Third World America - Arianna Huffington [87]
Providing microcredit to small businesses is an innovation for which Muhammad Yunus won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006.158 In 2008, Yunus’s Grameen Bank opened a branch in New York.159 In 2010 it opened a branch in Omaha, Nebraska.160 The Grameen Bank’s slogan: “Banking for the unbanked.”161 Hoping to serve one million American entrepreneurs, Grameen America plans to expand into more than fifty cities across the country, including Washington, D.C., and San Francisco.162 A practice most closely associated with helping struggling Third World countries has now arrived in America. By February 2010, the New York branch had extended loans to 2,500 clients, mostly women. The average loan amount is $1,500 (no collateral necessary) and more than 99 percent of the recipients make their payments on time.163
Grameen Bank is not the only organization committed to providing microcredit to small businesses here at home. Since 1991, ACCION USA has lent over $119 million, in the form of more than 19,500 small-business loans, to low- and moderate-income entrepreneurs.164 Luis Zapeda Alvarez, for example, who was once homeless and out of work, now runs his own business delivering baked goods to New York City restaurants and delis—in large part due to the assistance he received.165 After banks refused to lend him start-up capital, Alvarez approached ACCION and borrowed enough money to buy the delivery truck he needed to get his business off the ground. When his truck needed new insulation, ACCION USA helped him secure a $5,600 loan to make the improvements. Alvarez’s business has expanded to three daily delivery routes—he’s now so busy that he had to hire a part-time employee—and his success as an entrepreneur has helped cement his relationship with his children.
Another New Yorker, Lyn Genet Recitas, opened Neighborhood Holistic, a yoga studio and spa, in Harlem with the help of a microloan from ACCION USA.166 Within a year, the studio was profitable, and Recitas expanded her venture, bringing on twelve part-time employees and providing yoga scholarships for low-income community members.
Some of the most exciting social advocacy and “citizen philanthropy” is happening on the Web. DonorsChoose.org, for example, invites public school teachers from around the country to post funding proposals for classroom needs. Users browse the listings—for things such as notebooks and pencils, LCD projectors for math instruction, or mirrors so that art students can practice drawing self-portraits—and donate however much they’d like to their chosen projects.167 By May 2010, just a decade after the site was started by Bronx high school social studies teacher Charles Best, DonorsChoose.org had raised over $52 million across more than 130,000 different proposals.
In Connecticut, Web developer Ben Berkowitz has launched SeeClickFix.com, which invites users to post nonemergency problems in their neighborhoods, such as a broken streetlamp or a potholed road.168 Other community members are encouraged to chime in with solutions; sometimes neighbors reply with fixes within minutes. With SeeClickFix.com, citizens can more rapidly identify and repair local problems to improve their neighborhoods and, by extension, the entire country.
Using the backbone of social networking to help people connect and find service opportunities that fit their specific abilities and aspirations is the idea behind All for Good, launched in 2009 by Google engineers (using the company’s “20 percent” philosophy that allows employees to spend one day a week working on passion projects).169 The goal was to apply the power of the search engine to service