Dear asuguy1,
It's really Wonderful that you and your friends are already so "other-centered" that you want to start up a Kiva lending group.
As a one-time teacher who wondered if some of my students
ever were going to realize that there were other people in the world besides them, that the entire world didn't necessarily,
always revolve around them, I believe it's particularly special when young people look out into the world beyond themselves and want to try to do something to help.
To try to answer at least a couple of your questions:
1) I'm close to positive, myself, that the $1,000 minimum pertained only to the situation where people wanted to make loans by sending
checks to Kiva, rather than through the more common means of using PayPal, as Tatiana suggested. $25 or any greater amount in increments
of $25 should be enough to get you on your Kiva way.
2) And, as reb-mar suggested, at least, for now, Kiva has a maximum $25 loaning limit restricting what individual (and, apparently)
group lenders can loan to an individual Entrepreneur. The limit is sporadically imposed when it seems like there are many many more
people out there wanting to get/to be involved with Kiva and fewer Entrepreneurs, or Borrowers, to make loans to. The idea behind it is
that Kiva wants to make sure that everybody, particularly newcomers to the site, has the opportunity to participate (and become hooked!).
In the past, Kiva has removed the limit when the mad rush from either holidays or particularly widespread publicity has quieted down.
3) Whether there is another means for availing funds for loaning, apart from using PayPal or from sending Kiva a check of a minimum of $1,000, I'm not sure. I think a person can make loans, merely using one of the standard credit cards, but I'll defer to another Kiva Friend who might have
more knowledge on that one. (As to the requirement that any checks sent to Kiva for lending purposes be of an amount no less than $1,000,
the rationale behind that one, apparently, is that the organization doesn't have a large enough staff, yet, to have it be cost-effective for them to deal with the extra work required by the receipt of checks when there are less labor-intensive alternatives, like opening an account through PayPal, to accomplish the same objective).
4) As for whether successive groups of students can have access to your student account, at least for the purpose of allowing them to see which Entrepreneurs the group, historically, has made loans to, who, of them, has paid off in full, and who has paid off in part, the availability and sharing of the Group's Lender Page URL should be enough to enable students who come after to see that information. Check out this "random" example (smiley guy) of a Lender page to see what kind of information those later students would be able to access....
http://www.kiva.org/app.php?page=lender&action=view&name=jill1766&rdr5) The more challenging question, as I understand it, is:
How Can a Student Group Open Up a Group Lending Account When the Individual, Who Opens the Account, Inevitably (well, at least, hopefully) Will Be Graduating, and The Students -- Who Initiated the Account -- Want That Group Lending Account to Survive Into Perpetuity.... or, at least, beyond their own graduation dates? A teacher/professor, on one of the existing Student Lending Groups and I corresponded with one another, and he wrote the following, which, I think, remains an unsolved issue:
".... If you wanted to do something useful, you could encourage the kiva people to make it easier for groups to 'lend' -- as it is now, one student took all the responsibility, which is hard for an 18-y.old (I can't handle student money), but she could at any time terminate the program and withdraw the funds. She won't -- she's a great kid -- but that's how the system's set up...." I did forward his e-mail to the Kiva people a couple of weeks ago, but didn't ask them for a reply. As this very clearly has been and will continue to be a significant issue, as long as student groups want to form Lending groups and as long as teachers can't, legally, handle the students' money, I, too, would suggest that you get in touch with Kiva, directly, and specifically call their attention to this issue and request their guidance on it.
Don't worry, if you have any more questions here, anybody and everybody else, with the possible exception of our KivaFriend, Steve, will have a Much
Much shorter reply to your inquiry.
Super good luck,
Jill
All right, now, you understand, don't you, that part of the deal is that you guys "have to" become active participants of the Forum here and participate and post up a storm on a regular basis, right? Well, I suppose that that's not a requirement, exactly, but it sure would be great.... and a boon to all of us.... if you would.
