Pulling in my littlest sister

When my littlest sister (both in terms of height and age...she's 29) visited back around Thanksgiving, I played ATM and gave her cash in return for a check made out to one of the charities I donate to. She looked at it longingly and said she wished she had money to give away. Well, she probably won't for a few years yet, but I think I've come up with a solution to get her in the habit without costing her anything.

You know how most rebates are only one per household? Well, what if, when I buy multiple items like that, I submit one of them with her details...and once there's $20 or so accumulated, she can make a donation? I mean, the original money spent will have come from my ThaiForGood sessions, and it's essentially being "recycled" - first I get to buy something for one charity with it, then the cash gets donated to another.

The first thing I want her to try is applying $25 to a Kiva loan because it's interactive, personal, and comes with a lot of feedback. I think she'd really like that. After that, I could get her to think about what kinds of causes she'd like to support, then research a few and make suggestions. Hopefully she'll find it interesting enough to start reading up on such things on her own, but if not, she'll at least have the basics.

Still in "Giving" Mode

That 10-Day Give may have finished up 6 days ago, but I haven't completely slacked off the way I thought I would. So far this week...

• On Thursday, I mailed $1080 worth of coupons to the US Air Force base in Okinawa. And today I collected dozens of coupon flyers and chopped them up. This week's selection was obnoxiously crappy, so the yield for the Overseas Coupon Program was pitiful.
• I made another Kiva loan, this time to a seamstress in Cambodia. What can I say, I envy her skills!
• Today I mailed the $245 I raised with charity massages to Thai Freedom House, which is currently struggling with a bad landlord situation, inflation, blossoming enrollment, and reduced contributions due to the economy.
• This afternoon I will be doing another charity massage, and the money from this one will go towards a joint project by Feed Villages and Village Volunteers, earmarked for the construction of grain/produce storage facilities to keep the food supply from the Community Garden Project available for their feeding programs year-round. They need $3100 to pull it off.

Days 7-9 of The 10-Day Give

Got a little catching up to do here...

Day 7: Doubled the contents of the "Snowflake Savings" jar earmarked for The Baobab Home.

Day 8: Nothing - I've got two things lined up for Day 10 that really can't be done any other day. If you've been following my new giving habits, you can probably guess what they both are...

Day 9: Another Kiva loan, this time an unusual opportunity - a consortium of impoverished first-timers in the Dominican Republic with no history of entrepreneurship or successful past loans. Most loans are to tiny businesses that already exist, to give them the cashflow to expand, so I reckon the chances of default on this one are significantly higher than usual.

Day 6 of The 10-Day Give

I've been sitting on a pile of Kiva credit since they released $10M in partial repayments. With so much money going around the system at the moment, there have been days where all loans were fully funded or maybe there were 3 to choose from. I'm not complaining - I think it's wonderful all around!

But this evening, as Day 6 of the challenge had less than an hour left, I had a peek - 154 to pick from, woohoo! I was a little tempted by the herbal medicine venture of a Peruvian clairvoyant, but she wasn't terribly indigenous-looking. Having been to Peru, I know how the class system works, and I want to help the descendants of the Incas, not the descendants of the Conquistadors. Hm, I just reread that...I hope I sound fun-cerebral-weird and not like a complete nutjob.

Anyway, I reached out to Patience Moore, an egg seller in Ghana because (a) I think bringing a healthy source of protein to the local market is a good thing (many Kiva retailers are selling cosmetics and soda, which I don't consider essential), and (b) it's very unusual to find a 31yo African woman with no husband or kids - you know there's a story there. Good luck, Patience, I'll be tracking your progress over the next 8 months and rooting for your success!

Rainy Saturday Updates

It's a gloomy, gray, wet Saturday, and no one - myself included - has much inclination to set foot outside. That means zero business and lots of time for introspection and initiative. And naps.

Thai Freedom House
Today I posted an ad on Craigslist offering one half-price Thai massage this weekend, with all of the proceeds going to Thai Freedom House. I should have advertised it earlier this week, but I thought I was going to have some minor surgery on my leg this morning, which requires two days off from work. No nibbles yet...I blame the weather. There's always next weekend if this one doesn't pan out.

Goods4Girls
I need a lesson on how to use a sewing machine and what the little "insider" tricks are for getting things to line up right. Next Saturday I won't have any water at all from 4am to 8pm, so I'm heading to NJ to visit my mother, who said she'd see if her very-skilled best friend would be willing to spend an hour with me over a sewing machine.

Kiva
I made my second loan to an African entrepreneur - well, a group of entrepreneurs. I have trouble finding ones I like because either (a) the microlending institution has a religious backer, or (b) the loans are to Nigerians, who've just run too many scams for me to feel charitable towards, or (c) they're polygamous, which just makes me feel weird.

Krazy for Kiva Kredits

A few days ago, my favorite microfinance charity, Kiva, rolled out a new procedure: instead of giving you back your $25 when the loan is fully repaid, you get your little piece of the repaid installment as soon as they do. They used to hold onto it until the very end, using the interest to fund their expenses. I thought this was a terrific plan.

I'm not sure what they're doing to meet those expenses now, but I can see what inspired this change. The past few months has seen an explosion of loan requests - from a daily average of 60 to an average of 600 - and there were frequent issues with time running out before a loan got fully funded. This new system will alleviate that, at least initially, and it doesn't just benefit the borrowers. As a lender with 10 x $25 increments in the microfinance pipeline, this means I can make a new loan more frequently and regularly. Now that may not sound exciting to a lot of folks, but most of us find it "fun" to sift through borrowers for someone whose story or business strikes a chord. It also benefits Kiva - existing lenders will be visiting the site more often, giving more thought to microlending, and very likely talking about it more with the people in their lives.

E.g. this morning I got in on a loan to a 63-year-old coffee grower in Peru who wants to expand the size of her orchard (I guess that's what you call it when it's too small to be classified as a plantation). Why did I pick that loan? For odd reasons, that make total sense when I describe them to the people who know me...

- I've been to Peru and have seen first-hand how prevalent the poverty is amongst the descendants of the Incas.
- I'm writing this from a B&B in Argentina, so there's this feeling of being "in the neighborhood"
- I discovered that I like coffee just 20 months ago - after 25 years of being a committed tea-only drinker
- 14 years ago, I worked for a fair trade coffee co-op (CafeDirect) in the UK, and know how tempting it is for people this poor to grow coca for the drug cartels
- She's 63. Instead of retiring, she's expanding. I want that motivation when I'm her age!

The point of mentioning all this is that I'll probably mention it to my mother or sister or a client purely for its conversational value. However, you never know when an amusing story will be filed in the back of someone's mind and retrieved later.

A Soft Spot for Cambodia

A couple of years ago, I wrote a brochure for a charity whose main project at the time was assisting young Cambodian survivors of human trafficking (a slightly nicer term for forced prostitution) in their recovery by funding psychology services and vocational training. I learned that Cambodia is a really hard place to donate safely, because there are too many shady people - no doubt the same shady people that promise nice jobs to teenage girls and then sell them into sex slavery in Bangkok - who make a business out of tricking foreign NGOs. Seriously, they will put together a fake brothel full of fake child prostitutes for official visits and solicit funds to save them.

So when I see a decent loan on Kiva to a Cambodian, I snap it up. A couple of my micro-borrowers finished repaying their loans - Congratulations to Marta the Dominican vegetable fryer and Estela the Peruvian grain-seller!! So welcome to my portfolio for the next 8 months, Try Kan, and best of luck with the expansion of your vegetable farm :)

PenaltyFee for ChariTee

I've recently put the wheels in motion to start a new little business sideline, "TreadMate Kate" (Kate = me). While it's certainly not a charitable venture, there are a couple of elements of giving back wrapped into the plan. One is that I'm only charging half the market rate for the service, which is along the lines of personal training, because after conquering near-morbid obesity, I sincerely want to help others begin that fight and stay the course. The second is more relevant to this blog: the cancellation fee.

I suck at being a hardass about things like late arrivals and last-minute cancellations, but it's essential for the service I'm offering. I know the gamut of seemingly valid excuses we make to ourselves and to others for not squeezing in a little exercise, so it is absolutely essential to the service that I enforce a policy. Well, what better way to make it more palatable than to earmark $5 of each fee (which runs from $10 to the whole enchilada) for charity?

Then there's the matter of choosing a charity. I didn't want one that was too big or too small, or that might not have wide appeal. So for the moment, I'm going with one of my stand-bys, Kiva. No, not because I can claw back the money one day - but I can send my truant clients a link to the microloan recipient's information so that they can see what some of their thrown-away money is accomplishing. It may even encourage then to become a lender.

Now how's that for a win-win-win situation?

Yay, Rosario!

Rosario Coronado is a cheesemaker in Nicaragua. I like cheese. I'd probably like Nicaragua. So on that basis, I contributed to her Kiva loan request back in February and she just paid it off yesterday. That gives her a better repayment record than anyone in my FAMILY (three loans outstanding with the Bank of Big Sister, one of them for nearly 5 years). I immediately reloaned the $25 chunk to Delfina, an herbal medicine maker in Ayacucho, Peru.

I have a strange relationship with Peru. I hiked the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu in 2006 and saw a particularly bitter form of poverty. I dropped change out of my pocket, and old ladies swarmed to pick it up and run away with it. I dealt with 12-year-old stall vendors who pouted and sneered at my attempts to bargain (I hate doing that, but for god's sake they were charging more than the airport for something half as nice!). I had a shoeshine boy inflate the price of his unwanted services by a factor of 25 (I agreed to a factor of 15 and still felt fleeced). I gave money to a few beggar kids - 30 cents, which had the buying power of $1 there - who bitched me out for not giving them more, until I threatened to take the coins back. The camp porters while on the trek had to stand guard over us at night because the locals would steal our shoes or worse if no one was watching. I do not like bargaining with people who sleep one layer above dirt, but I also don't like having them laugh at another stupid American for paying a week of their wages for a piece of pottery. I felt like shit for being shoved into a position where I resented and deplored the seriously poor, thanks to the palpable, unabashed disdain of said poor.

As such, I have no interest in returning to their country. I won't even consider pan-South American tours that include Peru. However, I will help from a distance and hope that I'm lending to people who don't secretly despise the source of their funding. What can I say? I think it's disgusting that the descendants of one of the greatest empires of the New World have been brought so low. So to Delfina the Medicine Maker and Estela the Grain Seller (due to complete her loan in a couple of weeks) - you go, girls!

Giving is PERSONAL

I love when a charity tells you what $XX buys, and I love it even more when you can choose exactly what your contribution buys. Sounds like I repeated myself, doesn't it. To illustrate the difference, donations to FINCA go into a microloan fund, whereas with Kiva, you can pick exactly which fledgling business you want to loan to. There are other differences between them (donation v. refundable loan, $50 first-time borrowers v. $500 borrowers with a history, etc), but today I'm focusing on how satisfying I find it to sponsor a specific person or small project, and below is a review of some of my favorite ideas, some of which I've given to while others are on deck. I think I developed a penchant for this kind of giving back in elementary school, when they handed out the little cardboard ricebowls for us to assemble and put our small change in...I remember that in 1977, $5 could feed a family in Bangladesh for a week. Call it my first lesson in the value of a dollar.

There is a large "charity warehouse" site that is a true joy for me to leaf through - GlobalGiving. You can pile up your selections in a shopping cart, and there's lots of information about the projects you're supporting, including the charity of origin. The founders are a pair of problem-solvers formerly affiliated with the World Bank. The downside: they take a 10% cut for their operating expenses. The upside: quite a few of the charities are so small and volunteer-driven that it's hard for them to put the manpower into fund-raising, so a site like this puts them on the donor map, and that 10% is well-spent. I also just discovered that GlobalGiving has a blog, so I'll be catching up on that this week. If you want to cut out this middleman, you can check out each charity's website on your own and see if you can send an earmarked donation that way, but I found that most are just set up for contributions to end up in a general fund. Another plus for this site: you can make a difference with as little as $10. Like, you can pay for the training of a Ugandan woman to produce therapeutic food that large charities buy for their emergency starvation projects in Africa...provides income for the woman and a local source of a much-needed product, saving on shipping and promoting sustainability - a project spearheaded by the International Medical Corps. Yeah, $10 doesn't even buy a martini in my 'hood these days.

Even biggies like UNICEF offer this option, labeled "Inspired Gifts" - like $15 for two mosquito nets to help fight malaria, and $17 for 50 liters of therapeutic milk formula for emergency measures to fight starvation.

AfricaAid lets you buy a portion of a project, and fills in each little piece with the donor's name, whether you're contributing $10 to educate 10 kids for a week or $400 for the lunch cook's annual salary. I kinda like this one, especially for a donation gift in someone else's name.

Here's one I'm saving up for: the Nepalese Youth Opportunity Fund, where $100 saves a little girl from bonded servitude, pays her school fees, and provides her family with an income-generating pig. Can you tell how much I love the pig part?

The more grassroots, the better. I like seeing one person or one couple out there trying to make a dent in the problems and imbalances in the world. You just know that if you handed them cash and said "it's for your charity", they wouldn't dream of putting it in their own pocket. That's the kind of people I want to deal with, and their causes are heartfelt and often creative because they answer to no one but their conscience. Yup, my kind of people.

$25 to a Man With a Can

Where it all started...

I'm a big fan of a hand up rather than a hand-out because even broke folks have pride. Between that and the fear of finding out that I'd been patronizing a large organization that kept half my contribution for their costs, I resisted the whole charity thing for most of my adult life.

And then I heard about Kiva. I realize most people have heard of this one by now thanks to Bill Clinton's book and The Oprah Winfrey Show, but for those of you who haven't, this is a very personalized form of microlending. You pick a struggling, ambitious entrepreneur in a developing country based on their business or picture or name or whatever-criteria-you-like and lend them $25. A bunch of other people like you kick in $25 chunks until the total loan request is met. A big selling point for me is that I can claw back my money whenever a loan is repaid - being self-employed in a teetering economy, it's nice to have this option. Oh, and the cleverest part of all this is how Kiva funds itself. Sure, it accepts direct contributions to its expenses, but get this: it doesn't reimburse us lenders until the loan is repaid in full, which allows them to benefit from the interest on the partially repaid balances of thousands of loans.

My first loan was to a couple that runs a fuel store in Azerbaijan - how could I resist this HappyHelpfulHusband photo? And now my portfolio reads like a United Nations of gutsy, industrious women: a Nicaraguan cheesemaker, an Ecuadorian seamstress, a Peruvian food retailer, an Indonesian green bean chef-on-a-moped, a 4-pack of Vietnamese chicken farmers, and pharmacists in Tanzania and Cambodia. What can I say, as someone who never envisioned working for herself, this concept and these people speak to me.

Then I began to wonder, what else speaks to me ...