FOR URBAN NATIVES BY URBAN NATIVES

Sutton King, MPH, Nāēqtaw-Pianakiw (comes first woman), is the co-founder, president and co-director of UIC.  Afro-Indigenous of the Menominee and Oneida Nation of Wisconsin, she holds a BA in Psychology with a minor in sociology from the College of Mount Saint Vincent and a Master in Public Health with a concentration in Global Health from NYU School of Global Public Health. Living on unceded territory of the Siwanoy (The Bronx) for over a decade, she is an internationally recognized Indigenous rights activist,  social entrepreneur, and published researcher dedicated to developing and scaling innovative solutions to improve Indigenous health equity across sectors. Her focus centers access benefit sharing and culturally appropriate methodologies within technology, healthcare and business.

In 2020, Sutton was named a New York visionary and nominated as a David Prize finalist. She is a MIT Indigenous Solve fellow and a 3x NYU Fellow participating in the NYU ignite alpha and beta fellowships. In 2021, she was named an NYU Female Founder and “one of the 100 most influential people in psychedelics” by Psychedelic Invest and PsychedStudio. In 2022, Business Insider recognized her as one of the 16 most influential women shaping Psychedelics.

Early in her career, in partnership with Kognito, the DOJ and Indian Country Child Trauma Center, she led the development of the first culturally tailored trauma-informed simulation training law enforcement professionals how to engage with tribal youth. She implemented this programming as well as suicide prevention technology in eighty different tribes across the country. Following that, she joined the New York Indian Council, the Urban Indian Health Program of NYC as the Director of health and wellness. Currently, she is the Co-Founder of ShockTalk, a culturally tailored telemental health platform that facilitates culturally appropriate patient-provider relationships for Indigenous communities. She joins the Indigenous Medicine Conservation Fund as a Program Manager and Bridge Maker sitting on the operations committee. She facilitates a relationship between the Psychedelic Space and Indigenous traditional cultures that centers Indigenous sovereignty. Through her consulting business, Sutton King LLC, she advises organizations ranging from startup companies to philanthropies on stakeholder models and access benefit and sharing through social impact investment and giving.

In her role as an advocate, she sits on the Sovereign Bodies Institute  Survivors’ Leadership Council, made up of Indigenous survivors of trafficking and survival sex work from across North America. This council was put together to advocate for victims and survivors, provide peer support to movement leaders who are survivors, and create a platform for survivor voices, so that the world can learn directly from us. She also serves as a Member of the Natives Working Well in Philanthropy (NWWP) (Formerly Native Program Officer (NPO)) Planning Group. 

Sutton@urbanindigenouscollective.org

Ariel Richer is a Co-founder and Co-director at Urban Indigenous Collective. She is Afro-Indigenous and white; descendant of the Carib Indians, the Indigenous people of Trinidad and Tobago and Venezuela. Ariel is an Assistant Professor at the University of Utah, College of Social Work. Ariel earned both a Master’s Degree and a PhD in Social Work at Columbia University School of Social Work, and has been a Licensed Master Social Worker for 8 years. Her research focus is on intimate partner violence and increasing access to relevant services for Black and Indigenous women who experience structural stigma related to drug use, involvement in the criminal-legal system, sexuality, and racism. Her work is grounded in principles of community-based participatory research, as she works collaboratively with Black and Indigenous communities.

Previously, she worked as an Impact Evaluator at the Administration for Native Americans where she worked directly with community-based organizations developing logic models, evaluation plans, data collection tools, and processes. She is fiercely committed to addressing gender-based issues at large, especially gender-based violence, and has over nine years of experience within domestic violence organizations, sexual assault resource centers, and economic enhancement programs serving survivors of trafficking and domestic violence.

Ariel@urbanindigenouscollective.org