Before I finished writing Green Entrepreneur Handbook, I made the decision to donate all of the proceeds from the sale of the book to two organizations I care deeply about: Kiva and Startup Weekend.  In this post, I want to share a bit about why I chose Kiva and how you can also get involved.

Microfinance and Me

While I was in college, I started reading about microfinance and microlending.  In abstract, the concepts seem to be good ones and I thought little about them in practice.  At the tail end of my college experience, I went on Semester at Sea and had the opportunity to have dinner with a group of young people that were overseeing a microfinance program in Vietnam.  It was my first real-world exposure to microfinance, but again I didn’t quite understand how I could be involved or play a role in this field.

Fast-forward almost ten years when I discovered Kiva.  One of the first people I met that was very public of his support of Kiva was a friend of mine, Dan Martell.  Dan is an entrepreneur and a fellow board member of Startup Weekend.  I saw Dan publicly supporting Kiva via social media channels and thought it was worth checking out.  I spent a great deal of time investigating Kiva and learning more about microfinance and microlending.  It was fascinating enough that I checked out the book A Billion Bootstraps from the library and read it cover-to-cover.

Microfinance and Kiva specifically appealed to me because it allowed each donation to have an exponential impact.  For each microloan to an entrepreneur in Peru, Indonesia, Lebanon or the US, that money impacts the entrepreneur incredibly — helping them improve the quality of their life and their family.  However, these “donations” actually are a type of giving that is recycled — once the loans are repaid, you then lend the money again to another entrepreneur in another place around the world.  Small dollar amounts can have huge impacts when the loans are repaid and reloaned.  That’s why microlending and microfinance are so exciting.

Why Kiva?

Kiva is a vehicle that takes the power of microlending and brings it to the masses through the internet.  Sure, Kiva didn’t invent microlending, but much like Mint.com helped take consumer financial services management by storm, I believe Kiva takes microfinance and puts it squarely in the hands of the consumer (and the Internet masses).  It’s so simple and personalized, you can find an entrepreneur, make a small loan, and then track their progress on repaying the loan over time.  Once it is repaid, reloan the funds again to another entrepreneur.  Then rinse and repeat.

That’s the power — it’s putting microfinance into the hands of donors that may otherwise not known how to connect with entrepreneurs around the world.

Green Entrepreneur Handbook, Microfinance, Kiva and the impact

So hopefully you can see why I’m donating half of all the proceeds I get to Kiva (the other half is going to Startup Weekend which I’ll also talk about in another blog post).  The book was written as a way to provide green entrepreneurs with tools to help be most successful.  And my hope is that by taking any proceeds from the sale of the book and “paying it forward” to entrepreneurs through Kiva, that we continue to see the circle grow.

I continue to be excited and Allison and I have made a commitment to make regular donations (even outside of the book sales) to Kiva.  I hope you consider it too — donations as small as $25 make a huge impact for these individuals, helping life them from poverty and improve the quality of life for their families.

My next goal is to be able to visit some of these entrepreneurs and learn more about their stories face-to-face.