Risk vs. Reward

We’re approximately 3 repayment periods into our lending cycle and so far we’ve been fortunate to have a 100% repayment rate. CGF’s borrowers have been very professional in repaying on time, with some even depositing their payments directly into our account even before the due date. While the credit histories of many of our clients have been shaky, on-time repayments are one way that these borrowers have shown their “creditworthiness.” Our borrowers, all primarily moderate-income residents of Providence, have been very satisfied with the support they’ve received from CGF and the relationships they’ve developed with the staff.

All of this sounds great, and the stability CGF has been fortunate to have during its pilot phase is an important prerequisite to building a strong, effective lending organization. However, this stability raises an important question, one that many social sector organizations ask themselves from time to time as a sort of informal evaluation: Are we reaching the right people? CGF’s mission is to support low and moderate-income individuals in order to help these populations gain access to the American financial system. We’ve got the moderate-income part down, but what about the low-income group? Why haven’t we approached these individuals to the same extent? Here’s a better question: Why haven’t they approached us?

It’s not like we are gauging our social impact by the number of defaults we have, nor are we by any means seeking out defaults in order to feel more secure about reaching our target market. However, one of the reasons we haven’t had many defaults yet is because our clients have not been the most risky borrowers. Much of this is due to our own accord, and occurred without a conscious effort on our part. As a start-up organization, we viewed a smooth transition into the lending business as imperative to having a strong long-term impact on the community we serve. In order to achieve this smooth transition, we shied away from risk. We decided to “play it safe” for a while, and in doing so, avoided actively seeking out very low-income individuals as clients. While our current borrowers are far from what a traditional financial institution would consider safe, many of them are also not what microlending organizations would deem risky.

CGF’s mission is to create a poverty-free, inclusive green economy through innovative microfinance. In order to eradicate poverty, we must target it; in addition to moderate-income families, we must lend to those individuals that will see the most growth in standards of living as a result of a small capital infusion. CGF has already started to identify some of these lower-income borrowers, many of whom have aspirations to start their own businesses, through our community partners. Moreover, through researching the demand for credit-building loans, CGF has also come across a number of individuals in Providence who lack credit histories and thus would benefit tremendously from a loan that could help them build credit, something that would gain them access to even more financial services through credit card agencies or commercial banks. These potential borrowers will be even riskier investments then our current ones, but in turn could see huge changes in the standards of living of themselves and their families. Hedging against risk is critical to organizational growth, but not when the hedging mechanism compromises reward. As CGF gives out more loans, striking a balance between risk and reward will be critical to creating a truly upwardly-mobile, socially equitable economy.

A Powerful Force

by Colette DeJong, Mali Health Organizing Project 2009 Summer Intern

Gray storm clouds hang in the sky outside, and children poke their heads through the grates. A chalk board, marked in careful French cursive, holds the day’s agenda. The Community Health Action Group – 12 elected community leaders – is seated around the table in benches, and the tempo is slow and laden with the heat before exploding into bursts of rapid-fire Bambara. I don’t catch a single word, and hope only to follow the plot arc –  an earnest objection here, a sassy slingin’ response there, an angry outburst that defuses into laughter all around. I occasionally whisper an urgent “QUOI??” to Lassi, the Malian intern next to me, and he starts half a sentence in French before I lose him back to Bambara. When I think I’ve pieced together what the riff is about, I call out something in French, and they sweetly pass the floor for two seconds (she-ain’t-too-bright-but-her-hearts-in-the-right-place) before diving into Bambara discussion once more.

These guys own the room.

The relationship between MHOP and the CHAG is a fascinating puzzle. On the one hand, we feed ideas into the discussion for their approval– exciting plans drawn from lit reviews, development classes, what’s been done and what’s been talked about. We draw up project timelines; as the intern for a new community health worker program, I scribble ideas for the community-service “action fees” which will replace cash user fees into a crumpled purple notebook from an Illinois CVS. When the CHAG disagrees with the plan, it feels like a misunderstanding, even a fly in the ointment – how can we convey that girl’s education programs in Bambara, not French, have a greater statistical impact on child survival? Our interjections are a curious mix of steering the agenda and being left in the dust. The CHAG winds and weaves through a 2 hour discussion before reaching its decision – an approval, yet with ownership, of ideas that almost universally start with MHOP.

In the weeks before my first CHAG meeting, brainstorming Action Fee ideas while squeaking around Sikoro in my brand new Chacos, I felt like I smelt something burning. My actions felt perverse – was I arbitrarily, patronizingly pinning up hoops for people to jump through for donor-funded health care?  How had I been so blind to this foul, sinister underbelly to my Starr proposal?

My first CHAG meeting cleared the air and lightened my heart. Their pride, their spirited ownership, their brief, amused and motherly audience to my off-base contributions – left no question of ownership. Most of the ideas did originate in our CVS notebooks, and I still don’t know how this works —  the interplay between local ownership and efficient task-setting, the CHAG’s initiative and our willingness to alter our breathless designs. But I know that it does work. I’m bearing witness to something vivacious, spirited, and community owned. And if I pretended anything different to the CHAG, I’d get mercifully, profoundly, and deservedly walloped.

How do you teach what’s really important?

Yesterday I walked through the familiar maroon doors of Stephen F. Austin High School, a building that I knew all too well for a four-year period.  Since graduating from high school, however, I have avoided stepping onto the campus, appreciating my education and memories from a distance.  But yesterday I returned to Room 302, my old debate classroom, with all the same posters on the walls and only a few minor changes in the arrangement of the desks.

In hindsight, my return to this classroom makes sense.  Of all the activities I participated in during high school, I most obviously see the benefits of debate.  The skills that I gained in this activity transferred to my writing in literature classes, my analysis of statistics and my ability to argue with my parents at the dinner table.  Learning how to debate has immediate impacts and ferments the desire to think critically about the realities of our world and then go on to solve some of these problems.  In theory, it is an incredible activity.

Yet even now I have the exact same complaints with debate that I did in high school.  Why do we have to learn the terminology?  Why do we have to follow so many rules?  Why does one person have to be declared a winner when the issues are so vast?  Why don’t we get so angry at the government or corporations or failed programs that we actually walk out of the classrooms and do something about it?  Why does improving at this activity bring one into an even more isolated world of hypothetical conversations instead of promoting activism?

Teaching debate in Providence, rather than participating in the activity as a student, is now becoming its own form of activism.  Yes, I am still spending my afternoons in high school classrooms instead of at the State House, but now I enter these schools with more of a mission.  Our goal is not just to teach students how to research, read tough authors or speak articulately.  Even more, we want to show these students that this ability to think about complex issues will enable them to affect future micro and macro policy decisions.  Many of our lawmakers are former debaters; many people in power grew up with this activity.  We at the RIUDL want bright, motivated Rhode Island public high school students to have the passion and credentials to be the next agents of change.

This socially conscious goal was never explicitly expressed in my high school debate program.  We talked about tournaments and the specific topics and which intellectual could be most helpful to a certain position.  Yet the spirit of social change must have somehow seeped into us, because most of my peers and I went on to care about something broader than the internal world of debate.  We looked back and got what it was really about.

Now I sit here comparing my experience of high school to the mission of the Swearer Center, which expressly communicates its desire to address inequalities, share knowledge of the public good and “prepare students for lives of effective action.”  Debate taught me to do all of these things, but even today I have no idea if that was the intention of my coaches or by chance.  If it was by chance, should I just trust that debate imparts these same goals and desires on all participants?  If it was a focus of my high school coaches, must I too make these goals so subtle?

These questions are perhaps what any teacher or parent asks: If I have a clear goal, do I make it known or just hope that all turns out well?  Or do I let these desires develop organically, and avoid steering people in any one direction?  This is perhaps an issue of trust – in a program, in another person, in the culmination of many experiences and observations.

Going back to Austin High felt good; I no longer felt the anxieties of being a high school student.  I could view my education with a distance, even in the building that housed much of it.  But returning did not answer my questions of intentions or expectations of my debate coaches.  And perhaps this is one of the great secrets of debate: under the mask of concern over competition or trophies, everyone in this world understands the gravity and power of this activity on the lives of these students and the future of our society.

Sophie Elsner
Rhode Island Urban Debate League

New England Fish Forum updates

I wanted to do a quick check-in post making public the New England Fish Forum web presence(s)! The main site is here for the New England Fish Forum, and the sister project, the interactive Knowledge Database, is here. 

I’ve been in touch with a lot of people over the last week, and things look promising for the first Conversation to take place in June in Rhode Island (a southern Massachusetts one will also be coming up). While fisheries management is endlessly frustrating, it seems, I am continually heartened at how eager and willing fishermen, scientists and managers are to talk to me when I introduce the Fish Forum as an idea. In the meantime…

1. Our Fish Interactive Knowledge Database

I am meeting with the heads of fishing industry orgs, scientists, managers and people at collaborative research initiatives to get this really useful–not to mention used! 

2. Conversations

I would like to hold at least three, but hopefully more, Conversations this summer. These will be informal meetings between industry members, scientists and managers, sort of in the vein of the last workshop but without a research intent. I may prompt and moderate but in general I envision these as alternative salons for shoulder-rubbing and hopefully communication to happen in a way that is positive and more productive than within the Council structure, at least as it is perceived. I am trying to book the Commercial Fisheries Center at URI East Farm for the first one, and I wanted to coordinate with the Women & Fisheries project as well (they envisioned an all-women workshop for the month of June). I still believe that the Fish Forum must include men in the discussion, but I agree that having some of the Conversations be all-women will be beneficial for a number of reasons that I’ll write about in greater detail another time.

3. Fish Party ’09

I met with a wonderful marine anthropologist at SMAST last week. She is young and enthusiastic and has done her own share of work not just on fishing boats (for her education) but with women in fishing. She feels like a lot of the best breaking down of barriers happens at parties and we may be planning a party with no meeting agenda, nothing on the table to discuss, just invite everyone remotely related to fishing in New England, in the spirit of being in the same boat. Must consider food, beverage and location and timing questions of course. I’m thinking July, week before the Point Judith Blessing of the Fleet, or mid-August, before the Cape Cod Hook Association’s Hookers’ Ball. Yes, that is a thing.

4. 1-800-Our-Fish

This will be in the back of my mind for the fall… setting up a 24-hour 1-800 number that is staffed that fishermen can call to ask any questions about the latest regulations, since so many of them don’t seem to now who to call, and end up frustrated at the lack of communication from management. It would need separate funding. 

I learn and relearn just how interesting fisheries issues are in New England. The networks and avenues through which the commercial fishing industry operates as a community are complex, organic and difficult to map. Meanwhile, the council structure is accustomed to organizing, boxing and bagging its own fisheries categories that usually do not correspond with how the commercial industry community (to whatever extent it is a ‘community’) goes about getting things accomplished. This is a fascinating human problem with ecological as well as social consequences. Perhaps the New England Fish Forum will be one way acknowledge and strengthen the less structured but nonetheless important relationships in fisheries.

Charlie: Assetmap Starr Elevator Pitch

Net casting

By Katie Okamoto

This post marks the first week of the Summer ’09 phase of the New England Fish Forum (NEFF). Already I have had to reevaluate the ways in which I will accomplish NEFF goals. The ultimate goal is to contribute to a socially and ecologically sustainable local fishery; the Fish Forum seeks to achieve this ultimate goal with the intermediary goal of promoting a culture of improved communication and conceptual plurality in regional fisheries management under the New England Fisheries Management Council’s (NEFMC) jurisdiction.

My original vision for accomplishing these goals was through a web-based platform supplemented by face-to-face conversations and workshops between interested individuals. The Fish Forum would be a sort of Fishbook, an interactive website where conversations between fishing industry members, scientists, managers and professional environmentalists would engage in conversations across the NEFMC governing region. Part of Fishbook would include the Knowledge Database for scientific and experiential fisheries information to coexist for the first time.

I am increasingly convinced that a more achievable and effective focus for these summer months will be to facilitate in-person conversational workshops. Given the disparate and diverse community of people involved somehow or other with the fishing industry in New England, an online Fishbook may only be effective with positive experiences with in-person interactions among stakeholders. In the meantime, the web platform will house the Knowledge Database in its formative stages.

This month, I will re-introduce NEFF to community members and work with them to get more people excited about participating in the new conversation. This networking will be geared toward the first conversational workshop at the end of June. Additionally, tomorrow I will launch the Knowledge Database networking campaign (I’ll be meeting with a couple of scientists at SMAST to discuss the Knowledge Database design).

The Knowledge Database design campaign will engage scientists, managers and members of industry to plan the online Knowledge Database, where different kinds of fisheries information and expertise can coexist and inform management in a three-tiered approach. NEFF’s three-tiered method of influencing the current NEFMC knowledge culture will be indirect, but it will contribute to a more inclusive and conceptually pluralistic approach to fisheries management decision-making. Currently, the NEFMC is required by federal law to consider the “best available science,” but the NEFF approach is based on the idea that diverse kinds/sources of knowledge can and should inform how we understand the ecological resource. The NEFF Knowledge Database (tier 1) will inform what research and research grants are sponsored by some of the key collaborative research initiatives in New England (tier 2). Initial Knowledge Database design, therefore, must involve people from the collaborative research initiatives in order to be effective. Research from these initiatives in turn contributes to the body of knowledge off which NEFMC decisions are made (tier 3).

I am excited about the work ahead and I can’t wait to get back to the water!