February 2, 2012
My colleague Tom Gallagher kindly sent me a link to an article he penned a few years ago about an alternative to payday loans: microcredit. I once visited a microcredit operation in Tula, Mexico, where mostly women found the necessary financial backing to start small businesses. It was amazing to see and the center where the operation was run was a center of social networking for these women, most of them poor, many young mothers. They helped each other not only with their finances, but with taking care of each others' children, they had speakers who talked about health issues, it was community organizing at its best. As Gallagher notes, there is no reason we can't do it here.
