So I’ve decided to play it a little safe for the first month, going with a pretty well established charity in Kiva.org.
In case you aren’t aware of what Kiva is, it’s an organization in which you can send money to entrepreneurs, usually in poverty stricken nations, and help them to provide for themselves and their family. The good news is the loan gets repaid almost 99% of the time, so when you are paid back you can then repeat the process with another entrepreneur. Also entrepreneur is a very difficult word to spell.
A lot of comments were positive about this idea, and so hopefully as many people as possible join up! I started with $900 and am going to give it in $25 portions to 36 different entrepreneurs. I already see a bunch of good options for upcoming months, and I’m sure as this page grows there will be even more great causes to choose from.
If you also end up donating, it’d be great if you could post it in the comments page on this post, just to get a sense for how much we can put together in a month. I understand some people may want to do so anonymously so that’s fine too!It may start out pretty small but hopefully in the future we can get the numbers higher as more people join the fun! Also any amount is good… $25, $50, whatever.
If you do end up joining feel free to share info if you are excited about any of your loans, and maybe we can even start a lending team there.
will be $200 from me. Now I just need to choose which ppls to send my 8 x $25s to…
Cool, thanks! Also note that you can just buy in for $200 and then decide later. Go to portfolio and it’s something like buy kiva credits.
I already have $100 in kiva from a few months ago, I may deposit more.
I too just signed up for Kiva. I started my projected series of donations with a woman in Peru who was trying to improve food production in her area through buying a tractor. I decided that for now, I’m going to concentrate on helping farmers. I have a friend who is an agricultural engineer from Uganda and he said that these tractors are essential for bringing agriculture into the 20th century for these 3rd world areas and critical for staving off famine. I also heard recently on the BBC that scientists now believe that the world’s food production will be outstripped by population demands in a few decades. In the West, this will mean a drastic reduction in choice and dramatically higher costs. In underdeveloped nations this will likely mean starvation on a unprecedented scale.
Thanks for inspiring me to become involved with Kiva and good luck with this worthy project.
Why not form a “Team” on KIVA? Check out their website for details but the short version is that all money raised via the team would be summed and we could see each other “loans” and share in the joy.
On a side note and please feel free to delete this if you don’t want to post it. Do you know if Craig Roll still play chess in the Philly area? He’s a NM approx, 50 years old, use to live on Church St, sort of lost track of him when I stopped playing, we use to be teammates at the US Teams…
OK thanks…
Yeah I was thinking of starting a team but I can’t think of a good name
Any suggestions?
I have no clue about Craig Roll, sorry!