East Lansing has no shortage of people who, first and foremost, believe that the value of your education is in enabling them to have an impact. Spartan Global helps them do that, but it’s their drive that is the true human resource, Thelen said.

SGDF has deeply impacted the lives of small entrepreneurs to whom they have extended loans, Stenzel said. A motorcycle repairman is building his small business thanks to a SGDF microloan. He used our SGDF loan to buy new coffee plants to replace those destroyed by roya,’ a coffee rust that is destroying coffee plantations throughout Central America.

The interest-free loans are underwritten by donors that range from corporate sponsors to individuals raised by student development volunteers, and through a loan repayment rate around an astounding 99 percent

Through microfinance and fair and direct trade, families are able to make choices that improve their lives, Stenzel said, adding that improved incomes have allowed people to gain access to running water, indoor plumbing, and other necessities taken for granted by people in wealthier nations.

Thelen said the start of SGDF was inspired in part by three consecutive semesters of study abroad, along with lessons on microcredit.

The connections go beyond the loans

There’s really a lot out there that we can have impact on that, from East Lansing, can feel really far away and remote … as a finance major it just seemed pretty fantastic that something that seems so counterintuitive in a sense, that just with small amounts and the simple access to capital that people had been stuck in poverty traps could suddenly use could be a springboard to better lives, Thelen said.

There’s a lot payday loans direct lender Demopolis more meaning attached to these loans than if one were buying a house or car here, Lyman said. These people’s livelihoods, and by extension their family’s livelihoods and their community’s livelihoods are attached to the success of these loans … so when someone doesn’t pay it back, that not only hurts them, but it also hurts their family and surrounding community.

And I think that’s why you see such a high repayment rate, at least when it comes to the loans that we facilitate, Lyman said.

Meanwhile, those repayments get recirculated in the form of new loans to help others. Every dollar we raise gets to be used over and over and over by different entrepreneurs at different times, Thelen said. It’s really been fascinating and just wonderful to see how the power of that continual accumulation of potential impact the organization can have has really started to snowball over the years.

In the wake of a recent volcano eruption in Guatemala, our students immediately inquired about our friends there, said Stenzel, who learned in an email from there that while ash covered crops and blocked roads, we’re dirty, but unharmed.

Stenzel said students are gathering funds to help their friends in Guatemala. This immediate concern for an action to help others is what business is about when Spartan Global is part of the team. The challenges and hardships faced by our friends in Guatemala are our concern, too, Stenzel said.

There’s been a lot of iterations of the organization of how they want to organize themselves and where they want to focus their efforts, said Thelen, now a professional software engineer and member of the fund’s nonprofit oversight board. No matter how many times that’s changed or, around it, the world has changed, there have always been people who’ve stepped up and said, I see that there’s suffering out there and I believe I’m in a position to do something.’