About

The Pehta Foundation is an independent, Indigenous-governed body responsible for stewarding the Pehta Framework — also known as the Indigenous Community Benefit Disclosure Standard (ICBDS). We uphold and evolve this standard so that Indigenous impact metrics are credible, comparable, and aligned with Indigenous community values and decision-making needs.

Our role is to ensure the Pehta Framework reflects the priorities of Indigenous Nations and supports transparent, consistent measurement and reporting of social and economic impacts. By governing the standard at arm’s length from industry and commercial interests, we help ensure that disclosure expectations are not shaped by individual corporate preferences, but by rights-holders themselves.

Our Purpose

Indigenous communities have long been the subject of impact reporting without having authority over how that data is defined, collected, or disclosed. The absence of standardized metrics and governance has made it difficult for communities to compare outcomes across projects, evaluate performance over time, or use data for strategic decision-making.

The Pehta Foundation exists to change that.

We govern a disclosure standard that:

• Establishes consistent definitions and categories for Indigenous impact outcomes

• Supports the measurement and reporting of employment, procurement, training, and community benefits

• Enables comparability across projects, proponents, and time

• Embeds Indigenous governance into standard development and evolution

This standardization makes Indigenous impact reporting more transparent, usable, and defensible — benefiting communities, industry, and institutional stakeholders alike.

The Pehta Framework

The Pehta Framework — formally referred to as the Indigenous Community Benefit Disclosure Standard (ICBDS) — is a rights-holder-defined standard for how Indigenous community benefit and impact outcomes should be disclosed across projects and sectors.

The Foundation maintains the Framework so that it remains:

• Grounded in Indigenous perspectives and priorities

• Clear in its requirements and definitions

• Consistent across reporting use cases

• Responsive to evolving community, regulatory, and market needs

How We Govern

The Pehta Foundation is governed by Indigenous leadership and technical advisors who bring lived experience, policy insight, and community perspectives to standard stewardship. Governance decisions are made independently of industry, ensuring that the standard remains accountable to Indigenous rights-holders first.

Our governance model emphasizes:

• Indigenous authority in standard design and oversight

• Transparency in decision-making and evolution of the Framework

• Separation between standard governance and commercial delivery

• Accountability to Indigenous communities and institutional partners

This structure ensures that the standard’s integrity is maintained and that changes to the standard reflect community priorities, not external commercial influence.

Relationship with Pehta LP

The Pehta Foundation and Pehta LP are distinct entities with complementary roles. The Foundation governs the Pehta Framework. Pehta LP, an Indigenous-owned organization, builds and delivers reporting tools and services based on that standard.

This separation preserves the independence of the standard while enabling practical implementation in industry and project settings. It ensures:

• The standard remains independent and rights-holder controlled

• Reporting solutions are responsive to real-world needs

• Governance decisions are free from commercial influence

Together, the Foundation and Pehta LP support a disclosure ecosystem that is credible, standardized, and useful to communities and market participants alike.