Join our Altrusa Lending Team at Kiva.org

At our last meeting, Carol and members of our International Relations Committee told us about Kiva (www.kiva.org), a non-profit that allows you to lend as little as $25 to a specific low-income entrepreneur in the developing world.

You choose who to lend to - whether a baker in Afghanistan, a goat herder in Uganda, a farmer in Peru, a restaurateur in Cambodia, or a tailor in Iraq - and as they repay their loan, you get your money back.  It's a powerful and sustainable way to empower someone right now to lift themselves out of poverty.

Our International Relations Committee has started us off by donating $100 to be loaned through Kiva.  We thank everyone who also put donations into the basket that was passed around -- another $75 was raised!  

The committee invites every Altrusa member (and your friends!) to participate individually, and to join our Altrusa of Montrose Lending Team.

If you join our lending team, we can work together to alleviate poverty.  Once you're a part of the team, you can choose to have a future loan on Kiva "count" towards our team's impact.  The loan is still yours, and repayments still come to you - but you can also choose to have the loan show up in our team's collective portfolio, so our team's overall impact will grow!

For instructions on making micro-loans through Kiva, and on joining our Altrusa of Montrose Lending Team, click here.

We're still selecting recipients for the $175 in funds donated by International Relations and our Club, and have already made loans to a group in Pakistan which includes a woman who will use the funds to buy medicine for her "medical store" and another purchasing pipes and taps for her family's sanitary supplies business.  Another loan is to a group in Uganda, including the owner of a health clinic who needs funds to buy more medicine to treat patients with malaria, colds, flu, minor injuries, and more.  A third small loan is to a large group of business women in Paraguay who are each in business selling food, clothing, hardware, beverages, or working as a hairdresser.