By Will Bullard
Development Director, Adelante

Gladys Jessenia Aguilar started with a $90 loan from Adelante. She already had a small business, selling grocery items. She learned about Adelante from other women in her village of La Colonia and wanted to diversify her pulperia (small grocery store). With the funds she was able to acquire more food items like drinks, beans, rice, corn, flour, and sugar. She was very organized about her business, writing down how much she spent and how much she earned in a notebook, as she learned from Adelante's business training workshops.

Gladys' husband knows how to make and mix cement, but is not always able to find work.

Because of Gladys' investments and good credit history, she was able to secure another loan was for almost $200 and help her husband. With the steady income from her store the family is able maintain a healthy diet.

Gladys has been very pleased with Adelante' micro-credit loan program. Recently she said, "I have been able to pay the loan back from my earnings and my business has grown well."

Resources

• Find out more about "Economic Self-Help: Rural Micro-Credit" 
   
• Email Will Bullard, Adelante's Development Director, with questions or comments about the project

City Year seeks to demonstrate, improve and promote the concept of citizen service as a means of building a stronger democracy. Over the years, City Year has hosted visitors from different nations, many of whom expressed an interest in bringing citizen service programs to their home countries. This collaboration led to City Year's realization that citizen service could grow through the sharing of ideas across national borders.

City Year's Clinton Democracy Fellowship engages emerging leaders from outside the United States, who are between the ages of 21 and 35 and who have a strong interest in using citizen service programs, citizen service policymaking and social entrepreneurship techniques to build a stronger democracy.

Resources

• See City Year's project
   
• See City Year's website
   
• See the complete list of Project Sponsors

Giving Change
Originally Published: 8.26.04
The Financial Times

Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel prizewinner in economics, scourge of the International Monetary Fund and all-round charmer, is getting married. Invitations to his forthcoming union with Anya Schiffrin, journalist turned academic and saloniste of Manhattan's Upper West Side, adopt a characteristically left-of-centre approach to the question of wedding gifts.

There's no list at Bloomingdale's. Instead, guests wondering what to give to the author of Globalization and Its Discontents and The Roaring Nineties are asked to consider a donation to Democrat John Kerry's presidential election campaign.

Republicans and non-US citizens are invited instead to the website of a Washington-based charity called GlobalGiving, where the happy couple have pledged to match any donations to development projects in Honduras, India, Bangladesh and Uganda.

Before joining the World Bank as chief economist in 1997, Stiglitz chaired President Bill Clinton's council of economic advisers. But friends say he's not angling for a position in any Kerry administration: after being showered with trinkets at speaking tours, the globe-trotting economist may just have too much stuff at home already.

The Stigliz-Schiffrin registry is a preview of GlobalGiving's upcoming Gift Registry feature. Donors will soon be able to create their own personal webpages with lists of their favorite projects.

Resources

• See the Stigliz-Schiffrin registry.
   
• Read more about Joseph Stiglitz.