Marketing and Fundraising Team: Log # 3 by Michael Morettoni

Our bake sale was a smashing success! We raised just over $300 by selling baked goodies donated by the GLOBE managers. In my last post I recognized how important, and sometimes difficult, communication among the different teams can be. Even though it was trying at times to reach the other team members, in the end, we all came together beautifully; I really was most pleased with the collaborative teamwork. Our table was overflowing with the donated baked goods and was always staffed with managers eager to spread GLOBE’s message. We even had managers hand-delivering the GLOBE message and baked goods throughout campus. I was impressed and reassured of the commitment that we all took together when we joined the class.
   
The Marketing Team has also begun serious research for our term paper, investigating the possible mission drift within the Microfinance industry due to the introduction of ‘for-profit’ MFIs. Our research is preliminary, but our findings so far are disturbing. Our mission in GLOBE is to alleviate poverty through the financial empowerment of entrepreneurs in the developing world. Introducing profit margins and stakeholders can certainly disrupt the social mission that many MFI’s, including GLOBE, hold dear.
   
This week we read a chapter of Muhammad Yunus’ book, “Banker to the Poor”, which detailed the efforts to bring microfinance outside of Bangladesh and into developed nations. Our time in class so far has been devoted to learning the concepts of microfinance and their applications in the countries that GLOBE has actual borrowers (Vietnam, Democratic Republic of Congo, Kenya, etc.). So I was surprised to learn that the principles and methods of the Grameen bank could be so easily applied to the poverty stricken areas of the United States. Yunus visited with notable politicians and community leaders, like Bill Clinton, in Arkansas, Chicago, Harlem, and many other centers of poverty. While reluctant initially, the methods and ideology of the Grameen bank were adopted and eventually succeeded.

The most important lesson from this chapter was that poor do not deserve to be stereotyped or defined by their poorness, even though they may feel that way themselves. In every rural town and urban center Yunus visited he was met by creative, hardworking, and eager people who only needed opportunity to help better themselves. Negative characterizations about American individualism or American reliance on welfare are dangerous and shallow because, as Yunus and his associates proved over and over again, the poor are just as resourceful and have just as much humanity as anyone else with a degree or a full wallet in their pocket.