» kiva http://seanmophoto.wordpress.com Mon, 05 Jan 2009 15:24:41 +0000 http://wordpress.com/ en hourly 1 http://www.gravatar.com/blavatar/0221b461041bb3ba2ab634e299b5d3cf?s=96&d=http://s.wordpress.com/i/buttonw-com.png » kiva http://seanmophoto.wordpress.com More Kiva Microloans http://seanmophoto.wordpress.com/2008/12/09/more-kiva-microloans/ http://seanmophoto.wordpress.com/2008/12/09/more-kiva-microloans/#comments Tue, 09 Dec 2008 22:51:10 +0000 seanmorr http://seanmophoto.wordpress.com/?p=125 ]]>

I’ve been bad about posting lately, more to come soon, including a very cool engagement session and a complete wedding post for Ben & Angela.

I continue to donate $50 from every wedding booking to Kiva.org, a great organization that provides entrepreneurs in developing countries the opportunity to borrow money to help them with their businesses.  Kiva’s mission is to connect people through lending for the sake of alleviating poverty.  You can check out their site here I turned my lovely wife Tiffany loose the last time we made loans, and she chose women’s groups in Tanzania, Pakistan, Senegal & Cambodia.  You can see the groups in the photo below.

kiva2

]]> http://seanmophoto.wordpress.com/2008/12/09/more-kiva-microloans/feed/ 0 seanmorr kiva2 Giving Back With Microloans http://seanmophoto.wordpress.com/2008/05/16/giving-back-with-microloans/ http://seanmophoto.wordpress.com/2008/05/16/giving-back-with-microloans/#comments Fri, 16 May 2008 02:55:42 +0000 seanmorr http://seanmophoto.wordpress.com/2008/05/16/giving-back-with-microloans-2/ ]]>
I’ve been interested in the idea of microloans for a while now and have finally decided to take the plunge with a great organization named Kiva. To read more about what Kiva does, click here. My wife Tiffany and I had been looking for a charity to give to and then we saw a piece about Kiva shown on an episode of Frontline World on PBS. Microloans or Microcredit appealed to me, as I have spent a lot of time traveling in developing countries and I’ve seen how hard people work to start their own businesses. We’d put it off for a while, but then I decided to donate a portion of my photography commissions to Kiva. For any weddings booked after August of this year, I will donate $50 to Kiva. The great thing is that you can follow the loans and get updates from the people to whom you’ve loaned money. Also, about 99% of the money you loan gets repaid to you and then you just loan it out again.

Here are my first four loans. I have only contributed a small portion to their overall loan, but its a start.

We have

  • Cecelia Abiodu, a Nigerian Woman who is trying to grow her soft drink business
  • A group of three women in Peru who are developing a fish market
  • A group of women in Guatemala who are developing a livestock collective
  • Orlando Conrado, a Nicaraguan taxi driver who needs to improve his vehicle to support his family

So, as I book more weddings, I will donate more to Kiva. I will update the blog with any info I recieve so people can follow along.

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