Talk about timing. This year at Trickle Up, we started what we call our Delta Initiative with a plan to give $700 grants to the poorest of the poor in Louisiana, Mississippi and Arkansas to start very small businesses. Our first grant under this initiative went to Louisa Montgomery of Shelby, Miss., who runs a barbecue catering business for local construction crews. With our seed money, she bought a huge grill that allows her to double her output; she can cook enough at a time to prepare 50 plates a day.

She had just bought the grill when Hurricane Katrina hit the area. We have decided to help the poorest victims in the region by giving grants so that they can start small businesses, such as landscaping and yard work, cleaning services, day care, maybe handicrafts, although you never know what entrepreneurial ideas someone might turn up. We hope to raise $700,000 to $1 million for the Delta area. We aim high in our fund raising. If we can make it, great; if not, we know we tried.

My second husband, Glen Leet, who died in 1998, came from an old Connecticut family that founded Leete Island. Some of the family dropped the “e.” Glen always said our country was built on microfinance. One founding father may have bought a plow and another put up the cash to buy seeds, and they started small businesses with what capital they could get.

So Glen married this little gal from Brooklyn: me. We came from very different backgrounds, but I think ours was the least argumentative marriage that has ever been. It was an extraordinary merging of two minds with simple goals: We wanted to work on eradicating poverty. How do you do that? Well, you encourage people, first of all, by listening to them, and second, giving them start-up capital so that they can start a business.

“OTHER PEOPLE said, ‘That’s lovely what you’re doing, darling,’ but we had to prove this project could work before anyone else would donate to it.”

We started Trickle Up in 1979 on the Caribbean island of Dominica, which had an unemployment rate of about 45 percent. We started working with a local women’s organization there, and asked people to spread the word: “Anyone interested in starting a business, come and talk to us.” Initially, Glen and I put up $1,000 of our own money. Other people said, “That’s lovely what you’re doing, darling,” but we had to prove this project could work before anyone else would donate to it. We found people in Dominica with many ambitions. One would be interested in starting a bakery, one in making carpets and another in making T-shirts.

What we had in mind was not the same as microfinance. Our goal was to reach people who are so poor many of them do not have the collateral to get a micro-loan, not yet. We had those who were interested fill out a one-page application, asking such questions as: What kind of business would you like to start? How much would it cost you to make the products? How much would you have to charge to make a profit? If they could show us a reasonable business plan in the application, we would give them $50. Then, a couple of months later, if they could show us their records of money going out and money coming in, we would give them the second $50. After that, they were off on their own, and they learned to build their own capital.

A year later, we would check to see if the business was still going. Some were not, but it has been very exciting for us to find that 70 percent of the businesses we have funded through Trickle Up continue after the first year. We have visited years later and found our recipients have been able to build new roofs and even send their children to college.

In the Dominican Republic, one young man took the money and ran to the other end of the island. The villagers ran after him and made him come back. Otherwise, our recipients are just so happy to be given the opportunity to move themselves out of poverty. Nobody wants to be poor.

Of course, we face certain governments that do not encourage this kind of activity, but we work through individuals and organizations, not with governments. We did, though, start working in India as a result of meeting Indira Gandhi. She was visiting the United States, and I was invited to a small reception for her. I told her about Trickle Up; she got very excited and called her secretary over, and that is how we got started in India.

A Woman’s Place
I first learned about philanthropy from my grandmother. She was a tiny little woman, no more than 4 feet, 8 inches, and she became involved in raising money to expand a hospital in Brooklyn, the Kingsbrook Jewish Medical Center, which is a huge hospital now. She rang doorbells to collect money. At 16, I started doing that with her.

I got into nonprofit work as a career, though, because it was something I could do as a married woman with children. When I graduated from NYU, I was thinking about going into advertising. I was 19. But I also got married. A wife’s place was in the home, and my in-laws did not take kindly to the idea of my working, although my first husband, Lou Robbins, a lawyer, was a sweetheart of a guy, and he knew I was not the kind of woman who was going to sit home and knit or cook. He died unfortunately, very young, when we were in Egypt.

I think I learned what it takes to be a leader when I became board chairman of the Audrey Cohen College for Human Services in New York. At a board meeting in the late ’60s, when the student revolts were occurring all over, I was sitting at a table when all of a sudden, a student raised his hand and said, “You’re not going to run this organization. I am.”

He started ranting and raving. I was trying to show that I could keep calm. I started to drink from a glass of water, but I had to put it down because my hand was shaking so much. Ultimately I stayed in control and the staff and the students in the room stopped listening to him because he wasn’t making any sense. For me, it was a great learning experience. I find every time I encounter a crisis and have to keep things under control, I have to realize that even if my heart is pounding and my hands are shaking, my mind can keep going. It’s exercising discipline, and it ain’t easy. But you have to do it, because if you are going to be a leader, you will have to confront issues.

Our projects at Trickle Up do not often encounter griping or rebellions, but at times we have to calm people down. Once in India I was dealing with a women’s organization in which the old leader and the new leader were arguing. The important thing for me to do was to listen to both of them and mediate. You have to learn to listen to other people, no matter how bright you think you are and how much experience you’ve had. There is always something else you learn that you never knew before. I’m 82, and I’ve found that it doesn’t stop.