Giving back

[firecat]

Business Week publishes an annual issue on philanthropy. This year's issue, recently released, contained an article about the founder of eBay, Pierre Omidyar, who has co-founded a philanthropic organization - http://www.omidyar.net/ - that seeks to empower individuals to make change by funding organizations and projects that facilitate this. Their partners include SourceForge.net, Socialtext wiki software, and some campaigns seeking to empower young and low-income people to vote.

Another couple of projects focus on something called "micro-finance" or "micro-credit," which is making small loans available to individuals in poverty, so they can start and run small businesses and thus improve their financial situation. One of these is Grameen Foundation USA (http://www.gfusa.org/), whose mission is "to empower the world's poorest people to lift themselves out of poverty with dignity through access to financial services and to information."

I'm increasingly convinced that some social change is going to have to come through political struggle and large organizations of people banding together to demand that governments and large organizations stop abusing and exploiting them.

But, having grown up in a culture which taught that if you educate yourself, work hard, and are financially responsible, you have a good chance of becoming successful enough to be comfortable and to use your influence to help others, and also being aware that having some money helps a heck of a lot when one has a goal of making more money, I'm attracted to the notion of micro-credit. What I don't know is whether in today's world (which I perceive as full of large heartless entities trying to exploit everything they can get their hands on) it really works to reduce poverty, and whether reducing poverty by helping individuals run and grow businesses also eventually helps reduce poverty in those individuals' communities.

I wonder if anyone reading this has any additional knowledge about micro-credit in general or about Grameen Foundation in specific.

Comments

[joedecker.livejournal.com]

I don't have references, I read a bunch about Grameen a few years back. In the end, my general take about their work (and what I was focused on was mostly their efforts in Asia), was that it was efficient, worked toward empowering women in those areas, and was very successful. I can't speak to the question of how that would work here in the United States—in many cases in Asia loans were made to women who leveraged the cash to start effectively a small business. Borrowers were "pooled together" in groups of (five?) to support each others attempts to thrive, but the amounts of money
involved were far smaller than what you'd need to start a business in the US (and I have to add,
business regulation does play a part in that additional cost.)
Ignorance on how it *does* work in the US aside, my memory was that they made my a very, very "short list" of organizations that got my money (along with the Nature Conservancy, Sempervirens Fund, and Impact. (http://www.impactbayarea.org)) Consider this a soft, and not very well-documented, but enthusastic thumbs up.

Sideline

[red-frog.livejournal.com]

I don't know anything about Grameen. However, Joe, I noticed that the Nature Conservancy was on your short list. Not trying to talk you out of anything, but I wondered if you'd seen the series (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/nation/specials/natureconservancy/) that the Washington Post did on its business practices and the follow-up with the IRS. If you have not, I think you might find it interesting. The NC changed its accountability structure, but I haven't seen much on specifics or how that's going.

Re: Sideline

[joedecker.livejournal.com]

I've heard of that info, but haven't researched it. My donations to them came before that stuff came out (back "when money was cheap"), and I haven't made big donations (except trying to keep Impact afloat) in the last year anywhere else.
But reading through it is, definitely, on my "to do" list.