Gumball Capital - microfinance + student entrepreneurship
Gumball Capital - a startup nonprofit - gets students educated, involved and inspired to fight poverty through entrepreneurship.
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Microfinance, or small loans to the poor, has helped lift millions out of poverty - but many more need our support. We raise awareness and funds for microfinance loans
Q1: Do you know why we use the number $27 so often?
Idea Description
At Gumball Capital, we think that students are looking for way to MAKE A DIFFERENCE on important social issues like global poverty. And we wanted to challenge them to use their creativity, enthusiasm and tech savvy to see how much they could really do.
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We created the Gumball Challenge - a entrepreneurial competition where student teams are given gumballs, a $27 loan and a guidebook, and have ONE WEEK to generate as much revenue as possible. We ran a test trial in fall of 2007 and schools like Stanford, Berkeley and Yale got involved. In seven days, these student raised enough money to SUPPORT OVER 200 MICROLOANS to developing world entrepreneurs. Now we're ready to take our idea further!
What will you do if you win $10,000 for this idea?
$4000 for Starter Kits for student teams. We have over 10 schools lined up to run Gumball Challenges, and they need gumballs, educational guidebooks and $27 loans. The best part is that the loans can be recycled and used again - making our impact sustainable!
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$3000 for our operation costs. We need to pay for legal fees, print guidebooks and flyers, ship Starter Kits, pay for webhosting and other online services, send out t-shirts and run online advertising.
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$3000 for staff member stipends. Our 15+ student staff have spent thousands of volunteer hours over the past months developing our ideas. Small stipends will allow us to further the efforts to grow our organization and our impact.
Vote for it now.
Muhammad Yunus, who founded the Grameen Bank and won the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize, made microfinance famous.
His initial $27 loan to a group of 42 Bangladeshi women started what became to be the Grameen Bank. Now having lent over 6.3 billion dollars to 7.2 million borrowers with a repayment rate of 98.6%, his organization is living proof of the power of microfinance