When I graduated from high school, all I wanted to do was work at Vogue or any other high fashion magazine. I’ve pursued that goal by earning my undergraduate degree in Business Marketing and an Art Minor. Three summers ago, I was on Craigslist looking for an internship and came across a company that had just started called TOMS Shoes. A few weeks later I became an intern at the start-up shoe company and from that point on the internship changed the way I thought about the world and the people in it forever.
TOMS Shoes is a for profit company that incorporates giving into everything they do. For every shoes they sell, they donate a pair to a child in need in a developing country. A few months after my internship ended, I was chosen for their annual shoe drop which was conducted over a two week period where a team of TOMS employees visited remote locations throughout South Africa and delivered over 50,000 pairs of shoes to orphans and school children.
My perception of life and giving changed the minute I stepped off the plane in a completely foreign world that looked a lot different from where I had come from just 24 hours earlier. Walking along the unpaved dirt road, our group would be stopped by children asking for our clothes, water bottles, or anything else that they saw us carrying. Those two weeks changed my life. Things that had previously meant so much to me seemed insignificant now. I just could not wrap my head around how some sleep comfortably on beds while others fall asleep outside with empty stomachs.
This is how I got interested in non-profit work and decided that I only wanted to work for companies who focused on empowering people. This is where Kiva comes in. I believe the smallest gestures have the ability to change people’s lives more than we could ever imagine. Gestures don’t always have to be grand and we as a community have the ability and the responsibility to try and make someone else’s life a little better. If we can start believing that we are all equal and every human life is worthy, no one will be able to stand by and ignore the world’s problems. As much as aid can help a starving community, the aid only lasts for hours, days or even weeks. Aid always runs out and I believe the only way to start to tackle the dire poverty throughout the world is to give the tools that we as citizens in developed countries receive. The chance to earn a better life through a loan.
I want to be a Kiva Fellow because I want to see the loans in action. I want to work at the field partner’s office and learn about every aspect of their operations. Every day in school I learn about development and the economics of poverty, but I want to actually experience it and see what can be done on the ground. School and textbooks can only go so far and the only way to begin to grasp poverty and the way communities can work themselves out of it, is to live there. Kiva Fellows have the ability to be part of the experience and see firsthand what can be done to make people’s lives more comfortable. Loans don’t just give capital, they give opportunities that were not there before and let people empower themselves to make a more comfortable and productive life for their families and communities.
The California Flag, United States Flag and a Palm Tree
