Over twenty years ago, when a little known governor in Arkansas, Bill Clinton, and his wife, heard about a Bangladeshi economics professor turned banker-to-the-poor, they wanted to know more. How did these small loans to help build local businesses work? Why were they loaning mostly to women? And could it work in parts of the impoverished South?
And wasn't it amazing that a governor from Arkansas and his wife could actually imagine that someone from one of the poorest countries halfway around the world might actually have an answer that would work in the United States? The fact is that where "Creative Capitalism" or Social Business, as Clinton's friend, Muhammad Yunus, the Bangladeshi professor he nominated for the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize, calls it, is also needed here in the United States.
Flash forward to today and people like Bill Gates are talking about "Creative Capitalism," the good that companies can do by helping create sustainable businesses which do good for communities around the world. Brad Pitt, who has dedicated himself to helping the people of New Orleans devastated by Katrina, and many others want to meet with Nobel Peace prize winner, Muhammad Yunus. CEOs of corporations are slowly but surely "getting it" and invite him into their board rooms. Governments, finance ministers, billionaires, women's groups, the list goes on -- are all becoming part of this snowball effect. They are interested in creating sustainable "hybrids," giving based on a business model, which has as its aim not making money off of the poor, but building the kinds of businesses which can provide goods and services for the poor, including health care, communications, etc. while using a "creative capitalist" structure.
This means that charity dollars do not have to be raised again and again to keep the benefits reaching the people who need them as the business model creates that kind of sustainability. In other words folks, it becomes about TRUE giving instead of simple tax write-offs and getting rid of guilt. It is about helping people to help themselves so that they eventually do not need out help anymore! Yet governments should, and some already do, allow for companies and individuals to receive some kid of compensation for "giving" to social businesses, microcredit organizations, etc. And these organizations do exist, such as Grameen America, or microcredit loan centers in the Bronx and central Los Angeles.
My father grew up not far from where Bill Clinton was born and I returned to that part of the rural U.S. many times during my youth and young adulthood. My father took me to see how and where people lived, and how little they had. He made me and my brother pick cotton one very hot day, and I can recall cutting my fingers and the blood sticking to the cotton. We were also brought to the sugar cane fields, and driven to rural communities where people had little education and no access to credit or any way to make their lives better. When I saw the images on television of Katrina decades later what made me truly sad was that nothing at all had changed. These people had slipped through the cracks, somehow did not exist in America. That is, until we saw them on TV. But these people did and do have ideas. This is not about giving credit to people to buy a flatscreen television or waste borrowed money; it is about people who want to, if given the chance, work, create small businesses for which there is a real need in their communities. People who had to leave New Orleans after Katrina are now nurses and workers in Houston and elsewhere. We only ever hear the negative, but that is the media's fault, not the fault of those who have suffered and are only looking for a little help to make their lives and those of their families better.
But the welfare system which penalizes someone for earning anything at all, as well as the lack of support for the establishment of microcredit banks, has slowed down the process of creating independence for some of our own country's most vulnerable people. Hopefully the U.S., especially with the recent economic woes and problems of unchecked speculation which have hurt the most vulnerable borrowers, will begin to address these issues. The real problem behind lending in the "sub-prime" area is not the borrowers themselves who truly wanted to own their own homes, but those who used cheap money to flip properties, creating a bubble, on which inflated prices for loans became based, and thus those who truly needed the credit lost out.
This year at Davos we are witnessing a miraculous thing...but one also wonders why it took so long to happen. Human beings are very capable and creative if given the opportunity. Muhammad Yunus, Bill Gates, Michael Dell, Jeff Skoll, Craig Barrett of Intel, the CEO of Danone in France, Bill and Hillary Clinton and many many others all understand this and are taking concrete steps within the world of business to do give people opportunities.. What a truly amazing thing it is that we are finally thinking globally, and that true globalization is now understood also as acting locally, or even using ideas, monies etc. from one part of the planet to help focused local ventures in communities halfway around the world. But let us also look at home to help. From rural Arkansas, Washington State and New Orleans, to the ears of those Americans at Davos, come home to the U.S. and do something here. And remember, we are indeed all interconnected.
Loading comments…
Posted January 28, 2008 | 10:27 AM (EST)