God is in the Change - With Lord in mind and miniloans, group helps neediest :: Chicago Sun Times
Written by Justin Forman
Monday, 27 August 2007
What could be the fastest growing lender in Chicago doesn't loan to executives in high-rises, but to mothers in mud huts.
Its average loan size is just $172. And its president and CEO, Christopher Crane, won't take a salary, and pays for his own travel.
Opportunity International, a 36-year-old Oak Brook-based microfinance organization, makes loans and take deposits from the poorest of the world's poor. Operating in 28 developing countries from Albania to Zimbabwe, the nonprofit has grown 26 percent annually since 2002, and is aiming to grow 25 percent a year for the next seven.
"It's a 90 percent untapped market, and it's the world's largest market," said Crane, a lean, energetic native Californian who combines the passions of an entrepreneur and a Christian evangelist. "Microfinance will dramatically change the world for the better. It has the potential to create more wealth than has ever been created before."
Scott Bartchy is a radical. He believes in a subversive system that embraces those on the fringes of our society and seeks to establish a new way of life that goes against the status quo.
Kind of like Jesus.
Bartchy, currently the Director of the Center for the Study of Religions at UCLA, notes a great gap between the original, early form of church in the first three hundred years of Christianity, and the modern concept of doing church today.
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Scott Bartchy is a radical. He believes in a subversive system that embraces those on the fringes of our society and seeks to establish a new way of life that goes against the status quo.