2006.01.06: January 6, 2006: Headlines: COS - Guatemala: Microfinance: Service: NGO's: Banking: gregvankirk: Greg Van Kirk and his team of volunteers comprise Community Enterprise Solutions the not for profit he co-founded with fellow Guatemala Peace Corps volunteer George Glickley to provide loans to rural constituents
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2006.01.06: January 6, 2006: Headlines: COS - Guatemala: Microfinance: Service: NGO's: Banking: gregvankirk: Greg Van Kirk and his team of volunteers comprise Community Enterprise Solutions the not for profit he co-founded with fellow Guatemala Peace Corps volunteer George Glickley to provide loans to rural constituents
Greg Van Kirk and his team of volunteers comprise Community Enterprise Solutions the not for profit he co-founded with fellow Guatemala Peace Corps volunteer George Glickley to provide loans to rural constituents
While working in investment banking in New York City in 2000, Greg Van Kirk read about Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus’ micro-credit work providing loans to the poor of Bangledesh. “When I turned 30 and read about Mohammad Yunnus’ work, I knew it was now or never, so I joined the Peace Corps,” he said. Armed with his investment banking credibility, and accrued analytic and business skills, Van Kirk knew that what he needed was real field experience. His transformation from Peace Corps volunteer to social entrepreneur began in Nebaj, an indigenous, rural town in the mountains of Guatemala, where he found himself surrounded by nature and culture but with no facilities or centers for tourists to stay at or visit.
Seeing an opportunity to help local people bring new money into the community and create new jobs, he donated his own money and solicited the support of family and friends and created five tourism-focused businesses: a restaurant, a Spanish language school, a guiding service, an Internet café, and an artisan store. Van Kirk said Jan. 16 will mark the fifth anniversary of the tourism business and said the businesses have received about $10,000 in total donations to date and are now all locally owned and operated, directly employ over 30 people and have average annual revenues approaching $100,000.
When it came time to create his own venture to build on the success of the tourism businesses, Van Kirk took into consideration the whole picture, using his heart and his head. Since he co-founded Community Enterprise Solutions in 2004, Van Kirk’s work has had a concrete impact. For example, thousands of women weavers and rural merchants with bad eyesight are now able to continue making a living by buying eyeglasses from Community Enterprise (CE) Solutions. The company trained and equipped local entrepreneurs, as featured in November of 2005 in the NBC Nightly News “Making a Difference” segment. When summing up his work Van Kirk said, “It is the most challenging thing I’ve ever done, working with so many human, cultural, and societal issues, trying to come up with solutions to problems that have been around for thousands of years.” “In the end, my job is to drive myself out of business. We train people and get them to the point of self-sufficiency; to the point where they don’t need us anymore,” he said.
Greg Van Kirk and his team of volunteers comprise Community Enterprise Solutions the not for profit he co-founded with fellow Guatemala Peace Corps volunteer George Glickley to provide loans to rural constituents
Harding man models Nobel winner in helping third world
By CHRISTINA MUCCIOLO Staff Writer
01/06/2007
HARDING TWP. – While working in investment banking in New York City in 2000, former township resident Greg Van Kirk read about Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus’ micro-credit work providing loans to the poor of Bangledesh.
It was the inspiration Van Kirk needed to begin a career in international development.
Within two-and-a-half years, he had started his own development organization providing loans to rural constituents, as well as services that integrate business creation, training and consulting for budding rural entrepreneurs.
Van Kirk, 37, is at the forefront of a new development approach called “social entrepreneurship” where residents in developing countries are encouraged to participate in globalization.
He is also changing people’s lives with his non-profit organization and volunteer opportunities, while pushing the boundaries of his field.
Van Kirk said in an interview on Dec. 28 that his main source of inspiration has been his parents, Phil and Mary Van Kirk, who live in the Mount Kemble Lake community and are well known for their community leadership. They are co-directors of the Affordable Harding Corp., the non-profit entity that oversaw the construction and completion of the township’s first affordable housing complex, The Farm at Harding, located at the corner of Kitchell and Woodland roads.
Van Kirk said he has always seen his parents as role models. He said that when he read about Muhammad Yunnus and his business approach to solving social problems, he found another source of inspiration, which has led to his life’s work.
The book was, “The Price of a Dream: The Story of the Grameen Bank,” by David Bornstein. It tells the story of Yunnus’ creation of the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh. The bank has extended small loans for self-employment to more than two million women villagers, lifting scores from poverty, while inspiring the creation of hundreds of “micro-credit” programs around the world and helping to reshape international development policy, according to a report on the book.
Van Kirk has taken the idea of rural economic development and expanded it using a social entrepreneurship model.
Van Kirk and his team of volunteers comprise Community Enterprise Solutions (www.cesolutions.org), the not for profit he co-founded with fellow Guatemala Peace Corps volunteer George Glickley. They are at the cutting edge of the new way of approaching problems as they work to provide resources for and train budding entrepreneurs in developing countries to create business ventures that solve community problems in low-cost and sustainable ways.
Splitting his time between his New York City residence and Guatemala, Van Kirk said he has always loved the challenge of working in entirely different cultures.
Van Kirk started his exploration into uncharted territory in November 1989 when as a student he traveled in Czechoslovakia as the Berlin Wall was being torn down.
A month after graduating from Miami (Ohio) University, he went to Japan, where he spent two and a half years managing a language school in Kitakyushu, a city located two hours north of Nagasaki.
Upon leaving Japan, Van Kirk said he wanted to continue to explore different places and challenge himself, but to do so in a way that made an impact. First however, he wanted to gain some “expertise” so that he could be as effective as possible. So he ended up working in investment banking to get the real experience he was seeking.
For five years, Van Kirk worked at a boutique firm in San Francisco and with UBS in New York City, where he closed structured finance deals for clients such as Boeing, Cisco Systems, Verizon, and Irish Telecom totaling over $3.5 billion.
“When I turned 30 and read about Mohammad Yunnus’ work, I knew it was now or never, so I joined the Peace Corps,” he said.
Armed with his investment banking credibility, and accrued analytic and business skills, Van Kirk knew that what he needed was real field experience.
His transformation from Peace Corps volunteer to social entrepreneur began in Nebaj, an indigenous, rural town in the mountains of Guatemala, where he found himself surrounded by nature and culture but with no facilities or centers for tourists to stay at or visit.
Seeing an opportunity to help local people bring new money into the community and create new jobs, he donated his own money and solicited the support of family and friends and created five tourism-focused businesses: a restaurant, a Spanish language school, a guiding service, an Internet café, and an artisan store.
Van Kirk said Jan. 16 will mark the fifth anniversary of the tourism business and said the businesses have received about $10,000 in total donations to date and are now all locally owned and operated, directly employ over 30 people and have average annual revenues approaching $100,000.
Future Investment
When it came time to create his own venture to build on the success of the tourism businesses, Van Kirk took into consideration the whole picture, using his heart and his head. Since he co-founded Community Enterprise Solutions in 2004, Van Kirk’s work has had a concrete impact.
For example, thousands of women weavers and rural merchants with bad eyesight are now able to continue making a living by buying eyeglasses from Community Enterprise (CE) Solutions. The company trained and equipped local entrepreneurs, as featured in November of 2005 in the NBC Nightly News “Making a Difference” segment.
In addition, local entrepreneurs are now providing rural families with the opportunity to buy much needed wood burning stoves.
Van Kirk said most of the inhabitants of rural Guatemala, and the third world for that matter, cook campfire-style on a dirt floor in their homes, and that there are huge negative impacts to cooking this way. It causes major respiratory and vision problems and uses an enormous amount of wood, costing money and speeding up deforestation.
Van Kirk said ordinarily, international donations are used to buy wood burning stoves for people, but that this is not a sustainable way to address the problem as funding is limited and dries up over the long run. Thus, thinking like a social entrepreneur, he devised another solution for the issue of campfire cooking; a local business selling wood burning stoves to poor families who pay in installments.
Van Kirk said that what starts out as donation, turns into a local, profitable business where the benefits end up far exceeding the seed money provided to the business.
From the success of the stove model came the business model training young Guatemalan women to give eye exams and sell glasses in rural communities. Van Kirk said this both creates a sustainable source of revenue for the entrepreneur and enables people 40 to 65 who need reading glasses to continue or even restart their livelihoods.
When summing up his work Van Kirk said, “It is the most challenging thing I’ve ever done, working with so many human, cultural, and societal issues, trying to come up with solutions to problems that have been around for thousands of years.”
“In the end, my job is to drive myself out of business. We train people and get them to the point of self-sufficiency; to the point where they don’t need us anymore,” he said.
In addition, to his not-profit work, Van Kirk provides consultancy to other organizations and most recently worked in Senegal and Gambia. As well he has co-founded New Development Experience (www.newdevelopmentexperience.com) which offers social entrepreneurship volunteering programs as well as mission trips for church congregations to Guatemala.
Van Kirk said his volunteering venture currently has agreements with Columbia University and the University of Notre Dame whereby a number of students will receive financial assistance to participate in Social Entrepreneur Corps, the core program of the volunteering venture.
“I love teaching and seeing somebody else be successful,” he said. “There is not greater feeling than being in a village in rural Guatemala watching someone we’ve trained, helping their community members, and doing so successfully. That is stuff that gives you goose bumps.”
Van Kirk is currently rallying members of the First Presbyterian Church of New Vernon for a trip to Guatemala, who are promised with the unique experience of using their hearts and their heads for an entirely different purpose.
©Recorder Community Newspapers 2007
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Headlines: January, 2007; Peace Corps Guatemala; Directory of Guatemala RPCVs; Messages and Announcements for Guatemala RPCVs; Microfinance; Service; NGO's; Banking
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This story has been posted in the following forums: : Headlines; COS - Guatemala; Microfinance; Service; NGO's; Banking
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