Building trust though diversity

RAPID CITY – Tom Johnson, CEO of Elevate Rapid City, grew up on the Wind River Indian Reservation but is not a registered tribal member. While being raised far away from population centers he and his family was forced to travel long distances in order to purchase supplies. He frequented border towns like Lander, Wyoming, and further, larger towns like Rawlins and Casper, Wyoming.

Now, as Johnson is working with Elevate Rapid City, a strategic economic growth and development firm, he understands the importance of a rural trade area around a population center like Rapid City. “The trade area of Rapid City from the census is Pennington and Meade Counties, but, if you look at the data, residents are driving from Spearfish and the reservations,” he said. “The whole trade area for Rapid City is more likely, depending on the industry, is between 300-500 thousand people.”

Realizing the full potential of Rapid City’s trade area requires involvement of Native Americans and the maximization of their purchasing power, and Tom understands the past and current relationship between a largely white border town and its Native American reservation neighbors. “There has been several hundred years of historical trauma and race relations here that have had fits and stops,” he said. “So you have to recognize that exists as a context that overlays all of this. So we recognize that and understand that there is a perspective there where you have to build trust across those cultures.”

For Johnson, building trust will be the cornerstone to repairing the relationship between border town and reservation. “The challenge, I think for all Rapid City business owners, is to try and create an environment which is welcoming to all cultures and people and they feel comfortable coming in to the business,” he said.

He offered a simple model to start reparation. “As a business owner, you have to be willing to develop individual relationships,” he said. “You can develop trust by being interested and asking questions, and with trust comes relationships, and in time the trust and relationships add up to a more holistic change.”

He also plans to provide a model to Rapid City of what the city’s trade area looks like. “We can show how many of those people that are coming in are Native, and we can make a per capita spending estimate, and we can put it into our economic model, and it will tell us what the total impact of spending is,” he said. “I think we really have to tell that story. I think it’s important to business owners to know that the impact of Native American spending is big.”

Fixing race relations through a business lens in Rapid City and its surrounding community is a far cry from everything that needs to happen. But building relationships one by one in small businesses will start wheels turning, and it will be profitable for all parties involved.

Elevate Rapid City is a public-private partnership that focuses on strategic economic growth and development. Their website states they “work to elevate the Rapid City region for all with the strong vision of making Rapid City and the Black Hills region the place people want to be.” Tom Johnson assumed his position as CEO in October of 2019.

 

(Contact Travis at travisldewes@gmail.com)

Visit Original Source