Sage Hill Kiva

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Blog #6

We ended service learning this year by trying to set Ava up to have a successful following year. We found entrepreneurs to pitch to, including Booth Machinery, LLC and Tim Rafalovich, the Senior Vice President of alternative equity groups at Wells Fargo.  All five of us are going to try to reach out to Sophomores and Juniors to try and get them to join Kiva next year.  We had a ton of interest at the beginning of this year, so we don’t think finding new members to help Ava next year will be a problem at all.

We’re happy to report that Robina is keeping up with her repayment on her $650 loan.  She’s even ahead of schedule!  The success Maddy’s dad has had this year with the Kiva program has made him interested in continuing a relationship with Kiva at Sage in the years to come.  We’ve had a super successful year and Ava is looking forward to next year!

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Maddy and Connie fixing the Kiva posters up in the H Building. 

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March Service Learning

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February Service Learning

Our great panel gave us some amazing advice this morning for Multicultural fair! We were a little lost with what to do for our booth at the fair, but we finally decided on making flyers to hand out, which includes a brief description of what Kiva is and who we are trying to fund loans for. We will place a couple of boxes for donations. We have a rough draft of our flyers, but we still haven’t decided which borrowers we want to advocate for.

While Alfonso and Seth worked on the flyers the rest of us worked on our posters, which will be placed in the lower H building. On our poster, we explained what Kiva is while including a brief description of our pitch and loan for Robina.

We’re super excited to have a table at the Multicultural fair. It’s going to be a great opportunity to introduce the Sage community and parents to the value and purpose of Kiva. Donations will go towards our Sage Hill Kiva group, which will ensure future loan fundings in the years to come.

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We started off our Service Learning day by meeting up with our awesome panel and practicing for our pitch with Dave Valdez of Load Center, LLC. We had our draft of our powerpoint prepared, but we went back and made a few adjustments and added a slide on the specific loan we were pitching for. We chose Robina, from Pakistan, because of her compelling story and potential to help her son expand his company. Robina’s son started his own business selling welding material six years ago. Her son will use the loan to increase his supply of welding products, including iron rods, iron sheets, soldering rods and welding rods so that he can respond quickly to customer needs. He plans to expand his business with the additional income he earns. Robina hopes that the loan will be helpful for her son's business.

After finalizing and practicing our pitch, we had our meeting with Dave Valdez and it was a huge success! We were able to complete the $575 remaining from the $675 of Robina’s loan. We’re extremely excited to help Robina and her son grow the welding business.

This service learning day, we all worked together on the pitch and preparation instead of splitting up on multiple tasks. Today was truly a group effort, and we are happy with the results of the day. We look forward to more future pitches, and expanding our presence on campus!

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Today, we started off by having a really productive meeting with our super awesome panel! We then found potential businesses to pitch to. We are excited to announce that we have scheduled a meeting for our next service learning, January 13th, to pitch to Dave Valdez of Load Center, LLC, under the private equity firm Everwatch Capital. For future pitches, we are also contacting Opus Bank, Wells Fargo, and the Tarsadia Foundation.

KIVA has a spot in the downstairs H building to put posters up for display. We have created two posters which will display details explaining what KIVA is and the story of a person we will potentially be loaning to. This will be a great way to get the Sage Hill community aware and involved in our group.

So far, our powerpoint is coming along well. We have a very solid template for our future pitches. We will explain what KIVA is and pitch a specific loan to each company. Together, Seth and Connie wrote the powerpoint, while Ava and Alfonso worked on the posters, and Maddy contacted businesses to pitch to. We are extremely excited to pitch, for the first time, in January!

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Today we started off the day meeting with our awesome panel!! Then we narrowed down our list of potential loans from ten to five.  We ultimately decided to cut the entrepreneurs who had low star ratings for risk, as we feel more comfortable advocating for people who are more likely to pay back the loan.  

One of our potential loans is for Hafeezan from Lahore, Pakistan. Her loan is for $775 to help her fix her husband's lathe machine so he can easily operate it and generate income for the family. Her husband manufactures and renews spare parts of vehicles.

Another potential loan is to help Fazana buy raw material for manufacturing plastic accessories for her husband’s business. She is from Lahore, Pakistan.

There is also Miguel Mariano from Cotorra, Columbia. His goal is to start a business renting out washing machines. A loan of $300 dollars will help him launch his business.

Miriam Del Carmen, from El Salvador, wants to buy a griddle to make pupusas and a display case to sell pencils, pencil boxes, paper, erasers, pencil sharpeners, and geometry sets. This will help her expand her business even more, and all she needs is $1,000.

Makamba’s Group from Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, needs a $1,575 loan to help a member buy up to date salon products to meet her customers’ requests.

Finally, we have Martha from Nezahualcoyotl, Mexico, who needs a loan of $950 to help her restock her store.

In addition to pitching local businesses, we decided to create and promote a Sage Hill Kiva lending team. As a group we will encourage members of the community to independently make loans and join the team. A Sage Hill Kiva lending team already exists with $14,000 dollars of investments, and part of our goal for next month is to contact the creator of the team and see if we can continue using that team instead of creating a new one. We also plan on making a donation box on campus where community member can donate cash if they do not want to sign up for Kiva. SInce it would be hard to keep track of the people who give cash, we will count cash contributions as donations instead of loans, and continually reinvest the money as we are repaid. Even if people donate dollars, we can combine donations into multiple $10 increments.

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Today we hit the ground running by having a very productive first Service Learning Day.  After meeting with our panel, we jumped onto the Kiva website and continued our search for entrepreneurs to loan to.  Looking through hundreds of people in need of loans, Maddy and Connie (with Seth and Alfonso) have compiled a pretty good list of people we could pitch on behalf of.  Because there are so many people in need of loans on the Kiva website, we still have more searching to do, but our initial list is very promising.  We kept our focus on entrepreneurs trying to start or improve their businesses (as there are a lot of people in need of money for other things like tuition or books) because our service learning group’s focus is on the developing business markets and alleviating poverty through entrepreneurship.  We are in the beginning stages of finding local businesses to pitch to, but we’ve made some good connections to get us started.  Alfonso emailed Ms Murphy about the SHIP opportunities on campus this year, so that we can hopefully contact some of the companies already affiliated with Sage.  We’re waiting to hear back from the SHIP Program to see if there are businesses already involved with Sage that we can pitch to.  We’re also looking outside of Sage at the community at large to find companies to pitch to.  Seth set up the lovely blog you’re currently reading and finalized our mission statement.  

We spent quite a bit of time familiarizing ourselves with Kiva and all it encompasses, so that we are experts not only on the entrepreneurs we are pitching on behalf of, but also on Kiva as a whole.  

Here are some quick facts to get you more familiarized with KIVA:

Since its founding in 2005, there has been:

  1,343,211 KIVA lenders

  $764,008,075 in loans

  98.49 % repayment rate

KIVA works with:

  302 microfinance organizations (otherwise known as Field Partners)

  450 Volunteers around the world

  83 Different countries

Our goals for this year is to pitch 3-4 local companies every other Service Learning day and to complete 3-4 successful loans. For the days that we are not pitching, we will be meeting to plan and practice our presentations.

For next Service Learning, we hope to have a finalized list of the Kiva entrepreneurs we will be pitching on behalf of.  We will plan out and work on our presentation for our pitch. We also hope to set up an appointment to do our first official pitch to a company.   

We also listened to the juniors pitch to us, and we’re excited to have Ava join our team.  Welcome Ava!  We’re very excited about our team and looking forward to a successful year!