Tanka Fund reflects on four years of partnership with the Regenerative Agriculture Foundation
Summary
Tanka Fund’s work in Buffalo restoration is rooted in culture, community, and long-term responsibility to the land and people. Our partnership with the Regenerative Agriculture Foundation reflects shared values around relationship-building, trust, and collaboration. Through this work, connections have grown, opportunities have expanded, and the path forward is clear: more Buffalo on Native lands and stronger, community-driven systems to support them.
5 Key Points
Buffalo restoration is grounded in community.
The partnership with RAF was built on shared values, especially the belief that community is the purpose of the work.
RAF’s program offered funding, but also created space for meaningful collaboration and relationship-building.
These connections are already leading to new partnerships across Buffalo production, food systems, and cultural work.
The next phase focuses on continued growth — expanding Buffalo herds, supporting Native producers, and strengthening Native economies through connection and shared responsibility.
For Tanka Fund, the work of Buffalo restoration has never been purely agricultural. It is cultural, economic, and deeply relational, rooted in the belief that restoring Buffalo to Native lands means restoring something far larger than a species to a landscape.
That belief is what drew Tanka Fund to the Regenerative Agriculture Foundation's Restoring Regenerative Agriculture program, and what made the partnership one of the more meaningful chapters in the organization's recent history.
Brett Ramey, a citizen of the Iowa Tribe of Kansas and Nebraska and a key figure at RAF, describes his own work in terms that resonate closely with Tanka Fund's mission. "I also do on-the-ground work with my tribe," he said. "We're bringing fire back to our woodlands. We're doing prairie restoration... and always having a community component to it, because that's as much the point of any of it."
Community as the destination, not the byproduct. It is a distinction Tanka Fund has held since its earliest days on the Pine Ridge Reservation, where the organization began alongside a small group of ranchers who needed support and had something to teach. The work grew from there, more producers, more access, more opportunity, but the foundation never changed.
Over the past four years, RAF's Restoring Regenerative Agriculture program has supported 62 organizations across the country, Tanka Fund among them. The financial award mattered. But what distinguished the program was what came alongside it.
"There's that one-time monetary award, awesome, we know that's helpful," Ramey said. "And then there's that additional layer... the invitation to engage more with other organizations. We want people to opt in to whatever degree they're able."
Rather than engineering collaboration, the program created the conditions for it. Monthly convenings brought together organizations working across vastly different geographies and focus areas, generating conversations that continued well beyond the calls themselves. For Tanka Fund, the opportunity to learn from peers doing work grounded in similar values, even when the work looked different on the surface, proved to be one of the program's most lasting contributions.
Those relationships are already producing results. Collaboration is taking shape with other Buffalo producers, as well as organizations working in education, food systems, and cultural preservation. The connections formed organically, because the structure allowed them to.
"It's never just about us as individual orgs," Ramey said. "We also know that it's never just about us."
That perspective aligns precisely with how Tanka Fund understands its own role. Buffalo are not simply a commodity or an agricultural asset. They are central to restoring Native lands, rebuilding Indigenous food systems, and strengthening local economies in ways that are sustainable and culturally grounded. The work of returning Buffalo to the land is inseparable from questions of identity, stewardship, and a responsibility that stretches across generations.
In that context, regenerative agriculture means something more expansive than soil health or carbon sequestration. It is about the values that shape how people relate to land in the first place.
"The ways that we've always been regenerative in our practices," Ramey said, "are grounded in those underlying values and ethics."
RAF's program was designed with exactly that kind of complexity in mind, addressing longstanding gaps in how philanthropy reaches the organizations closest to the work. The result is a different quality of relationship between funder and partner, one built on fewer barriers, greater trust, and more room for the work itself.
"It actually helps and benefits everybody when we get more Buffalo on the ground," Ramey said. "Whether they think about it or not... we know that it does."
As this phase of the partnership draws to a close, Tanka Fund is not marking an ending. It is a transition. The foundation built over the past four years, through funding, relationships, and shared values, sets the stage for what comes next: more Buffalo returning to Native lands, more opportunity for Indigenous producers, and more pathways to strengthen Native economies in ways that are sustainable and rooted in culture.
And alongside all of it, a continued commitment to doing this work the right way: restoring land and connection.
Because that is what this has always been about.
