Posts Tagged ‘Create Jobs for USA’

Weekly Microfinance News & Announcements 4/6/2012

posted: 2012-04-06 @ 5:31 pm EDT

Starbucks ‘Google Offers’ Deal: Half Price Gift Cards Will Benefit ‘Create Jobs For USA’ Fund

By Huffington Post Money Google Offers will sell $10 Starbucks gift cards for the price of $5 on Wednesday in a deal available only to those who have subscribed to Google’s Groupon-like deals site that went live in Portland last April and has since expanded to more than 40 cities.

Jobs Act: A great start, but more is needed

By Duncan L. Niederauer, CNN Money New legislation giving small businesses access to capital will help, but it won’t solve the jobs crisis. America’s corporate leaders need to join together to fuel the growth of entrepreneurial innovation.

Financial Literacy Survey Exposes Significant Gaps in Grasp of Personal Finance Skills

By PR Web In recognition of Financial Literacy Month, the National Foundation for Credit Counseling (NFCC) and the Network Branded Prepaid Card Association (NBPCA) today released the results of the 2012 Financial Literacy Survey. In its sixth year, the survey annually provides data and trending around Americans’ attitudes and behaviors related to personal finance.

Government rules out role for Yunus in Grameen Bank chief’s selection

By Mizan Rahman, Gulf Times The government yesterday ruled out the possibility of selecting Nobel laureate Mohammad Yunus as the head of a search committee to select the new managing director for Grameen Bank he had founded.

The ripple effect: Supporting a local business lender supports your local economy

By Dennis Hunter, The Times-Standard In a community, money that is invested within creates a ripple effect that can be passed on and multiplied outward to broaden its impact on the community as a whole. In business, you need to understand how the ripple effect can affect your business and how the actions you take affect the businesses and people connected to your company.

Funding Circle, a Kickstarter for SMBs, Picks Up $16M From Index, Union Square Ventures

By Ingrid Lunden, TechCrunch Some great news for small business owners, and perhaps a sign of more crowdsourced funding coming to the U.S.: the UK-based Funding Circle— a kind of Kickstarter for lending to smaller enterprises — has just announced that it has raised a $16 million round to further build up its business of enabling non-bank lending to small enterprises.

Weekly Microfinance News & Announcements 3/2/2012

posted: 2012-03-02 @ 8:51 am EST

Startup Fundraising Platform ProFounder Shuts Its Doors

By Leena Rao, TechCrunch ProFounder, which is the brainchild of Kiva co-founder Jessica Jackley and fellow Stanford Business School alum Dana Mauriello, allowed entrepreneurs to share a percentage of their revenues with investors (their friends, family, and community) over …

Smart Power

By Maria Otero, CGAP Smart Power is about addressing the basic necessities of people’s lives, understanding their challenges and empowering them to help themselves—much like we have been doing for decades through microfinance. This concept of Smart …

Create Jobs for USA: A Progress Report

By Joe Nocera, The New York Times This morning we received a Create Jobs for USA progress report. To date, we have raised more than $7 million in donations, thereby directly supporting $50 million in new financing for community businesses across America…

A Conversation With: Muhammad Yunus

By Neha Thirani, New York Times (blog) Muhammad Yunus, the economist who founded Bangladesh’s Grameen Bank, visited Mumbai recently where he spoke to India Ink about his vision of “social businesses,” his forced departure from Grameen and the recent controversies that have dogged micro-finance in India and elsewhere.

Banking the Unbankable Requires a Targeted Effort

By Bryan Yurcan, Banktech To tap the growing number of unbanked and underbanked consumers worldwide, banks need to be more aggressive in offering services and products specifically designed for the market. By Bryan Yurcan The unbanked and underbanked are a growing and …

Whole Foods To Help Empower Low-Income Entrepreneurs

By Huffington Post Entrepreneurs in developing countries get between $30 and $300 and Grameen America offers loans between $500 and $3000 for recipients in the U.S. …

Weekly Microfinance News & Announcements 2/24/2012

posted: 2012-02-24 @ 5:00 am EST

Starbucks Says 3-Month Old Loan Fund Is Already Creating Jobs

By Alan Kline, American Banker Schultz said in the letter that Starbucks expects to introduce more corporate partners over the next couple months as it aims to grow the fund to a point where it will have made loans in all 50 states by the end of this year. He also asked for Geithner’s help in identifying more partners so that more CDFIs could participate in the program.

The Nonprofit Lookbook: Lessons in Social Enterprise from the Fashion World

By Saras Chung, The Nonprofit Quarterly In 2006, Mohammud Yunus had just won the Nobel Peace Prize for his work with the Grameen Bank, inspiring hundreds of social entrepreneurs across the country to test out the theory of microlending in areas of poverty and severe need.

A Conversation With: Muhammad Yunus

By Neha Thirani, New York Times (blog) Muhammad Yunus, the economist who founded Bangladesh’s Grameen Bank, visited Mumbai recently where he spoke to India Ink about his vision of “social businesses,” his forced departure from Grameen and the recent controversies that have dogged micro-finance in India and elsewhere.

Why Commercial Loans Remain Tough to Get

By Myles Dannhausen Jr. Truthout According to Multifunding, which ranks banks based on their ratio of small business loan balances (loans to small businesses with balances of $1 million or …

Startup Fundraising Platform ProFounder Shuts Its Doors

By Leena Rao, TechCrunch ProFounder, which is the brainchild of Kiva co-founder Jessica Jackley and fellow Stanford Business School alum Dana Mauriello, allowed entrepreneurs to share a percentage of their revenues with investors (their friends, family, and community) over …

Smart Power

By Maria Otero, CGAP Smart Power is about addressing the basic necessities of people’s lives, understanding their challenges and empowering them to help themselves—much like we have been doing for decades through microfinance. This concept of Smart …

Congress Addresses Financial Inclusion and Client Protection Principles

By Holly Padgett, Center for Financial Inclusion In December 2011, a bill was introduced in the United States Senate that would advance concepts of financial inclusion in USAID’s (United States Agency for International Development) approach to microfinance and international development …

Starbucks CEO: Washington fails on job creation

By Ashley Killough CNN His company is now spearheading its own employment program, raising funds for a campaign called “Create Jobs for USA” that distributes loans to small …

Should we have a FDA for financial products?

By Suzy Khimm, Washington Post (blog) Eric Posner and Glen Weyl don’t think that Dodd-Frank goes far enough to curb risky financial products, so they’d like a federal agency to vet them first: ( AFP/GETTY IMAGES ) The financial crisis of 2008 was caused in part by speculative investment in …

Weekly Microfinance News & Announcements 2/17/2012

posted: 2012-02-17 @ 9:42 am EST

Obama’s SBA Budget: Doing Less With More

By Robb Mandelbaum, New York Times Microloan counseling would not fare as badly, but other programs that serve the most disadvantaged small businesses, like HubZones and outreach to Native …

Social entrepreneurs use startups to change the world

By VentureBeat With 50000 visitors to its website per day (higher than any other nonprofit with the exception of Wikipedia), Kiva is often cited as the premier success story in this space. Kiva’s President, Premel Shah, recently recognized as a young global leader by …

Who Needs to be Educated for Us to Achieve Financial Inclusion?

By Center for Financial Inclusion Maybe the first focus of financial education should not be at the client level. Maybe the appropriate starting point is for those of us employed by the microfinance industry to better understand our clients’ financial needs, capabilities, and aspirations.

Could Google Wallet be Google’s next failure?

By Marguerite Reardon, CNET (blog) On Friday, Google temporarily disabled the ability to set up new prepaid cards in its Google Wallet app after it was discovered that if someone lost his Google Wallet-enabled phone and the screen of the device wasn’t locked that someone finding the …

Starbucks’s Schultz to Expand Jobs Fund After Raising $2 Million

By Leslie Patton, Bloomberg Businessweek Josh Davis cofounder of Gelato Fiasco Inc in Brunswick Maine received a $140000 loan from Coastal Enterprises Inc through Create Jobs for USA to open a …

Kabbage Crunches UPS Shipping Data to Approve Small Business Loans

By Penny Crosman, American Banker “If you have a FICO score below 720, banks won’t look at you for a small business loan,” says Kathryn Petralia, co-founder and COO of Kabbage, a provider of working capital to small online merchants. “It’s horrible, perverted logic because small …

The Lessons of Microfinance History

By David Roodman, CGAP The chapter would tell stories, such as how Yunus came to devise his form of microcredit, how John Hatch came to village banking. And it would show statistics—how many borrowers and savers there are, in what countries they can be found.

Microfinance in Bangladesh: It’s Not What You Thought

By Elizabeth Rhyne, Huffington Post (blog) The model of microfinance in Bangladesh, as it originated at Grameen Bank, involved tiny loans to women with fixed terms and amounts, group liability, weekly meetings, forced payments into a group savings account, and a set of 16 social pledges chanted …

Weekly Microfinance News & Announcements 2/3/2012

posted: 2012-02-03 @ 6:00 am EST

Think Again: Microfinance

By David Roodman, Foreign Policy What has made so many so sure of microcredit? The ideas are powerful: a blend of self-reliance and liberation that appeals across the political spectrum.

How “the crisis” changed microfinance and where we go from here…

By Sam Mendelson, Microfinance Focus A little over a year ago, this industry of ours was shaken to its core. It wasn’t so much the events in Andhra Pradesh (AP) per se – distressing as some stories of client mistreatment were.

Revive Made in USA? Easier said than done

By Parija Kavilanz, CNN “We didn’t pay that with a small business loan,” she said. “That came from our savings.” Still, she’s not bitter. Her factory has created 50 new jobs in the area. And she hopes to grow that to 100 this year. “We’re trying to do the right thing and …

The true costs of prepaid debit cards

By Felix Salmon, Reuters Blogs (blog) By Felix Salmon Anisha Sekar of Nerdwallet has officially launched a comparison tool which allows you to work out which prepaid debit card might be best for you — and, crucially, allows you to compare the cost of a prepaid debit card to the cost of a …

900+ Have Already Signed WeFunder Petition Demanding Crowdfunding of Startups

By Walter Frick, BostInno While “crowdfunding” has been a success in charitable contexts with sites like Kiva and Kickstarter, as the law currently stands startups are able to take money only from accredited investors, and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) limits the …

What Will It Take To Save the Unbanked?

By Justine Rivero , Forbes Controversy surrounding celebrity-endorsed prepaid cards threw around words like “unbanked” and “underbanked.” But the real head-scratcher isn’t the high-fee cards and their Hollywood affiliations, but why it’s taken so long to recognize the plight of …

Big Banks’ Small Business Lending: Do The Numbers Really Add Up?

By Janean Chun, The Huffington Post News Editors But Kassar has crunched the data the four banks reported for the quarterly FDIC call reports and found that these banks did not show increases in outstanding small-business loan balances from the end of 2010 to the third quarter of 2011.

How Nonprofits And Commercial Groups Can Help The Economy

By Lewis Humphries, San Francisco Chronicle As if to prove how valuable and effective these unions can be, the Create Jobs for USA campaign enjoyed instant success in gaining funds to both create and …

A New Era Under The Volcker Rule

By Matt Atkins, Financier Worldwide Due for implementation in July 2012, the Volcker Rule, part the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Act, aims to reduce the scope for banks to make risky investments with their own capital. Current proposals will ban banks from making trades from their own …

Weekly Microfinance News & Announcements 11/4/11

posted: 2011-11-04 @ 2:58 pm EDT

Can Microfinance Save The World?

By Andrew Belonsky, Death and Taxes But as Gina Harman, CEO of microfinancing group ACCION International’s United States division, explains, the industry is far more than just fiduciary giants …

Not Unbanked: Untapped. Underserved spend $45B on financial services

By Arjan Schutte, Forbes Of course micro lenders around the world, such as Nobel laureate Grameen Bank, who serve the poor with small, market rate “business” loans have demonstrated it’s big business – and largely, good for the world. But here in the US, the unbanked and …

Washington Post – Microloan Program to Help Legal Immigrants …

by Luz Lazo, Washington Post Pacas, 42, is among the first to apply for a new microloan designed to help legal permanent residents cover their naturalization costs. To read more about LEDC’s participation in CASA de Maryland’s new pilot microloan initiative, click here. …

Progreso Financiero Receives $30 Million in New Funds from BlackRock Kelso Capital

by MarketWatch (press release) It also shows that mainstream financial institutions are increasingly acknowledging the value we bring to the market by expanding access to financial products for unbanked and underbanked households in the United States.” More than 23 million Hispanics …

2011 INCENTIVES GUIDE

by Business Facilities The Small Business Loan Fund (SBLF) provides partial funding for expansion projects that will benefit Rhode Island’s economy by encouraging business development. The program makes loans available with attractive terms for nonspeculative ventures …

Volcker Rule to Cost Banks $1B: U.S. Government

by Silla Brush, Bloomberg The Volcker rule, a 298-page proposal, named for former Fed Chairman Paul Volcker, shown, was included in the Dodd-Frank overhaul of financial regulation aimed at limiting the kind of risky trading that …

Moving Past Controversy: The Future of Microfinance

by Eliza Huleatt, 3p Guest Author No discussion on the future of microfinance would be complete without mention of how these tools can be applied in the United States. More and more organizations are exploring the space for microcredit here at home. Alex Counts thinks that …

What Does Coffee Giant’s Initiative Mean for America’s Micro Businesses?

By Elaine Edgecomb, Huffington Post With (seemingly) a Starbucks on every corner, the Starbucks Opportunity Finance Network “Create Jobs for USA” initiative is designed to offer all of us an opportunity to become job creators.