Can you have a big impact with a small amount of money?
Just over a week ago, Grameen Bank and its founder, Muhammad Yunus, won the Nobel Peace Prize for their work making small loans to poor people with big dreams. Mr. Yunus helped popularize the term "microfinance," and many organizations now use it describe wide-ranging attempts to use tiny sums of money to effect social good. [Some Grameen Bank loans being as small as $12.]
Several Web sites have sprung up in the last few years in this vein. They let individuals give or lend small amounts to others, who post their funding needs. The investment group of eBay founder Pierre Omidyar has funded many of the services, and it borrows liberally from the auction site's open-marketplace model.
There are three ways to get in on this: You can give money away, lend it out and charge no interest or make loans and hope to profit. But all of the options have this in common: You usually get to decide which person or group gets your money. It's not up to a nonprofit staffer somewhere.
[Excerpt from an article by Ron Lieber, The Wall Street Journal]
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