Empowering Bay-Area Women with Microfinance

On a cloudy December afternoon, Lisa Hannah checks her laptop, glances at CNN Money TV, then fills her new puppy’s water bowl. As a mother of three, the holidays are a busy time in her town of Greenbrae, just north of San Francisco, but Lisa has recently undertaken a project that made this season even more hectic. As we speak, she is working on the details of a microloan to a Bay Area business.

If Lisa can finalize a business plan and dot all the I’s on the deal, she will provide $10,000 in capital—collected in ten $1,000 investments from women in the community—to a woman planning to open a certified organic café in the East Bay.

“She’ll be my first microfinance client,” Lisa says.

She hopes, however, that this initial credit injection will signify the start of a microfinance network that provides loans to women looking to open, improve or maintain their businesses in the greater Bay Area, and ultimately in other places as well.

“It’s a huge passion of mine,” Lisa says. “I’m a single mom and I have three daughters, and I look at a lot of [what I’m doing] as women helping other women.”

The idea to provide these small scale loans took off after she heard a talk by Muhammad Yunus, the Nobel Prize-winning Bangladeshi economist who conceived microcredit, at a local bookstore talk. Lisa asked herself: What if I got people to invest in their community—in businesses they know and see—and go back to the old fashioned way of doing business?

Lisa worked on Wall Street before deciding she didn’t want to hire a full time staff to raise her children. She knows about finances. She also knows how difficult it can be to find loans, especially given the global recession. Banks have virtually stopped issuing credit, she says.

“There’s this huge need because our economy is faltering. People are asking for smaller and smaller amounts because we’re not in this crazy growth period.”

Microloans involve a time-intensive process, offering returns that don’t work for most regular banks; but on a smaller scale, they make sense, particularly if someone is willing to work tirelessly to manage the process. Microfinance banks usually have a staff that accomplishes this feat, but for Lisa’s fledgling organization, she has, at least originally, committed to doing this herself.

“I want to help and this is my way of doing that, combining my Wall Street financial background and helping women on both sides frankly. If I can get some of these women into a fund that makes them money, maybe that will help with their financial independence. In turn, they’re helping others keep their businesses or build their businesses.”

Women helping one another is a value Lisa wants to pass onto her daughters, but while the lessons of giving and receiving are fairly easy to explain to children, the value of lending proves more complicated.

“I talk a lot about mommy doing something to help the community—they glaze over when I talk anything about finance, so I don’t,” she says, “but we talk about business, and if we do go ahead and do this café, I will bring them over and they will be part of it.”

For now, Lisa is happy that her daughters made lists of people to appreciate rather than wish lists for themselves this year, but she hopes to instill her children with some of the values she learned to cherish growing up in a disadvantaged, single-parent household.

“I am all about empowerment. I believe if you give someone something and say we are giving you something, there’s no empowerment to that,” Lisa says. “When you lend people money, you basically say: I believe in you enough to pay me back.”

You also create a relationship based on equality and faith that can pay dividends for both borrower and lender. Lisa hopes her first such relationship will bear fruit sometime in January, when she believes the organic café will be ready to launch, thanks to Lisa and like-minded women from the community.

Lisa has not finished her microloan website yet, but she has thought of a name for her business: Microloans 360. While it’s unaffiliated, we at Life360 think it’s a really catchy one. To learn more about microfinance and microfinance institutions, take a look at Grameen Bank and Kiva.

If you’d like to get in touch with Lisa, feel free to reach her by email.

Tagged as: bay-area, microfinance, supermoms