Morgan
“Dear Steve,
I’m interested in joining your Kiva team. Is there a minimum donation required?
Morgan”
Dear Morgan,
Kiva, for those that don’t know, is a non-profit group that assist small businesses around the world with small microloans, as little as $25. These loans are issued by local in-country lending partners who charge interest to the people borrowing but return the original amount to Kiva and thus you. You can latter reloan the funds or withdraw them.
I am a firm believer in investing funds in a collaborative way that makes a positive difference in the lives of others. Kiva allows me to do that with my lending. For example, I can be part of a collaborative effort where each person lends $25 and the total loan is small enough that it gets funded in hours. That loan might be used for a farmer in Cambodia or some other country to purchase a cow or a mill to help earn money to care for his family.
These loans are not for one time things, like to pay a bill. They are used for efforts that will create a sustainable future.
You can see actual loans that this site and I have been a part of by looking at my online portfolio.
I’d love to recruit you to my lending team, GetOutOfDebt.org, on Kiva, a non-profit website that allows you to lend as little as $25 to a specific low-income entrepreneur across the globe. You choose who to lend to – whether a baker in Afghanistan, a goat herder in Uganda, a farmer in Peru, a restaurateur in Cambodia, or a tailor in Iraq – and as they repay the loan, you get your money back.
If you join my lending team, we can work together to alleviate poverty. Once you’re a part of the team, you can choose to have a future loan on Kiva “count” towards our team’s impact. The loan is still yours, and repayments still come to you – but you can also choose to have the loan show up in our team’s collective portfolio, so our team’s overall impact will grow!
I originally tried to recruit personal finance bloggers to the team. You’d think that people that write about credit, debt and money issues would be eager to put their money where their beliefs are, not so.
Rather than wait for others to jump on the band wagon, I use income generated from the GetOutOfDebt.org site to fund the loans I make. You can see the total number of loans I have funded by clicking here.
So it costs nothing to be a part of Kiva, you can lend as little as $25, you get your money back or reloan it and we can work together to make a positive difference in the lives of others.I urge you to join Kiva and then join my lending team.
Here is a question that nobody has asked me yet, and I’ve been waiting for it. Why do I lend to people overseas and not make loans to people in the United States? The reason is that for a relatively small amount a collective loan can be made that will alter the income earning path of a person or a family overseas. A similar sized loan in the United States might just pay someone’s electric bill for last month, but that does not help to sustain that person into the future. It is simply about getting the most life impact per dollar.
If I could help, as part of a team, to buy a family a cow in the U.S. and that would give them more hope and income earning opportunity for the future, I’d do that also.
You are not alone. I'm here to help. There is no need to suffer in silence. We can get through this. Tomorrow can be better than today. Don't give up.
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