By Nathan Mario Roppul
I want to ask a question I have not seen asked plainly in our papers, and I want to ask it with respect for everyone it implicates: why are so many of our brightest young people in the CNMI starting nonprofits when the most successful islanders in our history started companies?
I am asking because the math is honest, and we deserve to look at it.
In 1947, a man named Jose Camacho Tenorio took two hundred dollars of personal savings and started selling beer and soft drinks. Two years later, according to a 1999 Congressional Record entry honoring the company’s fiftieth anniversary, he and his wife sold their house to open a grocery store. By the late 1960s, that same record indicates Joeten was doing roughly three million dollars a year in business. By 1998, that figure had grown to approximately one hundred and twenty-three million, with about a thousand employees. Today, three quarters of a century later, Joeten Enterprises is a family-owned conglomerate spanning groceries, hardware, automobiles, real estate, shipping and financial services. None of that came from a federal grant. It came from a man who saw an island economy and decided to own a piece of the supply chain instead of waiting for one.
A similar story carries Triple J Enterprises, founded by Robert and Margaret Jones, today an operation spanning Guam, the CNMI and the Marshall Islands. According to the company’s own published materials, Triple J holds distributorships for Ford, Honda, Acura, Mazda, Hyundai, Kia, Mitsubishi, Hertz, Michelin, Solahart, Certified Angus Beef, Tyson and Kraft, and it operates the first EB-5 regional center in the CNMI, attracting foreign investment capital into our islands. Their wholesale food division supplies hotels, restaurants, government agencies and military operations as far away as Kwajalein. They did not get there by writing grants. They got there by building a business that the rest of the Pacific had to do business with.
Now look at where most of our young leaders are pouring their energy. Almost every promising civic-minded islander I know is starting a nonprofit, or trying to. They are good people doing real work, and I do not want to take that away from them. But the structural picture deserves a clear-eyed look.
Most nonprofits in the CNMI ultimately draw from the same handful of pools. According to U.S. Department of the Interior press releases, the Office of Insular Affairs awarded the CNMI roughly $3.4 million in fiscal year 2022 across the entire territory through its Technical Assistance and Maintenance Assistance Programs, $2.5 million in FY2020 and $2.3 million in FY2018. Compact Impact funding, which the Department of the Interior reports historically distributed about thirty-four million dollars across all four affected U.S. jurisdictions combined (Guam, Hawai’i, the CNMI and American Samoa), expired in its original mandatory form in 2023. In late 2025, our delegate Congresswoman King-Hinds announced an $11.3 million discretionary package for the Commonwealth, also routed through OIA.
There are foundation cycles, state grants, disaster recovery dollars and the Saipan Chamber of Commerce, which describes itself in its own public materials as a nonprofit advocate for the private sector.
Here is the uncomfortable picture in those numbers. The total federal grant pool flowing into our entire territory in any given year is, in business terms, roughly the annual revenue of one well-run private dealership group on these islands. We have built an entire generation’s career path around competing for a pie smaller than what a few private companies in our region earn quietly, year after year, without any of the same fanfare.
That is not a fair fight for our talent. That is a structural trap.
I am not anti-nonprofit. We need cultural preservation work. We need youth programs. We need disaster relief organizations. We need the kind of clear-eyed civic writing that has appeared on these pages calling out complacency and insisting on accountability. That work is essential, and the people doing it are not the problem. What I am questioning is the default career path we hand to everyone else. Why is the first thing we tell a smart, ambitious twenty-five-year-old islander to do, “write a grant”? Why is the second thing we tell them to do, “form a 501(c)(3)”? Why is the option we almost never put on the table, “incorporate a company, find paying customers and build something the global market actually has to deal with”?
Because here is what we are not telling our young people, and I think we have to start.
As a U.S. territory, we have access right now, today, to one of the largest consumer markets on earth, to federal contracting opportunities, to e-commerce infrastructure that any independent Pacific nation would have to negotiate for years to obtain. The same Covenant relationship that complicates so much of our political life also gives us a passport into an economy of more than three hundred million people. The Tenorio and Jones families figured this out generations ago. The question is whether the next generation will, or whether we will keep training our brightest to write proposals while a handful of family conglomerates own the underlying economy.
We hear a great deal, and rightly, about our wayfinding ancestors. The Refaluwasch and Chamorro who navigated thousands of miles of open ocean by stars and swells. We say it at every graduation. And then we send our children into a world where the new currents (capital, code, supply chains, platforms, networks) run through every system the modern economy is built on, and we mostly do not teach them to read those currents at all.
Where are our engineers? Where are our founders? Where are the islanders building enterprise-grade companies that compete on a global scale? They exist. There are not nearly enough of them. And most of them, like me, are quietly building right now without a press release, because no one taught us this was the path we were allowed to take.
I am writing this from the diaspora, on a laptop, between job applications. I built a company that can scale globally with $0, an idea and some college education. I am not anyone you have heard of. I have spent the last year quietly building a digital platform for our community: not a nonprofit, not a grant project, not a program designed to end when the funding cycle ends. A real company, with a co-founder and a small group of serious people who could be working on more glamorous things and chose to build with me instead. We are not waiting for a check. We are not waiting for permission. We do not believe our future depends on whether the Office of Insular Affairs likes our proposal this fiscal year.
If you are reading this and you have an idea, I am asking you to do one thing. Before you write the grant, see if you have a business. Find one customer. Charge them. Test whether your work survives in the market that our territorial status already gives you access to. If it does, you have built something nobody can defund. If it does not, you have learned more in thirty days than three years of grant cycles will teach you.
A government that moves slowly cannot move at the speed of your life. Federal funding cycles cannot move at the speed of your life. Foundation priorities will not move at the speed of your life. You can. The companies that built the CNMI’s private sector did. The question is whether the next generation of islanders will keep waiting for permission, or finally start sailing.
I am one navigator. I am asking, with everything in me, where are the rest of you.
Come find me. Let us build.
Nathan Mario Roppul is a Chamolinian software engineer and the technical co-founder of Islander Connect. He grew up between Saipan and Oregon and currently writes from the diaspora in Oregon.
Editor’s note: The views and opinions expressed in this op-ed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of NMI News Service or its staff. All assertions are the sole responsibility of the writer. To submit an op-ed for consideration, email your piece to brad.ruszala@nminewsservice.com.