This is going to be a really long post. No one need read through it if he/she doesn’t feel like it. I, actually, wrote it earlier this morning as a “team message,” thinking, hoping I’d be able to send it to the team, initially, and, I was really hoping, to the team, only. But following some absolutely civil correspondence with one of the team captains after I’d clicked to join the team, and after, via Lender Messages, I later explained that I was joining, solely, for the purpose of sending them what I’d written and for being available for awhile if any of them chose to communicate, back, I found that that wasn’t going to work. So, here, somewhat reluctantly, I am, posting it here.
I will close these prefatory remarks simply by saying that with regard to my personal involvement with Kiva and KivaFriends, there is nothing that feels more important to me here than our growing an ever-increasing, all-inclusive peaceful world community and our trying to help people, wherever they are, who haven’t been nearly as lucky as most of us have been to have all the breaks in life that we’ve had."Hey…..
When I originally wrote of my concerns about this basket ----ing phenomenon a year and a half ago, as honest as I know to be, I’ll tell you that I really don’t believe that my concern was so much about whether I, myself, had a chance of getting in on some of the “choicer” loans, but really, whether other people that none of us (yet) knew had a chance at them. I became all too aware of the impact of your team (for that matter, of any team) having a member or more grab 30-80% of a loan, (countless times, it’s seemed like), almost whenever there was a particularly fun loan that had come up and that nearly as quickly, seemed to get closed out. Of course, I became aware of that impact because many, but not all of those times, yes, it was because *I* ( as in me-me-me-Jill) had hoped to get on one of those particularly engaging loans but had found that I couldn’t.
*** And yes, that has happened, really, countless times. Sometimes it’s happened when some of you were in “chat.” But other times, it’s happened when no one seemed to be in chat, but when one or more of your team members was apparently using some other even less public means of communication and distribution. And yes, OBVIOUSLY, some of the times (but, actually, not very many of the particular times that I’m referring to,) some of those times were times when neither your team nor any of your teammates were involved at all.
See, a lot of those times, I’ve tracked the loans. And I watched as one $25 piece of it, and then another $25 piece of it, and then another and another and another, etc. was sometimes, very slowly doled out over time. Way too many of those times, it was TAT members, one TAT member, then another TAT member, and then, still another TAT member, over that extended time period, who then showed up on the loan, almost (but no, not totally) to the exclusion of nearly everyone else.
But ultimately, it wasn’t, and it isn’t for me that I became concerned. I’ve tried to make that clear a number of different times, in a number of different ways. Actually, I’ve tried so many different times, publicly and privately. For me, it isn’t, it never was, and it never should be either about me, about you, or even, about “us.”
For me, it’s about, it should be about Kiva, and much more than about Kiva, it’s about all the entrepreneurs and the someday, would-be hopeful entrepreneurs that (perhaps) Kiva lenders might, in the future, be able to help. Help, that is, * if * Kiva, for all its failings and missteps, can grow. If it can attract more and MORE lenders, more people, ultimately, to follow Mohammad Yunus’ original lead.
This is about Kiva’s current entrepreneurs, but much much more so, it’s about all the people that Kiva, someday, might be able to help take a step or two away from poverty, that is, IF Kiva has enough lenders to help those ever-increasing numbers of downtrodden people do that.
In my mind, it isn’t and it never has been an issue of whether the loans, right now, get filled. Between us and all the other members of Kiva, so far, with very few exceptions, that hasn’t proven to be much of a problem. What I’ve hoped to get all of you to think about is Kiva, itself, and Kiva’s website’s attractiveness, and maybe much of its potential allure, especially to first-time visitors, or to people who have not yet gotten anywhere near so “hooked” or so involved as we all have.
Most of us know the stats, the one, particularly, about how the very great majority of Kiva lenders make only one or two loans, and then stop. And that’s only talking about the people who actually get so far as even to loan in the first place. There have to be many many times that number of people who have visited, who visit the website who haven’t/ who don’t find enough to attract them to make them want to return, for their to have even a chance of getting hooked.
When this issue was raised one of the last times, the time I’m thinking of, (I don’t remember if it was the most recent time or not), I wrote one of your team captains, personally, one whom I’d thought might have the greatest chance of influencing a greater number of you. When I was trying to explain my position, when I was trying to explain how it wasn’t about whether or not I, KF Jill, could get on this or that loan, I wrote that I, personally, would stay off all the school loans, all the medical loans, all the art loans, all the special craftsmanship loans, all the water loans, the music loans, the AIDS loans, etc., if the people on this team would stop taking such sizeable chunks of the more “universally” desired loans and would allow everyone coming to Kiva to have a fair and equal chance to get in on some of them. I still would do that.
As for whether the Mortgage the House thread has the same effect of depriving everyone who is not on a particular team (or someone who isn’t willing or able to come to KivaFriends’ chat during a limited time frame or someone who doesn’t choose to communicate in some kind of person to person or team to team more private means in order to get in on a particular loan), as to whether the Mortgage the House thread is similar in effect or whether it’s even more “excluding,” I’m not sure I agree with that suggestion.
But if people feel that there’s an equivalence, or that having the Mortgage the House thread or that having anything like it isn’t fair in a comparable kind of way, personally, I’m fine with vaporizing it if that’s the only way we can make things more fair and more open to everyone at Kiva, everyone present and future. As I said, I (honest to god) don’t think that this is about me, as I don’t think it’s about you or that it should be about any of us.
And, for whatever it’s worth, before I started the Mortgage the House thread, for that matter, even before Kiva teams were created, we, at KivaFriends, had absolutely no trouble at all building community, feeling community, strengthening community, or loving the community that we’d helped nourish. No trouble at all.
I’ve chosen to write this, this way, at least for right now. I’ve chosen to write it as, I’m hoping, a team message rather than in a more public way for a number of reasons. One of the reasons is that there are at least several of you whom I’ve grown to care about-- a lot. I’ve seen what an incredibly and really sadly emotional and community-fracturing issue this has become.
For now, anyway, I’m trying to communicate with you either as friend to friend, or, at least, as one decent-hearted person to another in the hope you might be able to hear me with some of the emotional intensity (that comes from a public exchange) removed. It’s been crazy, really crazy how much this damned issue has hurt people, how it’s hurt some of you and for that matter, how much it’s hurt me and our connections with one another. And that’s not even to mention how much it’s hurt what I’m sure are a whole bunch of other people, people who are now * former * Kiva Friends.
I have never, since I’ve been here, seen such smallness, (such really, it’s been sheer) meanness inflicted as I’ve seen inflicted in the context of the manner that differences of opinion and perception over this issue have been “expressed.” I’d never, personally, experienced that meanness here, those personal attacks before, well, never, perhaps, with one exception. And I’ll tell you, it strikes, those personal attacks and meanness strike me as antithetical to the community, as destructive to the worldwide community that most of us were drawn to Kiva to want to help establish, as destructive as just about anything I could imagine.
How many really kindhearted people we’ve lost, people from both sides of the issue, over this. It’s been such a waste, and, in my mind, it’s been so absolutely avoidable.
Well, that’s it, you guys. I’m going to stay on this team for a week to let you “have at me,” if you want, and then I’m going to withdraw. I wish you well and I wish you peace. I wish all of us…. that’s ALL of us, I wish all of us peace.
Jill
*** As I think about it, this particular phenomenon, especially, of some of your team members grabbing giant chunks of a particularly desirable loan, it pre-dated the creation of teams, at least, the creation of your team. According to one of your team captains’ posts from some time ago, your team was created, partly, in reaction to other people questioning, to their complaining about a practice that was already in effect.
http://www.kivafriends.org/index.php/topic,2709.0.html (9-15-08)
http://www.kivafriends.org/index.php/topic,1448.msg43907.html#msg43907 (9-25-08)
http://www.kivafriends.org/index.php/topic,3504.0.html (6-4-09) "
