Welcome!

Greetings everyone! Welcome to my blog: Community Banking with GIVE. This is going to be my first (personal) blog post, so please bear with me as I figure out what to do and how this works. I just wanted to start things off by thanking you for reading it. I hope that you find it as enjoyable and interesting to read as I hope to find it to write. I apologise in advance that my writing can become expansive, but I try to keep things as succinct as possible.

Okay so you may be asking: what exactly am I doing and why did I create this blog? The longer answer of what I am doing and why I am doing it will, I hope, become evident throughout my time there and in future posts so I will not bore you with it now. The short answer however is that in only a few days, I will be hopping on a plane to Amsterdam, then Nairobi, Kenya, before flying to Kisumu (a city in the Western part of Kenya near Lake Victoria) before getting on a short bus to the “village” Kanyawegi (technically it is a sub-location with ~6 villages in it). Phew. While there I will be doing economic development volunteer work for approximately 8 weeks through a small organisation founded by UBC students called GIVE (Global Initiatives for Village Empowerment). The simplest answer as to why I decided to jump on a plane going halfway across the world, to a country I have never visited, is because I want to learn and because I have a deep passion for helping others. I openly admit that I will probably garner more benefit from my trip than the people I am trying to assist, because of the new knowledge and experiences I will gain, but my goal is to still make a meaningful difference in the community that can be a stepping stone for breaking the poverty cycle in the village. I am very lucky to have this opportunity and hope to make the most of it. The people in the village are very enterprising and have put a lot of effort into the project, so hopefully I (along with the rest of the team) can provide some expertise and outside knowledge that they will find useful. This summer most of our work will revolve around increasing community involvement and engagement with the community bank that GIVE founded in the village now 5 years ago. The plan is to create some sort of governance structure similar to a Board of Directors, which we will facilitate the election and training of. Since I have a lot of other background stuff to go through in this post, so I will put up a much more detailed description of our project in a few days.

To explain the context a bit better here is a brief history of how I joined GIVE. Everything started through a class I took in first year at UBC: Comm 101. Jordan, a former traveller from GIVE on the Economic Team, came in and presented to our class about what he had done over the summer around a bee-keeping social enterprise he had set up. With my brother’s exposure to microfinance in mind I asked a question about why there was no “Microfinance Club” at UBC, to the response: “Just start one if yourself!”. My TA Safeena Dhalla came up to talk with my randomly assigned course project group after class to encourage us to think about applying to join the GIVE team. They had recently started a microfinance project at the community bank they had founded, and seemed to match our interests well. Through luck or chance I had a pretty cool group who were also interested in social enterprise, which led to a fellow team member Katie Dergousoff also applying with me to join the team. We both made it through interviews and the rest is history I suppose. Since December last year we have been doing work for the Economic Development Team originally around fund raising and preparing the travellers for last summer, then this year we have shifted to project work for our own trip. A lot of work has gone into the project since we first started, not only by us but also by the rest of our team (Not only in Vancouver, but also in Kenya and by a friendly adviser in England), so I think it is safe to say that we are extremely excited to finally be going.

I created this blog as a means to keep track of and reflect on what I do and learn while there. I plan to use this blog as somewhat of a sounding board or place to reflect, while still trying to keep it interesting for everyone else to read! One reason perhaps for me even considering going on this trip was through my brother, Michael, who travelled to Bangladesh two summers ago to do a program through the Grameen Bank (the first large-scale microfinance bank). Michael was the head of the Microfinance Club at the University of Western Ontario, and took the initiative to organise the trip for himself and a couple other friends in the club (quite impressive if you ask me). While there and after he returned, Michael maintained a blog to keep everyone up to date on what he was doing, reading and learning. It was a very effective way to keep track of what happened, and I have decided to borrow his idea. If interested here is a link to his blog. I want to use this blog as a way to explore my interests in social enterprise, development, business and environmentalism.

Alright, I think I will cap myself at that, if you managed to read through the entire thing then kudos to you, I apologise for the length! Over the next few days I will put up a more detailed history of GIVE and Kanyawegi, plus some more details about the project and what I will be doing.

Ciao for now,

Cheers,

Graham