Recent Stories with tag vittana

Steve Broback of the Parnassus Group, at 140TC: Seattle. Photo by Brian Westbrook.

"It fulfills a prediction I've had since graduating college about the power of hypertext," Twitter co-founder and author Dom Sagolla told me over the phone, about the near-ubiquity of the social media portal he helped conceive. "But it's also humbling, because we designed for such a basic use-case, and it's taken on an incredible range of possibilities. So to see how people have adopted it and used it and made it their own has amazed me."

This was Monday early afternoon, and Sagolla and I were making up for not having been able to connect face-to-face earlier in the day, while I was down at the Bell Harbor Conference Center at Pier 66 for 140: The Twitter Conference, a commerce-meets-culture confab digging into nitty-gritty of how to maximize whatever benefit you're trying to get from your 140-characters-at-a-time online presence.

While the audience was decidedly business-y, and most of the presentations oriented towards marketing and branding opportunities via Twitter, the subjects of politics, pop culture, philanthropy, and privacy kept popping up. On the last subject in that list, Ben Parr of Mashable pretty much summed up the prevailing philosophy when he explained: "Privacy is dead." So there's that....

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So I'm sitting in the Elliott Bay Café in Pioneer Square, interviewing Vittana co-founder Brett Witt (hobbies: iPhone hacks, djing) and their international partnerships guy Nick Cain (skateboarding, water polo).

In quick succession we hit on Amazon's personalization (though Witt and CEO Kushal Chakrabarti don't work on Bezos' farm no more), Seattle's microfinance start-up scene (not to mention heavy hitters like Grameen, Unitus, Global Partnerships, too), and social media--and I realize I am scribbling this all down in a $1.29 notebook I got from Walgreen's. 

Bloggers invented microfinance!

Actually, no, we did not. Neither did Muhammad Yunus, but the founder of Grameen Bank did a lot to prove that microcredit works--that right-sized lending creates a huge pool of potential investors and gives micro-entrepreneurs a chance to take financial risks that won't crush them.

With the nonprofit Vittana (they're also on Facebook), Kushal and Brett are taking microfinance in a new direction: college loans. Up to now, microlending has focused on the benefits of lending small amounts over short time frames. College loans are (someone has to say it) microfinance 2.0. That's why, I imagine, Huffington Post readers picked Vittana as the " Ultimate Game Changer in Philanthropy." (1.7 million votes were cast in ten "Game Changer" categories.)

A recent New York Times profile of Vittana summarizes the stumbling block: "Mainstream banks and others lend to microfinance institutions who in turn lend to small entrepreneurs because those loans support an activity that generates income. But a loan to a college student bears no immediate promise of repayment."

Especially in developing countries, the concept of government-funded student loans has yet to take hold, and prospective students are faced with the familiar Catch-22 of borrowers the world over: You have to be well-off to qualify for a loan.

The Times quotes Timothy Ogden, publisher of Philanthropy Action, to get to the real game-changing part: "If you’re trying to raise standards of living, making an education loan is probably a better way of doing that than lending another $100 to an illiterate and unskilled woman to open another roadside stand."

Brett Witt

"We just want to show that this is a feasible idea--a probable idea," says Brett, who's from Chicago's West Side, dredded, and brought you your Amazon Watch List. "One of our biggest 'products' or contributions to the field is just figuring out how student loans work [with a microfinance model]."

So far, Vittana has provided students with 33 loans worth $37,000 altogether, to students in urban areas of Paraguay, Nicaragua, Peru, and Mongolia. Vietnam and Cambodia are just coming online.

Right now, the average loan amount is just over $1,000, but "historically" (the site launched in May 2009), loans have ranged from $500 to $800. After their HuffPo fame broke, the number of lenders has doubled, which is good news because the number of students they put up on the site is tied to the lending resources available. Vittana lenders get their money back (in fact, there have been no defaults at all so far), but the loan is provided on an interest-free basis. All the cash transfers happen via PayPal....

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