Northwest Native Chamber

Introduction

The Northwest Native Chamber (NWNC) is on a mission to re-create an economy where Native communities can flourish. They provide wrap-around technical assistance to Native-owned businesses at nearly every stage of their growth, create relationship-building and networking opportunities, conduct advocacy and more.

NWNC is on the ground supporting Native business owners and community members every day, and Mixte helped to raise awareness of this innovative, impactful work. 

First, there’s the Clean Energy Contractor Development Program (CECDP) — a culturally-specific program to help Native homeowners and neighbors prepare their homes for a changing climate, while providing business opportunities to Native contractors that keep public dollars for clean energy circulating within the Native community. NWNC called upon Mixte to create resources to promote this brand-new program taking its first steps post-launch.

And then, there’s the Rise Collective — a gathering of community organizations that provide culturally-specific support to Native and BIPOC small businesses and entrepreneurs. NWNC launched this partnership to resist the extractive colonial systems that make up today’s culture of industry, and the disproportionate impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on Native and BIPOC people. Together, the Rise Collective made a greater impact for historically marginalized people to build economic power and generational wealth. NWNC called upon Mixte to create storytelling materials for these partners.

Our Objectives

• Create content for the Clean Energy Contractor Development Program landing page, and develop evergreen communications resources for the program.
• Profile and tell the stories of Rise Collective partners.

Here’s how we did it:

• We learned from those on the ground — We interviewed a homeowner and contractors involved in the CECDP about their needs, expertise and experiences, and reviewed online surveys with the Rise Collective partners to ensure we understood each organization’s work and voice. 
• We analyzed NWNC communications — We got to know their website, social media and print materials, and analyzed their media coverage, to understand how they presented other programs to their audiences.
• We identified the best format for promotional resources — We listened closely to how NWNC and its partners preferred to connect with their community members, and used this information to recommend the types of materials that would be most effective for their goals of promoting the CECDP and the Rise Collective.

The Outcome

• Clean Energy Contractor Development Program Final Products
  • We drafted culturally-relevant content for a landing page that included program descriptions, sign-up forms, testimonials and more. 
  • We designed a printed bifold about the CECDP, for NWNC and contractors to distribute at in-person community events.
• Rise Collective Final Products
  • We drafted content for NWNC to highlight the story of the Rise Collective on its website. 
  • We created a digital media toolkit for all Rise Collective partners, which included personalized graphics featuring their own quotes and descriptions of their work as part of the Collective.