Dreams and Realities

Written on 05/18 at 10:36 PM by Andy Posner 0 comments

Filed under: philosophy brown micro credit

We all have dreams that fiercely flicker in the darkest depth of our being; they envelope us like string made of sunlight, spilling through a forest canopy to recover something precious from the Earth.  But always we awake to sights and sounds that take us away.  We rise, we wash, we eat, we travel, we work, we worry.  And always there is that something, that compost composed of all that humanity has discarded because they did not believe it could survive.  And because we did not believe in its survival, this precious something seemed to die.  And all around us there was injustice: a billion people living on a dollar per day; wars raging in jungles, in deserts, in mountains; millions of human beings languishing in jails for drug addiction, dying from curable disease, despairing of tomorrow, their today filled with sorry; hundreds of millions lacking access to clean air, clean water, information, health care, good governance, good schools, and hope; an environment stretched its limits, struggling to satiate a boundless hunger…

Oh, but even though we thought it dead, this precious something had instead been accumulating beneath our feet.  The rivers, streams, beaches, oceans, and even the pavements, the parking lots, the abandoned plots of land strewn about the world, all contain the soil of hope, of justice, of love, of beauty, of truth, and from that soil can sprout the world we all have sought.

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See the Trees AND the Forest

Written on 04/29 at 08:09 PM by Andy Posner 0 comments

Filed under: philosophy Business brown micro credit

I originally wrote this post for the Capital GREAT Blog.

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This morning, as I planted the above tree in my yard, I started thinking about the saying “you can’t see the forest for the trees,” which refers to someone who is so caught up with the details that they can’t see the larger picture.  The saying felt especially pertinent as I have spent last week working on how CGF is going to go from 3 loans a week, to three loans a day, to 300 hundred a day and, so on.  As I’ve pondered the challenges associated with achieving such significant scale, I have also kept my focus on those three loans a week--the loans to the low-income entrepreneur, to the disabled woman in need of a special chair, to the parent seeking to purchase a computer to help her child with homework--and so as I planted that beautiful little tree, as I showered it with water, with love with care...it occurred to me that when it comes to social good, you must see the both trees and the forest.

What I mean is that, when you plant a tree, or when you empower another human being, you are doing a wonderful thing.  However, if all you do is serve one tree, one person at a time, then you are ignoring the scope of the broader problems facing earth and society, and you are also ignoring the broader social conditions that have disenfranchised the person and damaged the forest to begin with.  In other words, even as you work, one gesture of kindness at a time, to better the world, you must also think about how to replicate, scale and increase the impact of your actions.

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Addition vs. Duplication in Social Entrepreneurship

Written on 04/09 at 08:26 PM by Andy Posner 0 comments

Filed under: Business

(I wrote this article for the Capital Good Fund blog)
I think that one of the most important things for any social entrepreneur to ask him or herself--and, by extension, any social venture, be it non-profit or for-profit--is whether the work they are doing is additive or duplicative.  There is no shortage of good-willed people, and organizations started by them, in this country; instead, what we lack are organizations that build upon the work of other players--governmental, for-profit, non-profit, community-based, faith-based, etc.--rather than duplicate that work.  In our case, when we started thinking about how to tackle the $100 billion/year predatory lending industry, we realized that we could never replicate the brick-and-mortar infrastructure of payday lenders, check cashers, pawn shows, auto title lenders and the rest of the gaggle the preys on the poor. 

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Thought of the Day

Written on 07/15 at 05:48 PM by Andy Posner 0 comments

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“Today, 85 percent of the $400 billion that the government spends to encourage things like home ownership, college attendance, investment and small business ends up in the pockets of the top 20 percent of earners (and half goes to the top 5 percent). Very little ends up helping the working poor. On the other hand, many social benefits cut off when a family’s income rises roughly 30 percent above the poverty line — which is still a far cry from being out of poverty.” (From an NYTimes article titled Out of Poverty, Family-Style)

Think about that.  The government spends money to incentivize the better-off to do what they would be able to do without the subsidy, while they penalize the poor when their income increases.  That is an eye-opening fact, one that puts into stark contrast the policies affected rich and poor in the wealthiest country in the world, and one that should force us to re-think traditional notions of why people are poor.  The truth is that the deck is stacked in favor of those with power.

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My New Favorite Quote

Written on 05/28 at 03:23 PM by Andy Posner 0 comments

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As the absurdity of our current budget process becomes ever more painful (we cut services to the poor during a recession but refuse to raise taxes on the wealthiest Americans) the extent of our military spending has become that much more egregious.  This quote, by Dwight D. Eisenhower, who was an opponent of the then inchoate military industrial complex, captures what happens when we spend more on guns than on education…

“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.”

We are a nation more interested in defense than in what we are defending.  It is time for a new generation of people to emerge that will question--and change--the status quo!

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Green Microfinance: Advancing Social Equality and Environmental Sustainability in the United States

Click here to download a PDF of my complete thesis. Questions and comments are much appreciated!

My masters thesis in Environmental Studies at Brown University looks at how microfinance--the provision of small…

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A Solution to the Limited Success of Micro-Credit in the United States?

Micro-credit has undoubtedly been a runaway success in developing countries as a tool of both poverty alleviation and economic development.  To date, some 100 million people have been reached by micro-loans, and Muhammad Yunus, the founder of the Grameen Bank…

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Tonight, the Oneness of Things

It is late and my mind should be drifting through the colorful abyss of deep sleep, yet instead i find that tonight sleep will not come.  I am like a hungry flower who dreams of bees so ardently that all…

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