Creating Your Vision

What is your vision for the campus and/or community?

Campus Kiva brings micro-lending to a whole new level: giving students the opportunity to play a direct role in changing lives. Our mission is to educate students about the potential impact of microfinance and to encourage microlending through Kiva’s lending teams.
Through an international network of university chapters, Campus Kiva provides students with the perfect avenue to channel their desire to make a difference. Campus Kiva provides its chapters with the infrastructure and resources they need to establish a permanent presence on campus. The program offers its chapters a variety of opportunities to participate in a variety of activities and competitions, and strongly encourages intra-university collaboration.
In the Fall of 2008, Campus Kiva officially launched at over 20 university campuses world-wide and is continuing to grow.

Assessing Your Campus and Community

What campus/community problem does your blueprint address? What structures, practices and policies institutionalize the problem?

Campus Kiva seeks to address the problem of poverty in the third world. Through engaging students in microlending, and by educating them about development issues, Campus Kiva seeks to help motivated entrepreneurs escape poverty.
Furthermore, Campus Kiva fills a necessary void in the microfinance community. For years, students have been interested in microfinance, but it has always been difficult to get engaged in something meaningful. Students cannot easily set up banking institutions, nor can they simply go to less developed nations to work at existing microfinance institutions. Therefore, nearly every microfinance club that has emerged prior to Campus Kiva has been almost solely devoted to education.

What communities will you work with?

• Nationwide community

Setting Goals and Deliverables

• Goal 1: Spread awareness about Campus Kiva
• Identify an additional 5 schools to start chapters
• Get media coverage in at least 10 of our schools' newspapers
• Further identify potential partnership organizations and talk to representatives from other Microfinance groups like Accion USA.
• Launch the web site by the end of October
• Goal 2: Encourage collaboration between schools
• Engage at least half the chapters in one common activity - a competition or conference
• Feature one school in every monthly newsletter
• Build a feature on the web site where schools can message and contact one another
• Goal 3: Provide at least $20K in loans by the end of the first semester
• Get Davidson College to lend their $10K through a non-withdrawable Kiva account
• Encourage schools to hold one loan-raising activity by the end of the semester
• Get each of the remaining schools to secure at least $500 in loans.

What is your primary approach? Organizing

Why did you choose this approach?

The primary activity of Campus Kiva is to organize student chapters around microfinance awareness and lending.

Did you have secondary approaches? What are they?

Alliance building, leadership building, idea creation, and network and alliance building.

What will your tactics and activities be?

A primary activity that I will be engaged in is prospecting. I will be doing research into existing groups that support, or are already doing work around microfinance. Identifying leaders and developing educational materials will be another activity that I will spend a great deal of time on.

Connecting Back to Vision

How does your strategy contribute to your vision for your campus and/or your community?

Simple alliance building will be crucial to raising awareness about Kiva and microfinance. Educating the student population (through the creation of educational materials and through opportunities to participate in conferences and competitions), will not only encourage awareness, but it will feed into student and community lending through Kiva.

Resources and skills you will need