About Us
The Bentley Microfinance Group (BMG) is the result of a course, Seminar in Micro Lending, which debuted in spring 2008. The class and BMG are the brainchild of Finance Professor and BMG Director Roy Wiggins.
The Students enrolled in Seminar in Micro Lending developed a working model for the BMG after researching microfinance successes and failures both abroad and domestically to create a framework that could operate in Greater Boston. The fund is being financed by donations from alumni and parents and has an initial equity line of $125,000 and we expect to be able to grow it to a total loan portfolio of $300,000. One of the attractive things about this venture is that it will be utilizing Bentley’s academic resources and to build on that we have also started a consultancy Service to help our clients.
Dear BMI,
Greetings! We hope this message finds you well. As a fellow campus microfinance organization that is relatively new, we wanted to introduce ourselves. We are from the Community Empowerment Fund (www.communityempowermentfund.org), the University of North Carolina’s microfinance organization in Chapel Hill. We have been in operation for a year and currently offer small business training, financial literacy education, a savings program and small loans to those that are homeless or at-risk of being homeless in Chapel Hill and Durham. We have been working with Rohan Mathew at the Intersect Fund this year and will begin to be more active in the Campus Microfinance Alliance in coming months. We wanted to initiate a dialogue in the spirit of getting to know other student microfinance organizations and sharing best practices.
We would really appreciate the opportunity to talk with you all at BMI and hear more about what you all are working on. Please let us know if you might have some time soon to set up a conference call, and if so, when might be best for you.
If you have questions about anything we do with CEF, please let us know. We are always happy to collaborate. All of us at CEF are very impressed and inspired by BMI, and look forward to sharing experiences, getting to know you, and learning more about all the work you do.
Best regards,
Alexis Seccombe, Education Coordinator
919-923-8066
Maggie West, Loan Officer Coordinator
Community Empowerment Fund
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
http://www.communityempowermentfund.org