Microplace. Tracy Pettengill Turner, Founder, and Ashwini Narayanan, General Manager, are inspired by the working poor and dedicated to fighting global poverty.
Their organization (now a subsidiary of eBay Inc.) lets you invest online---as little as $20---in the international institutions that make micro loans. Unlike most micro-loan programs, your investment with Microplace earns interest.
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Shared Interest. Donna Katzin, Executive Director, takes photos and writes poetry for fun. But her heart (and her nonprofit micro-credit business) is in South Africa. Shared Interest borrows from US individuals and organizations, invests in securities that comply with socially responsible investment guidelines, pools the assets in a US bank account that’s used to secures letters of credit for South African Banks to make loans to low income people in South African’s most marginalized rural, township and urban areas.
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Read Global. When Antonia Neubauer traveled to Nepal in 1983, she asked her guide what his village needed most. Answer: a library so people could access education, technology and vocational training. Today the NGO she founded runs 49 Community Library and Resource Centers in Nepal, India and Bhutan that helps local people start sustainable, for-profit enterprises that meet real needs. What goes around comes around: those businesses help pay the libraries’ operating costs.
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