Phi Theta Kappa Panel Recap
I was honored to be able to sit on a five member panel at IPFW last night for Phi Theta Kappa’s seminar series. This is a three part series that speaks to how choices, challenges, and consequences relate to the paradox of affluence.
Let me set up the series a little. Ray Suarez, Jessica Jackley and Ralph Nader were all video taped giving a presentation at the PTK headquarters and then each local chapter is encouraged to have a local screening. I was asked to come and join the panel for Jessica Jackley’s, co-founder of Kiva.org. During each local event, they play the video and then have a local panel discuss the video and answer questions from the audience.
Fast forward to last night. I am blown away by Kiva every time I hear more about it. It’s such a simple concept and illustration of how web based technology is bridging the world together. It doesn’t just bring us together by allowing us to see an actual person half way around the world, which it does and does well, but it allows us to CHOOSE to help someone else. There’s nothing charity about it’s model because it’s actually strategically made and monitored loans. Every penny anyone puts in has the ability to get it right back after the loan terms and do it all over again. It’s more complex and involved than that, but on the surface you’d never know.
I dig this concept and it inspires me to push the envelope of what’s possible in a local setting at NeighborLink.
What I took away from last night was the diversity of the panel and how many of them had very limited knowledge of micro-finance in general, let alone of Kiva.org. Each one of us on the panel along with the crowd we’re so encouraged by what’s possible. The panel had different backgrounds and economic status, but all believe that doing good is a necessary part of our development as individuals.
Social innovation and entrepreneurship are blurring the boundaries of the non-profit and for-profit worlds and changing our world. Kiva has raised over $100 million and has empowered over 250,000 entrepreneurs to be their own change by helping them break the chains that were keeping them in poverty. Many people they help were extremely hard workers and business people but were being help down by bad lending principles in their home countries and couldn’t do anything about it.
The Kivas, Tom Shoes, and hopefully NeighborLinks of the world will continue to push the boundaries of traditional org structures and help more and more people have the one-on-one experience that can be had in doing good.
