Yarmouth, Maine, May 18, 2021: After a great deal of diligent work by the North Yarmouth Academy (NYA) Kiva Club, the NYA Kiva Team has climbed into the top ten in total lending among school teams in the world! The NYA team has lent over $171,000 since the club’s inception in 2008 by NYA History Department Chair, Peter Sillin. The club has made 6,610 loans, enabling others from around the world to start or grow their businesses and more. If measured by the number of loans made, the NYA Kiva Team ranks seventh in the world for school teams.
What is Kiva? Here is an excerpt from kiva.org:
More than 1.7 billion people around the world are unbanked and can’t access the financial services they need. Kiva is an international nonprofit, with a mission to expand financial access to help underserved communities thrive by crowdfunding loans and unlocking capital for the underserved. This improves the quality and cost of financial services, and addresses the underlying barriers to financial access around the world. Through Kiva’s work, students can pay for tuition, women can start businesses, farmers are able to invest in equipment and families can afford needed emergency care. By lending as little as $25 on Kiva, you can be part of the solution and make a real difference in someone’s life. 100% of every dollar you lend on Kiva goes to funding loans.
In 2008, Sillin read an article in The New York Times about the microfinance website kiva.org, an international nonprofit founded in 2005 in San Francisco. He thought it would be a good way to expose students to everyday life in different parts of the world, teach how and why entrepreneurs use financing to capitalize their businesses, and help build the habit and culture of philanthropy. “Since the loans were very small, it seemed manageable to start and see where it went,” said Sillin. Each year, the NYA Kiva Club holds a few fundraisers on campus to raise money to loan out $25 at a time. As the loans are repaid, the money is loaned out again. So far, the club has a 98% repayment rate, so the flow has continued to build. Over time, Kiva Club members opened individual accounts of their own and were joined by NYA teachers and other NYA community members to form the NYA Kiva Team. A team on the Kiva site allows affiliated people to control their own loan portfolios but to have their lending count toward the team totals.
For more information or to get involved with Kiva microloans, contact Peter Sillin or visit the NYA Kiva Team page. Anyone can create a Kiva account and control their own loans, and then credit the loans to the NYA Kiva Team total. Use this link to join NYA’s team, and here is a link to the front page of the school teams standings.
North Yarmouth Academy is an independent, college preparatory, coeducational school for toddlers to post graduate students with an enrollment of 375 students. Since 1814, NYA has fostered integrity, character, and intellect in its students. For more information, please contact NYA at 207-847-5423 or information@nya.org.
