Thanks for asking Kivan Steven!
The meet up went really well. There were 7 people including a Kennesaw State U. professor and 2 of his students. We chatted and introduced ourselves for a bit, and then we mainly talked about the Kennesaw State kiva/microlending project that Prof. Gary Roberts and a few of his entrepreneur class students began. The project is called Kiva Kids, and it is essentially a tool to get young students interested and informed about the power of microlending through Kiva. The Kennesaw team has miraculously fundraised
$10,000, and will give out
400 loans of $25 to schools both in Atlanta and around the world. The money will be given to the teacher of a class, who will explain the concept of Kiva, and then allow her class to pick a Kiva lon they would like to fund. The students will get to watch the loan be repaid, while learning about people in other parts of the world. The money will be paid back to the original donors. Basically, it is free money for teachers who want to engage their students in the woder world, and the donors will eventually get their money back- an education piece that pays for itself! It's a win-win-win situation. If you're curious for more info, check out the project site,
www.kiva-kids.org.
All present at the meeting promised to promote th project to local teachers at all levels of education.
We also briefly discussed the recent changes at Kiva: partial repayments, lending groups, etc... We agreed to set up an Atlanta lending group, which has been established and is called Metro Atlanta lenders.
Finally, we agreed that we would all like to meet again in a few months, and hopefully with an even larger group. With the lender messaging that is now available, as well as lending groups, it will be much easier to locate and contact Atlanta area lenders.
Liliane
