Emily Gerson is an Impact Guild member and a freelance writer and editor. She writes primarily about topics surrounding personal finance, small business, and LGBTQ issues.
Emily Gerson started using Kiva back in 2012. When making her first loan, she scoured the platform, searching for a story that resonated with her. She tried filtering by geography, industry, and gender, and found herself engrossed in these stories. Finally, a recent vacation in Costa Rica inspired her to make her first loan to a group of women who were involved in agriculture in Costa Rica.
Her second loan went to a man named Wilfred in Kenya who owned his own barber shop.
“I read his story, and my heart went out to him,” she tells. She found herself excited to log into Kiva to check on Wilfred and his journey with his barber shop.
Her third loan went to a woman in Jordan named Montaha, who runs a small beauty salon out of her home and cares for four members of her family. The money was for new tools for her business, in the hopes that she’d be able to expand and eventually open her own independent beauty salon. As an entrepreneur, Emily explained that she feels for other business-owners across the world who struggle to obtain the funds to get their ventures off the ground. And Montaha faced even bigger challenges than the average entrepreneur in America.
“This woman is in a heavily conservative country where women aren’t very empowered, and so for her to have the chutzpah to say, ‘I’m running my own business out of my house, and I want to start my own salon’… I want to help that.”
Emily’s desire to help those born into less privileged circumstances began in middle school, when she went on two trips to the border slums of Mexico to help build houses.
“That was the first time I ever saw poverty up-close. It was really life-changing,” she describes.
When she found out about Kiva, she was thrilled. Here was an opportunity to help people in an empowering way. Rather than simply a donation, Kiva offers an investment, one that has the potential to create ripples of positive change throughout communities.
Emily highlights the safety and reliability of Kiva as one of its greatest benefits. “In the world they live in, it’s really hard to access traditional credit. And if they can, it’s probably very predatory. I like that this is a safe way to help enable them to be entrepreneurs and to be successful and to take care of them and their families, in areas where it’s really hard to do that.”
When The Impact Guild was just an idea floating around a group of friends as they co-worked out of founder Sarah Woolsey’s house, Emily brought up Kiva as a display of the values they hoped to foster in this community.
“There are these ripple effects of good you can put into the world, and I feel like this is the perfect example,” she explained. “You can lend someone $25, which is not much out of our pockets, one or two dinners maybe, and that can help someone in Ecuador or Rwanda or Colombia or Cambodia, change their life through small business.”
As entrepreneurs who have come together with the hopes of working with purpose and making an impact, The Impact Guild community is uniquely positioned to embrace the importance of a platform such as Kiva. “Sarah was envisioning a culture here of people who really care about the world and care about their community, whether that’s their neighborhood or the worldwide community,” Emily recalls.
“It’s kinda like we’re all in this together. Let’s help each other, let’s support each other.”