|
|
 |
|
| Philanthropy |
Priming the Free Enterprise Pump
Jan Alexander
02/02/2004
|
Lucy Billingsley, a Dallas real-estate developer, describes herself as "pretty much of a tightwad," although these days she is a reformed one. At a party two years ago, she met Alex Counts, president and CEO of Grameen Foundation USA, a financing and support arm of the famous Grameen Bank, which pioneered the concept of organized micro-lending. "He is an unassuming, quiet fellow," she says of Counts, a former Fulbright scholar. "But when he told me what Grameen was doing for a village of poor women in Chiapas (Mexico), I thought this was an answer."
 Grameen was providing funds to a local microfinance institution (MFI) that, in turn, underwrote loans so that a small local bank could lend small increments of operating capital—as little as $50—to women who had never washed with running water or worn shoes, but who needed just a little capital to start a business selling chickens or woven fabrics or peaches. The women form trust groups in which all members have to cosign each others’ loans, and they meet with a loan officer every two weeks to make payments and seek business advice.
Last March, Billingsley and two friends went down to the remote mountain village, where they met women who wanted to expand the lending program so that they could buy firewood and put more time into their entrepreneurial ventures, instead of spending half the day scouring the mountainside for loose branches. Back home, she began organizing what she calls a philanthropic version of Tupperware parties to raise money for more loans for the women. In October, she took 30 Dallas women, some in pearl necklaces, to visit the Chiapas village.
Now Billingsley, in the process of raising $790,000 for the 7,000 micro-loan borrowers in the Chiapas program, is the donor the Grameen Foundation would most like to clone. "Lucy does her best to remove the barriers. I think that is just so cool," says Randi Nordeen, director of development for Grameen Foundation USA, who went to Chiapas with the Dallas delegation. "We’re launching other donor trips now."
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
