Entrepreneurship & Crowdfunding: An enabling tool for veterans with disabilities | Kiva Zip. Mirza Tihic: Director of Program Support Services at IVMF Two years ago, the Institute for Veterans and Military Families (IVMF) became a trustee with Kiva Zip to offer micro funding for veterans with disabilities. Today, Kiva Zip is out of the pilot phase and has been enabling numerous entrepreneurs across the US to start and grow businesses. IVMF Trustee Group As a trustee, the IVMF has enabled 10 veterans, all graduates of the Entrepreneurship Bootcamp for Veterans with Disabilities (EBV) program, to raise and disburse a total of $36,000 in micro loans. On March 1, 2014, Jamie Critelli, of the 2012 EBV class at UConn class and owner of Floral Beauty Greenhouses, paid back IVMF's first Kiva Zip loan. Jamie of Floral Beauty Greenhouses Jamie just submitted a new loan application, this time seeking $10,000 to obtain a NYSERDA grant to increase the energy efficiency of his greenhouses and introduce new products that can be sold year round.
Join us in serving those who have served. Zip | Blogs. When Aditi and I arrived in Busia, dust-splayed and weather-beaten on the shared backseat of a boda boda, we did not look like your average tourists. The midday sun was at its height, and as we throttled down miles of dusty country roads, the wind kicked up streaks of earth that colored my clothes red and coursed through my hair. Sitting on the very back of the motorbike, with Aditi sandwiched in-between me and the driver, I grasped for the metal bar behind me with one hand, and with the other, waved at an ever-evolving panorama of fruit sellers, truck drivers and playing children. The looks I got in return were bewildered at best -- no one was quite sure how to place me.
Up to that point, I had been living in Kenya’s foreigner-saturated capital city of Nairobi for three weeks and had gotten used to a certain indifference at my presence. Pictured: Fosca holding the visitor's book we would later sign. “Without the loan, things would be like they were before,” she said, “slow.” Zip | Park&Play. I am a mother of two kids, and I grew up in Cleveland, Ohio. I remember as a kid my mom would take us to alllllllll the kid's events in the city, no matter when, where or how (seriously), from the zoo to yearly kid fest events. We would often have other family members over to join us. Basically my mom was the parent that wasn't too cool to still do kid things, and now I am that mom. I'm 29 years old and for as long as I can remember I've always had the mindset of an entrepreneur. My son and daughter have fall/winter birthdays, and every year I would wonder what I can do to celebrate at such an ugly dark period of the year.
My dreams for the future are to earn enough capital to purchase a double decker bus and provide the same service as our trailer. Zip | Innovations in person-to-person lending. What is Kiva Zip? Kiva Zip is a pilot program launched by Kiva, the world’s first and largest micro-lending website. Kiva became famous for enabling anyone with an internet connection to lend as little as $5 to alleviate poverty. Kiva Zip takes this model even further by making it possible for lenders to send funds directly to the entrepreneurs they support. We have three major goals here: Help entrepreneurs access the financial services they need. How does it work? Borrowers apply for Kiva Zip loans by filling out an online application form. Lenders visit the Kiva Zip website, and choose which borrowers they want to make a loan to. Why Kenya and the United States? Currently, Kiva Zip is focused on serving loans in the United States and Kenya only as we develop this direct lending model.
New ways to use Kiva Kiva Zip is a bold new step for Kiva, making it possible to do much more than lend. The newest term here is ‘trustee.’ So how does Kiva Zip work for these different roles? For lenders. Kiva Zip Kenya Reaches a New Milestone: 1,000 Life-Changing Loans | Kiva Zip. By Kristrún Gunnarsdóttir, Kiva Zip Fellow Earlier this month Kiva Zip celebrated a milestone of having disbursed its 1,000th loan to entrepreneurs in Kenya. What is unique about the Kiva Zip model is that it is a direct, person-to-person lending platform with 0% interest loans and no fees for the borrowers (learn more here!). Entrepreneurs are endorsed by Kiva Zip Trustees--individuals or organizations in their community who know and trust them. We are very excited about the tremendous progress we have made and about the improvements we continue to make that allow us to better serve our borrowers, Trustees, and lenders.
Kiva Zip targets entrepreneurs with very small businesses and who can benefit from a loan as small as $50-$100 USD. In Kenya, Kiva Zip uses mobile technology to facilitate borrower training, the loan application, loan disbursement and loan repayments. But what can you really do with a loan as small as $100? Cash is King (even if it's not a lot) The Profit in Nonprofit. Kiva, the first online peer-to-peer microcredit marketplace, is one of the fastest-growing nonprofits in history. But its nonprofit status was not inevitable. Here’s why Kiva chose to be a 501(c)(3), what this tax status buys the organization, and how being a nonprofit poses challenges. In 2004, Jessica Jackley set out for rural Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda to perform an impact evaluation for the Village Enterprise Fund (VEF), a San Francisco Bay Area nonprofit that makes modest grants and loans to small businesses in East Africa. A few months later, her husband, Matt Flannery, then a computer programmer at Alviso, Calif.
-based TiVo Inc., came to visit her. As the couple traveled around the country interviewing small-business owners, they talked nonstop about the best ways to help Africa’s struggling entrepreneurs. One year earlier, Jackley had heard Muhammad Yunus, the founder of Grameen Bank, give a talk about microfinance. The Obstacle Course Just Do It "My day started as usual. The Profit in Nonprofit.
Confusion Over Where Money Lent on Kiva Goes. Kiva News: Today's New York Times Article. Hello Everyone, This is Matt Flannery, Co-Founder and CEO of Kiva.org. I'm now writing my second message as a part of the ongoing online discussion on the topic of person-to-person connections and transparency as it relates to Kiva and online philanthropy. For anyone that hasn't been following along, here are some links to get you caught up: The original post by David RoodmanMy reply And then today's article in the NYT by Stephanie Strom To recap our history, we started in a village in Uganda in 2005, working with a local pastor to disburse loans.
In the ensuing four years Kiva has grown by several orders of magnitude. As I originally posted a month ago, I believe that 1) pre-disbursal, our policy to allow MFIs to disburse loans to entrepreneurs before they are fully funded on the site, is necessary for the success of this model, and 2) that we can do better at educating our users about how and why this is the case. This all, to me, represents a good start. Thank you, Matt. Adventures of an African Microfinancier | The Long Road Home. The road to Kihihi, in western Uganda, is like a curvy woman playing the risky game of simultaneously toying with two very bad and dangerous men, thrusting her bottom into one man and flashing her bosom at the other man. As the rough, dirt track wavers back and forth, it flirts a little too boldly with the Congo border in one direction and way too precariously with several precipitous cliffs in the other one.
Sure it may be exciting, but crossing the line with one of the men is likely to get you raped and if you take it a step too far with the other one you’ll be smashed to pieces. Whenever the road took me west, I found myself fixating on a story from a book about Dian Fossey. A friend of hers in Rwanda was expecting a visit from her sons, who were driving from Nairobi, but the boys never arrived.
She learned later they had taken the wrong road out of Kisoro, in the far southwest corner of Uganda, and without knowing it until it was too late, ended up in Congo. Tags: Kiva. A Mostly Comprehensive Guide to the Kiva and Donor Illusion Debate : Philanthropy Action. Oct 13, 2009 A Mostly Comprehensive Guide to the Kiva and Donor Illusion Debate by Tim Ogden Updated November 10 The posts and comments have been flying fast and furious over the issue of Kiva specifically and the issues of transparency and donors demands for illusion. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29.
Disclosure: I serve on GiveWell’s board of directors. Kiva: A Cautionary Tale for Social Entrepreneurs? - Timothy Ogden. By Timothy Ogden | 4:41 PM October 19, 2009 For the past few years, Kiva, the person-to-person microlending site, has been held up as something of a poster child for social entrepreneurship. The site lets users choose an entrepreneur in a developing country and make a loan to them. This ability to personally help someone escape poverty has obvious appeal. The site has caught the eye of celebrities like Oprah Winfrey and New York Times columnist Nicholas D. Kristof with predictable results: explosive growth for Kiva. Recently, though, a bit of the shine has come off. And in just the past few weeks, the nonprofit and social entrepreneurship blogosphere has lit up with debate over what some have called Kiva’s misleading marketing. The twin controversies have served to illuminate several issues that all social entrepreneurs must wrestle with: Timothy Ogden is an executive partner at Sona Partners, and the editor in chief of Philanthropy Action, an online journal for high net worth donors.
What is special about the kiva model. Kiva (organization) Since 2005, Kiva has crowd-funded more than 1 million loans, totaling more than a half a billion dollars, at a repayment rate of 99 percent.[4] As of Nov. 2013, Kiva was raising about $1 million every three days.[3] The Kiva platform has attracted a community of more than 1 million lenders from around the world.[5] Kiva operates two models—Kiva.org and KivaZip.org. The former model relies on a network of field partners to administer the loans on the ground.[6] These field partners can be microfinance institutions, social businesses, schools or non-profit organizations.[7] KivaZip.org facilitates loans at 0% directly to entrepreneurs via mobile payments and PayPal.
In both Kiva.org and KivaZip.org, Kiva includes personal stories of each person who needs a loan because they want their lenders to connect with their entrepreneurs on a human level.[8] Kiva itself does not collect any interest on the loans it facilitates and Kiva lenders do not make interest on loans. Kiva_vs_MyC4-w. Kiva is a menace. This entry is from Curtis Chang, CEO of Consulting Within Reach (CWR). CWR has recently agreed to provide pro bono services to FORGE. As part of this experiment in radical transparency, Social Edge and Kjerstin have invited Curtis to regularly share about the experience in this context. The love affair with Kiva Like just about everyone else, I love Kiva. I first started following their story and Matthew Flannery’s blog here on the Social Edge at the end of December 2006.
Their approach of raising funds by connecting individual lenders to micro entrepreneurs seemed like a revelation to me at the time. As I’ve described elsewhere, going to the Kiva site has even become a small family tradition. It was no surprise to me that they’ve become the toast of the town, so much that Time recently named it one of the 50 best sites in the world. That’s why Kiva has become so dangerous for so many young social enterprises like FORGE. But copying success can be dangerous. Here’s what came next: Bombs. Reid Hoffman - Person Partner @ Greylock Partners. Reid Hoffman is a Partner at Greylock, and Co-Founder and Executive Chairman at LinkedIn. Reid joined Greylock Partners in 2009. His areas of focus include consumer Internet, enterprise 2.0, mobile, social gaming, online marketplaces, payments, and social networks. Reid likes to work with products that can reach hundreds of millions of participants and businesses that have network effects.
An accomplished entrepreneur, executive and angel investor, Hoffman has played an integral part in building many of today’s leading consumer technology businesses, including LinkedIn and PayPal. He possesses a unique understanding of consumer behavior and the dynamics of viral businesses as well as deep experience in driving companies from the earliest stages through periods of explosive growth. Hoffman co-founded LinkedIn, the world’s largest professional networking service, in 2003. Prior to LinkedIn Hoffman served as executive vice president at PayPal, where he was a founding board member. Videos. Kiva. Kiva is a nonprofit, personal micro-lending site that facilitates loans between lenders and low-income entrepreneurs in developing countries, using local lending companies and organizations as intermediaries.
Lenders can find the business and entrepreneur they want to lend to based on region, business type, risk level, etc. Each posted loan is accompanied with bios for the respective entrepreneur, details on the why and what the loan is going to be used for, total amount raised from other lenders, loan duration (usually 6-12 months) and loan default risk.
Taking small payments, usually $25, from a bunch of Kiva lenders raises the loans. Once a loan's full amount has been raised it is transferred to one of Kiva's field partners. In most cases the field partners have already disbursed the loans depicted before they are posted for "backfilling" by lenders on the Kiva website. When loans have been repaid in full they are transferred back to Kiva and then to Kiva lenders via PayPal. See Less. Fundraising Platform For Startups ProFounder Shuts Its Doors. ProFounder, a startup that offered entrepreneurs ways to raise money for their startups and ideas, is shutting its doors, according to an announcement on the company’s site today. ProFounder, which is the brainchild of Kiva co-founder Jessica Jackley and fellow Stanford Business School alum Dana Mauriello, allowed entrepreneurs to share a percentage of their revenues with investors (their friends, family, and community) over time in exchange for an investment.
Entrepreneurs could apply to Profounder, upload a pitch to offer to potential investors and then create a term sheet with Profounder’s templated forms and compliance sheets. ProFounder then gave businesses a page where they can invite friends, family, and investors to a destination page that allowed users to make contributions and investments directly on the site. Profounder says the current regulatory environment prevented them from pursuing further innovations on the site. Home | PROfounders Capital. 501(c) organization.