Prep Work

Hi all, just thought I'd give another update on the project. Since my last post, we have begun work on designing the curriculum for the small-business workshops. We had a meeting this past Wednesday to pour through resources and modules we have found on small business, entrepreneurship, and financial literacy.

One of our strongest resources so far is The Intersect Fund. They have an amazingly successful micro-finance program and it's awesome to be able to use them as a resource! We are also looking at material from Freedom from Hunger (an NGO that works to find sustainable solutions to hunger and poverty), Jamii Bora (a micro-finance initiative and business academy in Kenya), the NC Latino Community Credit Union, and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.

In addition to starting work on the curriculum, I've also recently heard back from the IRB. Going through the IRB process has been a pretty substantial test of my limited Spanish skills as I had to provide Spanish versions of the various forms involved with a research project. There were a few small changes I needed to make and I submitted them on Monday. Hopefully we'll hear back soon so we can start building partnerships with local organizations and meeting potential workshop participants.

Thanks for reading,

Ben

El Inicio

Hello and welcome to the blog documenting my CBR-SURF project this summer! For my project I am going to be exploring the concept of micro-finance within the Chapel Hill and Carrboro Latino community. For a little background information, the idea for this project developed from the time I've spent working with the Community Empowerment Fund (CEF) over the past year. CEF falls under the umbrella of the UNC Campus-Y and works to alleviate homelessness and poverty through the use of micro-loans, savings, financial workshops, and resource identification. During our pilot program, we served 8 borrowers and after a year of working with these individuals we were left with very mixed results. As a result, CEF began working to find ways to improve borrower connection to the program, increase repayment rates for our loans, and reach out to even more members of the diverse Chapel Hill/Carrboro community.

For my SURF, I will be evaluating the initial pilot and using the results of this investigation to design a small-business education program for potential borrowers. In particular, the project will focus on the Latino community and be taught in Spanish. While there is a lot of work to do and the exact specifics of the trainings and community partners we will work with are very fluid, the overall goal of this project remains the same: to explore the ability of a trainings course to improve the success of a micro-loan and ultimately serve as a tool for poverty alleviation.

We just had our first organizational meeting yesterday so there will be more posts coming soon. Thanks for reading!

-Ben