Ex-Peace Corps volunteer aids Peruvian village

Santa Fe's Chijnaya Foundation has no assets and no endowment. Although founder Ralph Bolton spent about 100 days in Peru in the past year, he does so on his own dime. His board members pay their own way as do volunteers (10 this year) from Pomona College in California, where Bolton is a professor of anthropology. The foundation depends on donations, which added up to about $60,000 (not including in-kind) last year.

Currently the foundation is trying to raise money to buy a tractor — and various attachments — for the village. It has also funded projects to improve the cattle stock through artificial insemination and to provide vision care via a separate grant.

Recently Chijnaya has been making loans for smoke-free stoves. Most villagers still cook in small, unventilated huts and many suffer from respiratory ailments. The smokeless stoves are made of adobe with metal doors and a tin chimney that is fabricated in Puno, a city located on the shore of Lake Titicaca.

The Chijnaya Foundation made about 200 loans for $20 each and paid a technician to show villagers how to build the stoves. Borrowers are paying the loans back over three to six months at 2 percent interest.

People in the region "don't have access to affordable credit," Bolton said. Those "who want to get ahead had no way to get capital. And, microloans fill an important hole."

Bolton started the foundation about four years ago to provide humanitarian and development assistance to communities in the Andean highlands of southern Peru where he was a Peace Corps volunteer from 1963 to 1965. He recruited his partner, Robert Frost, people from Pomona College and his son, Eugene, who is the foundation's executive director. By 2009 the foundation hopes to make Internet access reliable and build four luxury casitas for eco-tourists.

Seed money helps diversify area's produce

Matt Romero, one of the leading vendors at the Santa Fe Farmers Market and president of the institute's board, is preparing to install a new irrigation system on 3 acres of land about a mile from his home in Dixon.

Romero also farms 4.5 acres in Dixon where he grows salad greens and a couple of parcels in Alcalde for warm-weather crops. He raises
70 different vegetables including seven kinds of carrots and eggplant and eight varieties of potatoes that he sells at three weekly markets in Santa Fe during the season. The new land will be planted in winter and summer squash, pumpkins, onions, carrots and hardy greens like kale and chard.

"I don't grow it unless it's good to eat," said Romero, a former chef.

Romero said he could have put the new field into production using old-fashioned flood techniques, "but then I'd have to stay there for hours. We can do a lot (in that time) if we're not baby-sitting water."

Romero applied for a $3,000 loan from the Santa Fe Farmers Market Institute to buy the filters, pump, piping, valves and sprinkler heads for the more efficient drip irrigation system. He plans to repay the money in four installments over two years, or sooner, depending on how good a season he has. An institute donor is covering any interest costs for him and five other clients who are sharing a total of $16,000.

Borrowing from a bank would be difficult he acknowledged. "Money gets a little slim when you haven't had a check for five or six months," he said. "This time of year, starting a new property is difficult. It takes a gambling mindset that you're going to make this money back."

There's labor to hire and seed to buy, and one hailstorm might wipe you out, Romero said. He recalls two years ago when hail destroyed his yellow pepper crop. The plants, "looked like someone shot them with pellet guns. They were not even worth getting for the chickens."

The institute loan is like a "little seed money," he said. He figures this system will last five to 10 years and make his operation easier to manage. Moreover, other farmers will see it, and "they will start to think, 'Heck, if he can do it, I can, too.' "

The institute's Sarah Noss said the nonprofit raised $20,000 for the microlending program, kept $4,000 for emergencies and is now seeking further donations. Her goal is $100,000 so the organization can make quarterly loans for improvements such as greenhouses to grow winter crops and maybe eventually to help vendors buy tractors and irrigated land.

The institute collaborates with the Permaculture Credit Union to make the loans to market members that are reviewed by its loan committee. The program is believed to be the first of its kind in the nation supporting agricultural producers. The first loans ranged from $250 to the $3,000 to Romero.

Barbara Mann, owner of Gallina del Sol Farm in Stanley, received a loan to build fencing to expand her poultry production, curb a grasshopper problem and bring more eggs to the market. Other loans were to expand a grain facility and chicken coop, meet seasonal labor expenses, buy seeds and equipment and rebuild a cold frame/greenhouse that collapsed in the snow.

"The viability of farming is not as hopeful as we'd like it to be," said Noss. Microlending allows farmers to streamline operations, increase production and make farming more viable, especially for younger farmers who don't own their own land.

Partnering to promote gender awareness

Coffee Kids is working with 12 partners in Mexico, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Costa Rica and Peru on projects that include microcredit, economic diversification, health care and education among coffee-farming families to help them reduce their reliance on this crop. The nonprofit was founded in 1988 by coffee roaster Bill Fishbein in Providence, R.I., and later moved to Santa Fe, where it has four full-time staff and two part-time employees. Fishbein retired from the board this year.

Over the past 10 years, Coffee Kids has partnered with Self-Managed Development in Veracruz, Mexico, to create GMAS, a women's savings group, and a microcredit program. Every year, many of the men and boys leave the small towns in the state of Veracruz to harvest coffee. Families rely on this annual journey for their yearly income.

The program began with 100 members who met weekly to pool their spare change. Since then, $700,000 has been saved and 3,460 women, men and children in Veracruz are participating in the microcredit program. In addition, the money saved is used for community improvements and scholarships.

In Matagalpa, Nicaragua, 30 microcredit and savings groups with 735 members have accumulated nearly $66,000 and
442 participants received low-interest loans to invest in small business activities with help from Coffee Kids and the local partner, Cecocafen, an association of coffee cooperatives.

Microloans have helped women to start sundries shops, hair salons and tortillarias. The idea, said executive director Carolyn Fairman, is "it needs to be their passion and their idea. (If not), chances are it will fail."

To qualify for the program, women must have a demonstrated ability to save money — sometimes no more than 50 cents a week — before they get a loan. The interest rate, 4 percent for example, would include the loan payback as well as enough to generate a small loan fund for the borrower. Each woman has her own account booklet where she keeps track of every payment made and how much is saved.

Fairman, who started with the organization as an international program coordinator, said the programs not only provide a "leg up" but have a strong impact on the self-esteem of women. "I visit these women. I've seen it in their eyes; heard it in their voices. It's just amazing for a woman to know someone else believes in her. In some ways, that impact is almost more important."

Combining microloans with education

Earlier this year, Ann Alexander went on a six-day Insight Trip to Guatemala, where she visited 15 or 20 microentrepreneurs who are clients of Friendship Bridge. Alexander is one of 20 women in Santa Fe who support the organization, which has about 19 other "circles" in the U.S. and one in Japan.

Some of the clients used the loans to stock their tiendas, or small stores. One woman who had increased her flock of chickens from 25 to 500 hoped to get another loan to expand to 1,000. A weaver used the loan to buy a second loom so a relative could work with her. One woman set up a small shop to make and sell tortillas with her daughter-in-law. Another used the money to buy juicers to enable her to sell fresh-squeezed orange juice at the local market.

Friendship Bridge, founded by a Colorado urologist and his wife, provides microcredit and education to Mayan women in rural western Guatemala to help them create their own solutions to poverty. The average loan is less than $200. More than two-thirds of the women use the credit to produce, buy and sell handicrafts, food or animals.

The nonprofit also encourages women to set up savings accounts, provides scholarships for thousands of their children to attend school and runs a training center in the Nebaj area where children can take computer classes.

As with many microcredit organizations, the focus is on women. They are more focused on family, children and home, while men tend to spend extra money on alcohol and extracurricular activities, Alexander said.

Repayment rates among the women are good. In fact, even after Hurricane Stan devastated the country in 2005, women attended repayment meetings held every three weeks for between 20 and 30 clients. If the women repay their loans, they are eligible for more and bigger loans. At these meetings, the women also receive training in various aspects of business as well as health-care information, and they support one another.

The Santa Fe Circle raises about $5,000 a year or more for the organization. Last year, the women held a garage sale; earlier in the spring, they hosted an opera book reading; this winter, they hope to make and sell boiled-wool mittens.

Empowering Latino families to succeed

With grants from First Presbyterian Church and the National Credit Union Foundation, Adelante, the Santa Fe Public Schools program for homeless children and youth, and the Guadalupe Credit Union have set up a microloan program for the ambitious, business-savvy parents of the students. The goal, said the bank's business development director Fernando Olea is to "help Latino families in particular empower themselves financially."

Lourdes Garcia, a hard-working mother of three originally from Mexico, received
$500 earlier this year to expand her home-based gordita business. Now she is thinking of buying a larger refrigerator and has added sodas and candy to her sales.

The Adelante/Guadalupe Credit Union program hopes to make at least 30 similar collateral-free loans from $15,000 in grant money. Adelante does the initial screening of proposals and Olea provides financial literacy classes and business counseling.

The three initial borrowers are women with young children who need to work at home. Garcia, Olea said, "needed just a little more help."