Emma Perez
ON Nov. 21, 2024, the NDN Collective, a South Dakota-based indigenous-led organization, announced that Emma Perez, 500 Sails co-founder and senior advisor for the Marianas Alliance of Non-Governmental Organizations, has been selected for the 2024/26 NDN Changemaker Fellowship Cohort.
According to NDN Collective website, the fellowship is a two-year program “designed to invest ($150,000) in the visions, leadership, and personal and professional development of 21 Indigenous Changemakers working in their communities.”
There were nearly 500 individuals from 21 different regions of Canada, Mexico, and the U.S. that applied for the fellowship.
Perez tells Variety that the fellowship will provide financial support across a wide variety of areas, including mentorship, living expenses, and healing and well-being.
She will also have the opportunity to network with the 20 other Indigenous Changemakers in the fellowship who, like her, are engaged in cultural work.
Perez said she was inspired to become a fellow after making a presentation titled, “Rebuilding our Maritime Community – Traditions of our Past are Viable Options for our Future” at the University of Guam Conference on Island Sustainability earlier this year.
“I had multiple groups of high school students come up to me, including some self-identified ‘fan-girls,’ to take their pictures with me, as well as multiple teachers who came up to me to ask that I come speak to their classes in Guam,” she said. “The interaction that really stuck with me was with a young bartender who reached over to me at a post-conference gathering and said, ‘Thank you for your presentation. The youth in Guam are lost and don’t know who we are. Now I know who I am.’ ”
With funds from the NDN Changemaker Fellowship, Perez would like to make the same presentation to as many Chamorros as she can, including those in the CNMI, Guam, and the diaspora.
She also intends to improve her Chamorro language skills over the next two years so she can deliver the presentation in Chamorro.
Perez said those in the nonprofit sector must be prepared to persist through adversity.
“Missions are often uphill battles that some call ‘mountain projects.’ On one of the NDN virtual calls someone said, ‘Having a mountain project is going to be a traumatic experience.’ That made me laugh. I’m a water person … so my husband Pete and I always say ‘just keep swimming.’ We are used to being uncomfortable and wanting to stop but don’t,” Perez said.
She called on the community to create work that can positively affect the islands “seven generations from now.”
“We often romanticize our past, imagining what our ancestors had, how they lived, the wonderful things they did, but what if the best days of our people were ahead of us? Let’s think of that,” she added.
