Photograph Courtesy of Rachel Hu
While not every student may have the money to support global causes, the Kiva Club at Berkeley High School aims to change just that.
Kiva Club aims to alleviate poverty by sending loans to people and communities around the world. Many of those people plan to start farms or businesses, send their kids to school, and more. The organization they are affiliated with, Kiva, is an international nonprofit organization founded in 2005 and based in San Francisco.
The loans that are sent out to those people are paid back, and get reused to help new people. “All the money that we raise we put into our account on Kiva.org and from there we make loans every week to people in other countries,” explained Maxime Hendrix Liu, the treasurer and secretary for Kiva Club. Loan recipients use the money on special projects, which are documented on Kiva.org. Usually, over a period of six months to a little over a year, they repay those loans, and the same money can be recycled to loan another person.
On Kiva.org, they have Kiva field partners working in 72 countries across the world. Field partners help allocate funds from Kiva.org to its users. People in different countries reach out to field partners and ask them for a loan for a certain amount. These loans go towards projects they would like to pursue. Next, the field partner helps people create a loan page on Kiva.org to help fundraise. Those who donate typically donate some multiple of five, whether that be five dollars or fifty dollars.
Once the loan is properly funded, Kiva.org takes that money and sends it to the field partner, who then helps their client with the loan. Kiva club is currently working on communicating with the Kiva headquarters in San Francisco to potentially visit them. This is a project that has never been done before.
“We’d like to make [the relationship between Kiva Club and Kiva itself] a stronger relationship and [receive] more guidance with them,” said Elina Juvonen, the co-president of Kiva Club. She added, “We’d like to maybe have a tour and talk with some people who work with Kiva and see what it’s like working in a non-profit.”
Aside from doing bake sales outside campus, Kiva club also volunteers for the Ashanti Africa Association, an organization that Kiva club has partnered with in the past. The Ashanti Africa Association helps with the club with events, volunteers alongside club members, and helps to set up and usher event attendees.
During club meetings, Kiva Club sends out their loans through a collaborative process. Bennedetta Jolli, senior and member of Kiva Club said that everybody in the club looks together at loans and decides how to delegate the money. They sometimes choose a country to give a loan out to, or choose based on the people/projects they decide to support on Kiva.org. “Sometimes we go with categories, so it’s like, education, food, and we decide altogether,” Jolli explained.
Kiva Club’s mission is to help people in developing countries, and this is a part of why members stay in the club. “I stayed mostly because it’s very different from all the other clubs I’ve been [to],” said Rachel Hu, the co-president of Kiva Club. “It’s not mainly focused in the [United States], and it’s not just focused on one thing, just one sector…” She explained the different sectors in which consists of education, agriculture, businesses, and more.
As Kiva Club explores these categories internationally, they learn more about the people abroad they help and where they live. Juvonen shared, “It’s been really interesting because we learned a lot about different cultures and what people in other countries are doing.”
Over the past eight years, Kiva Club has raised over nineteen thousand dollars. Every week it loans between fifty and one hundred dollars to different causes in countries around the world. “It’s a great feeling to read these people’s stories and every week be able to help someone else across the world, improve their quality of life, and learning about the effect that we have is really incredible,” said Hendrix Liu.
“I think that Kiva Club shows that Berkeley High students … really care about people, not just locally, but all around the world,” said Juvonen, “We want change and improve the world as much as we can.”
The Kiva Club at Berkeley High School, in affiliation with Kiva.org, meets on Mondays at lunch in room C-224.