hey jason- anyone who is interested in coworking AND kiva/microfinance is definitely someone i want to be speaking too. i've a religious traveler, and have been running a microfinance blog for 5 years.
shoot me an email at [email protected] On Thursday, March 28, 2013 12:49:10 PM UTC-7, Jason Delia wrote: > > Hi all. I love this group. So much information. > > I don't actually have a coworking space yet but I have begun the process > of reaching out to my community to find potential members and bootstrap the > entire process. I've been thinking a lot lately about what I *MIGHT *do > if my space ever gets off the ground. > > One thought I had was around using kiva.org for building a sense of > community in your space. If you are not familiar, Kiva is a non-profit > that allows people to provide small loans to others in impoverished > countries looking for small business loans. Once the borrower repays the > loan it goes back into your Kiva account and you get to make another loan. > > Wouldn't it be great if you created an account on Kiva for your community. > Members could contribute however much they would like to the Kiva account, > with you as the space owner perhaps matching their donations and, as a > community, you come together to decide which borrowers to loan your funds > to. This wouldn't be a one time event either. As loans get repaid, money > is once again available to be loaned out and your community would come > together again and again to find new borrowers. Kiva provides regular > updates on the progress the borrower is making so you could have a bulletin > board or some other way to keep the community updated on how they are > helping. > > Seems like this would be a win for everyone involved. For relatively > little money you are helping to change people's lives; your members will > feel good about contributing to the causes; your community will be stronger > as your members come together to make decisions collectively; and a > stronger community will lead to more members joining and using your space. > > Jason > http://brainyspace.co/working > -- Visit this forum on the web at http://discuss.coworking.com --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Coworking" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
