Net Impact and Creating Opportunities

Last Friday I joined the Net Impact club at our school. Having joined in two other clubs at Krannert, I was a little reluctant because of the time constraints I have here. There are some really cool clubs here, one of them called student managed Investment fund, where, as students we get funds from the university (an undisclosed 6 digit figure) to invest in the market. Having played around with real money, it was very tempting for me to bounce upon the opportunity. But I kind of saved it for later, in fact, I was choosing between Net Impact and SMIF as the third club, after Consulting and Operations club. The reason I chose to be in this club is because the club’s motive is so consistent with my idea of social service.
At this point, for those who think of MBA grads as greedy young chaps trying to improve their pay scale, should try to change their perception. Social service is in the heart of almost everyone I’ve met here. In fact, my team mate Josh is pursuing MBA because he can go back to the Non Profit sector and improve some organizations he consulted before joining the school.
Next, I never considered Charity/ donation as doing social service. To me giving some money, or some other materialistic things like cloths, books didn’t really make sense. I believe that Social service is done by creating opportunities to elevate people living under the clutches of poverty or any other sort of disabilities. Its like an old saying that goes something like “Feed a man with a fish, he might not starve for a day; teach him how to fish, he would never starve”.
Today, we had Jessica Jackley tell her story of Kiva.org. in the wonderful speech she delivered on “The power of harnessing Perspective” She has been recently shortlisted for the Forbes 100 most influential people on earth along Sonia Gandhi, Mukesh Ambani etc. Please do check in the website to know more about the organization she founded. As a kid, she was afraid of learning about poor people. (In fact to me as well, whenever i hear stories of poverty, I used to kind of refrain myself. It used to scare me as a kid, thinking what if I were in those shoes.) Then one day, she happen to listen to Dr. Muhammad Yunus, 3 years before he was given the nobel prize, and her perspective changed since then. She started believing that she could help people come out of the vicious circle of poverty. She thought of micro financing as a solution to help few of those living in poverty. The idea of Kiva is that, you can loan any amount (even 25$) to an individual who wants to scale up his business or start a new business. It could be a small loan to buy a sewing machine. The beauty of Kiva is next. You will know to whom the money has gone to, what is he doing with that money, and constant updates through e-mails about his progress. There is a connection established between the borrower and the lender. The borrower also returns this 25$ or so by the specified time. Then you invest this 25$ into someone else’s idea and so on. How cool it would be to track the changes that you are bringing to lives of the people. The happiness in that is your incentive, ain’t it a better incentive than tax breaks or any other form of ROI? Amazingly, the default rate at Kiva is quite comparable with Industry standards, may be because of the connection established! She had recently rejected a $10 million donation from a corporate because it would kill the very idea of Kiva.
The reason I wrote this post at 2am amidst a busy schedule is that those who think creating opportunities as “quite impossible because I never get any time in doing all these, rather I’ll just give away some money”, to change their perspective. A change in perspective could come up with something as wonderful as Kiva, then its time to rethink about our perspectives, at least in this regard!