Currently, Kayla serves as a Project Director at Indigenous Impact Co. In this role, she uses her exceptional management skills to optimize systems, streamline processes, and enhance user-experience to build organizational capacity. She displays these talents internally, as well as externally, primarily with the Mountain Plains Regional Native CDFI. Kayla works to create a space where Native CDFI leaders, and others can efficiently come together, to collectively create systems change in Native communities. Her leadership and contributions as Project Director are grounded in an Indigenous approach to communications and management.  She fosters a productive work environment and a culture of accountability for the team.

Kayla’s motivation to positively impact Native communities was cultivated by the work of her close relatives who fought for and won Little Shell tribal sovereignty. She stands on the shoulders of giants; her ancestors and her relatives. Change in community is not made by one person, but created by the collective. Using her management, marketing, and communications skills, Kayla is able to assist in making a collective space in which Indigenous changemakers can come together.

Kayla Gray (Little Shell), currently resides in Helena, Montana, the ancestral homelands of the Salish, Blackfoot, Cayuse, Umatilla, and Walla Walla peoples. Kayla cherishes and considers Glacier National Park to be a home to her, as Glacier is a place filled with memories of family and camping. 

Kayla connects with communities through the use of visual storytelling, which is evident through her education and career. She earned a bachelor's degree in Business Administration-Marketing from the University of Montana and worked as a Communications Assistant at G&G Advertising, her relatives’ Native American-focused advertising company. Having grown up around advertising- Kayla discovered her passion for behind-the-scenes work.  Unique to Indigenous Impact Co.’s team, Kayla has eight years of banking experience at Stockman Bank, as a Teller and Customer Service Representative. At this job, Kayla met diverse people and saw firsthand the need for financial education and resources in underserved communities. Her passion is to empower and contribute to systems change in Indigenous communities.