#alleviatingpoverty

[mgoharofficial]

Seedout Fundraiser '16 #alleviatingpoverty #seedout #Change #socialchange #Pakistan #Lahore (at Royal Palm Golf and Country Club)

[kivashs-blog]

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!