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Emily Medina isn't running a pyramid scheme, despite what people often think. As the petite 26-year-old works her way through some of New York City's poorer neighborhoods, she approaches women selling food and trinkets on the street and offers to lend them money to grow their businesses. The organization Medina works for, Grameen, is one of the world's largest microfinance outfits and has a Nobel Prize to its name for this work. But in New York neighborhoods where loans to street vendors tend to come with interest rates north of 40%, it can take...
Since 2008 Grameen has collected 1,700 borrowers in New York City, and last June it opened a second branch in Omaha, Neb. Other cities in its sights include San Francisco, Boston and Charlotte, N.C. - anywhere local businesspeople raise seed capital and a bank will host low-cost savings accounts for borrowers with just a few dollars, since savings are a key part of the Grameen philosophy. "There are whole populations that aren't being reached by the banking sector," says Bob Annibale, director of microfinance at Citibank, which partners with Grameen in New York. Like other financial giants, Citi...
...folks running Grameen America say that this time around results will be different because Grameen employees themselves are making the loans, not training an American bank to do it. In New York City, Shah Newaz, who started working for Grameen in 1982, hands out checks to borrowers at Grameen America headquarters - a sparsely furnished one-room office above a laundromat. In Omaha, Habib Chowdhury, who has worked for Grameen since 1985 and is a veteran of its Kosovo start-up, has found more than 250 borrowers since June and has already lent $378,000, mostly to Mexican immigrants stocking...
Take, for instance, Altagracia Familia, a former schoolteacher in the Dominican Republic who now lives in New York City and sells empanadas and coconut sweets. Her vending cart used to be wooden, but then she upgraded to metal. Not by way of a loan, though. Familia slowly saved profits and bought a new cart once she had amassed $7,000. What she spent her Grameen loan on is much less flashy: ingredients and cart repairs...
Boston SOS It is an offshoot of New York based Improv Everywhere, best know for staging its “freeze” event in Grand Central Station. According to Cobalt, future plans involve guerilla gardening, or renovating public places under cover of night...