Good Faith Fund
Julia Vindasius
400 Main St., Suite 118
Pine Bluff, Ark. 71601
(501) 535-6233

The Mississippi Delta country of southeastern Arkansas may seem like a strange place to find a program based on a model from Bangladesh, but the Grameen Bank concept is alive and working very well in Pine Bluff, a rural "city" town with a lot of poverty and an emerging sense of hope.

The Good Faith Fund, housed in a modern office building in Pine Bluff, sets up teams of four to six unrelated people who want to borrow small amounts of money to start their own small business, loan officer Susan Maupin explained.

After a training period, each team acts as its own "loan committee," sitting in judgement on an application from one of its members, who may request no more than $1,200 for an initial loan, but stepping up to $7,500 later. Because the success of the program depends on peers working together to evaluate the worth of the loan proposal, as well as to ensure that the loan is repaid, team members develop a strong sense of responsibility and mutual support that pays off in entrepreneurial success.

With loan repayment schedules starting as low as $12.61 bi-weekly on a $300 loan for a year, even a small business has a prayer of making it.

As of December 1993 the fund has made 142 loans totaling more than $384,641.07, working from a $250,000 portfolio supplied initially by the Wintrhop Rockefeller Foundation and a loan from the Small Business Administration's Microloan Demonstration Program. The businesses, many of them home-based, include automotive services, beauty shops, business services, crafts and gifts, day-care, food services, repairs, retail and specialty businesses.

All the feature stories on @GRASS-ROOTS.ORG's pages are reported and written by Robin Garr, a prize-winning journalist who has visited more than 500 innovative grassroots programs in all 50 states since 1990.

Browse his book, Reinvesting In America, at Amazon.com.

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