, it's an exciting time I think for Indigenous people and for tribal nations, because right now in this time and age, it feels like it's cool to be an Indian. That hasn't always been the case I feel like in the greater world and scheme of things. There's a lot of forward movement, but the thing I think about is this is a snapshot in time. It won't always be like this. So the more we can innovate and push and keep this playing forward where we can build these stronger nations and stronger economies I think is what we all should be waking up in the middle of the night on. Like how can we leverage up all these things that are happening to our nations now? COVID brought a lot of hardship and pain to tribal communities, but it also brought a lot of positive things.
Dustin Goslin:
I think the ARPA and CARES Act were probably some of the single largest investments in tribal nations we've ever seen. And so how can we play that forward and show and leverage that for future cool things to happen? I think that's just a challenge out there to any person that works in Indian country is like, how can we keep playing this forward and keep the snowball rolling well beyond the changing tides of American opinion or corporate capitalism or the administration of the country or of the state or wherever? How can we keep moving forward an Indian country?
Leah Lemm:
Excellent. It's a good time to be Indigenous. We've got to make sure we take advantage of that time. I also saw on your bio, Dustin, conversation starter topics. I know this is the end of our conversation, but why is Stanley Hotel on your conversation starter topic? Are you a ghost hunter?
Dustin Goslin:
Oh man. Okay, good. I'm happy you didn't ask me about one of the other ones because I totally forgot I put it on there. Someone asked me and I was like, oh my God, I can't believe I put that on there. So I won't tell you which one that is. I'll leave you in suspense there. With the Stanley Hotel. And so funny story, we went to Rocky Mountain National Park a handful of years ago, is it before our son was born? So we had our daughter and she was a little tyke and she could walk. We were going around kind of Rocky Mountain National Park and seeing Denver and doing all that cool stuff. And so one of the days, I conned/convinced my wife that we would go stay at the Stanley Hotel. And so if you're not familiar with it, it's this cool looking like historic hotel right at the foothills of the Rocky Mountain National Park.
Dustin Goslin:
And so back in the day, Stephen King wrote The Shining there. So he stayed there for many weeks and it was his inspiration for that whole book. And so there's all of these stories around his inspiration. And so we went and had the pleasure of staying there. And so while we were staying there, I guess it wasn't known that those are actually true stories of what happened in that hotel. And so we got there and my daughter had videos of her going down the hall and there was those big old mirrors, if you remember the movie. And so she's walking and I'm like, "Say REDRUM." Got me in a little bit of hot water, but that's all right.
Leah Lemm:
Oh shoot.
Daniel Lemm:
Leah, I could be very easily conned into going to the Stanley Hotel sometimes.
Leah Lemm:
Conned or convinced.
Daniel Lemm:
Either way, your choice.
Leah Lemm:
Yes. Cool. Well, thank you so much, Dustin. I learned a lot, so I appreciate you taking time to chat with us.
Dustin Goslin:
Well, thank you so much, guys. This is cool. I love talking economics, economic development, Indian country, it's fun. Super cool. Thank you.
Daniel Lemm:
Hey, thanks. Thanks for nerding out with us for an hour here, Dustin, this afternoon. This was a lot of fun. It was enlightening. I got a lot of thoughts in my head, including when I come up with bad business ideas, I should just keep them to myself. But you never know where inspiration where you're going to pull that from, so thanks for your time, man.
Dustin Goslin:
All right. Thanks guys.
Leah Lemm:
Okay. Later.
Daniel Lemm:
Have a good day.
Leah Lemm:
All right, Dustin Goslin. What a fun person to talk to.
Daniel Lemm:
Yeah, there's a lot there and he shared a lot of great examples and how community values play out in economic vibrancy and defining the tribal economy and defining that in a way and who is a part of that. All the work that the Mille Lacs Band and through Mille Lacs Corporate Ventures, the story I think is interesting for how they've gotten to the place where they are right now with their business development, economic development. Even what they're thinking about moving forward and incubator programs supporting entrepreneurs. I mean, that's a recipe for sustainable economics and economics to have a good life.
Leah Lemm:
Dustin Goslin is a member of the Prairie Band of Potawatomi Nation, and he's the Vice President of Business and Economic Development at the Mille Lacs Band Corporate Ventures.
Daniel Lemm:
We are talking with so many great people and we want to say that your input matters too. Do you know someone who's working on systems change or centering Indigenous values? Or do you have a topic or interview suggestion? If so, then email wisdomcontinuum@gmail.com.
Leah Lemm:
Find Wisdom Continuum online at wisdomcontinuum.com and on social media on Instagram and Twitter @wisdomcontinuum. Thank you to Wisdom Continuum's Consulting Producer, Multitude. I'm Leah.
Daniel Lemm:
I'm Daniel. This is Wisdom Continuum.
