Economic Transition with Lorraine Davis

I was really impacted by alcohol and eventually drugs at the later part of my progressive in my addiction and so I came here to get a college education and to get into a different environment that had more economic opportunities such as housing and college and jobs and things like that so and that really leads me to the work that I began doing and so I incorporated the Native American Development Center in September 10 2012 was the actual date and I did that to be able to create a platform in this urban area to be able to really help Native Americans in an economic transitional process but even further than that it’s a culture shock there’s a social shock and so we’re really providing a holistic approach to helping better serve Native Americans in this area and through the progressiveness through my career I actually got educated and pursued a couple of degrees and became a family housing director at United tribes and during that time I witnessed a lot of those struggling had the same issues that I had in my transition and a lot of those are addiction issues which lead to a lot of issues with parenting and losing their children and car serration and it just goes on and on and then they fall through the cracks again you know then the homelessness comes in and it’s just a vicious cycle and so as the housing director for family housing I wanted to be part of solving a problem versus being a property manager and so that is where I made a step forward during that time I was actually pursuing a master’s in Business Administration and once I graduated with that I moved on and left that arena so housing is really a focal point for me because I believe that you need housing first to be able to build a foundation for yourself and for your family and so it’s homelessness the issues that are you know very apparent to Native Americans you know I just focus on housing first so that’s kind of one of our strategies that were working on bringing to the community and so but you know during the process of personal transformation there’s personal transformation and then there’s personal development and personal transformation is actually the spiritual component the cultural component and then the personal development is more of your interpersonal skills your that social development piece a lot of that is with the emotional and I was kind of talking about that a little bit today