SELF Reliance is Your Birthright

Recently I was invited to attend the Board of Directors Dinner of the Grameen Foundation.  I was thrilled to be there.  Grameen’s Founder, Muhammad Yunus, has done more to lift people out of poverty than any human in history.  Grameen, which means village, began in the 1970s as a bank making microloans to the deeply and chronically poor of Bangladesh.  Since then Grameen has loaned 8 million women entrepreneurs money to start or expand their tiny enterprises which has triggered massive declines in poverty and huge improvement in self-reliance, literacy and quality of life.  Since then Grameen has expanded to nearly 20 social businesses offering ways for the poor to build a new economy by improving everything from health care to solar energy.  Most of Grameen’s businesses are owned by the poor they serve.  For the past 15 years they’ve been teaching others their secrets and today microcredit has helped 133 million families.  Their goal is to reach 500 million by 2015.  It’s a great business.  Loan repayment rates exceed 98%.

One country that has gotten Grameen’s attention is ours.  They founded Grameen America to help the persistent poor of our country.  Yea, I know.  From Bangladesh to the USA.  Who would have thought?  Of course a microloan in the US ranges from $3000 to $10,000, a far cry from the typical $50-$150 microloan of developing country borrowers, but the purpose of loans is the same, to achieve economic self-reliance.

You see Yunus, an economist who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006, is a huge proponent of SELF-employment.  He considers working for a paycheck to achieve someone else’s goals a road fraught with uncertainty and too frequently little security or satisfaction.  As a practical evangelist for universal entrepreneurship, he claims that financial self-reliance is a core human drive.  He also maintains that the entrepreneurial instinct is a part of basic human nature.  He makes this claim based on over 30 years of experience encouraging impoverished illiterate women to start micro-businesses that most often flourish into enterprises that lift entire families out of poverty.  He even has a loan program for beggars.  It turns out that beggars are frequently good sales people.  When they have stuff to sell, they sell all of it.  He calls entrepreneurship passion plus common sense.

We don’t have to be dirt-poor villagers to understand that many of the 5 million jobs that were evaporated in this Great Recession will never, ever return.  We don’t have to be psychics to foretell that the employment market will probably never return to the steady growth and security it offered in decades past.  And finally we must ask ourselves, why work for the “man”?  Anyone who hires you is making money on your talent, presumably money you could be making for yourself.  Are you living your American Dream?

Many experts say that recessions are great times to start new businesses or become an independent consultant. This is because competition during recessions tends to be weak and uninspired.  Also 80 % of new businesses are self-financed, and Internet based businesses can be started with micro amounts of money. Consulting also can be a boom area since many companies lay off too many people. If you make yourself an expert in an area that fascinates you, you will be in demand. And the best marketing for consultants is word of mouth. So if you’re willing to open your mouth and tell the world how you can make things better, you may be surprised at all the opportunity you uncover. If the poor and uneducated can become self sufficient with almost no resources, we can too.