Vanessa provides leadership and oversight over the entire portfolio of work as well as leads key strategies focused on ecosystem building, access to capital and community-led economic development activities. Vanessa founded Roanhorse Consulting in 2016 to create a program for the City of Albuquerque to create a community designed entrepreneur program and alternative lending product for small businesses. She is also a co-founder of Native Women Lead, a national organization that invests in Indigenous women in business, of which she helped incubate at RCLLC, co-designing the 5R’s of Rematriation and launching the Matriarch Funds, a scaffolded financing strategy for Indigenous women to invest into Indigenous women. She is co-building the Rematriating Economies Apprenticeship to support more Indigenous women in fund and asset management. She sits on the boards of Delta Institute, Seven Fires and Potlikker Capital. Vanessa is a 2022 Miss Porter’s School Donaldson Awardee, a 2021 Paypal Maggie Lena Walker’s Emerging Leader Awardee and a 2020 Conscious Company Media’s World Changing Woman in Sustainable Business Awardee. She is a founding member of the Zebras Unite Co-op, partner with The Future is Indigenous Women, and co-founder of the Rematriating Economies Apprenticeship.  She sits on the boards of Delta Institute, Seven Fires, Potlikker Capital, Just Transition Investment Fund and is an advisor to Ecosystem Building Leadership Network, Decolonizing Wealth, and Sandia Lab’s Department of Energy BOOST initiative. Vanessa resides in unceded Tiwa Territory (Albuquerque, NM) with her partner and 10-year old son.