Here it comes again. It’s April of 2015 and the first two presidential candidates are off and running for November of 2016.
I find it especially chilling that these first two occupy extreme positions. Soon we will enter “sound bite season” where folks painting themselves in liberal or conservative garb lob incendiary comments over the walls of moderation, hoping to gain our attention.
I will once again vow to stop watching television, even my beloved sports teams until it’s over. But I will also again vow to vote and to engage in the discourse of politics with my friends and acquaintances, since that is the essence of our freedom. As always, we will try to find a pony (somewhere) in their pile of manure.
One of the first borrowers from our micro-fund for un-bankable entrepreneurs is Nate Rockwell. As he becomes mature in business six years into it we are enjoying a little more time in exchanging our ideas and world views. Here’s what he wrote me the other day which drives this blog topic:
“Something I have been mulling over a lot lately and in conjunction with our conversation on minimum wage and the poor, Tim: We can all agree poverty is bad and we want to eliminate it. But when you ask one question of our two political groups, the answers are polar opposites, and equally damaging to the situation of poverty.
That poverty is bad is easy to agree on, but there seems to be a vast chasm on how we should deal with poor people?
Conservative philosophy – ‘We should make them pull themselves up by their boot straps. I didn't get where I am today by being lazy.’
Liberal Philosophy – ‘We should make sure that they have everything they need to survive. There is no excuse for letting someone live without basic necessities in a nation as wealthy as ours.’
Pragmatic Response – ‘Why don't we teach them how to not be poor?’”
Why not indeed!
It threw me back to a statement I read many years ago made by Muhammed Yunus, founder of the Grameen Bank, in his book “Banker to the Poor.”
“People...were poor not because they were stupid or lazy. They worked all day long, doing complex physical tasks. They were poor because the financial institution in the country did not help them widen their economic base.”
Yunis was speaking of his learning early in his home country of Bangladesh where he began Grameen as a project for his economics class by lending $27 to 41 very poor women. Each week the women would meet to make their interest payments and learn from each other how to build their economic base. Today Grameen has over 10 million borrowers of still mostly small loans for starting and growing businesses. The company has billions in assets and interestingly is owned by its borrowers, 98% of whom (still) are women.
Yunis, Grameen and a growing amount of people around the world are answering Nate’s question: “Why don’t we teach them how to not be poor?”
Every program The Business of Good funds and supports is focused on answering this question. We believe specifically the answer is in three Es – Entrepreneurship, Education and Employment and so our investments are primarily in micro-lending (consumer, for-profit and social businesses) and mentoring first generation college students.
And maybe it’s a pipe dream that a presidential candidate will commit to such things during this long silly season to come but if one does, they will have my vote, my time and my admiration.
Peace,
Tim McCarthy
