Summary: Episode Description: In this episode, taken from the Buddhist Geeks Conference 2012, Matt Flannery, founder of the incredibly popular micro-lending service Kiva.org, joins us to discuss his personal journey. He shares what it was like building Kiva.org and his own struggle to balance reflective practice--in his case Zen--with making big changes in the world. Episode Links: Kiva.org Kiva Buddhists @mattflannery on twitter Transcript: Matt:Â Â Â Thanks for having me. Itâs great to be here. I really really appreciate my first ever Buddhist Geeksâ conference. Wonderful to be here. I started listening to the Buddhist Geeks podcast a little while ago maybe two or three years ago at a period when I had insomnia. So it says something about the podcast which is itâs very relaxing and it gets your mind working at the same time enough to get it off of whatever youâre worried about and help you go to sleep. So after doing this for several months in a row I wrote Vince and talked about maybe potentially coming here. And it was cool to see the people behind the podcast and itâs great for me to be here. I titled the talk Buddhist Geeks of Action. I am perhaps not a Buddhist Geek. I think sometimes Iâm Buddhist and I think most of the time Iâm the geek. Iâm barely, almost never in the same thing at the same time. So maybe you guys can help me throughout the weekend wrestle with those two things. I have sometimes struggled with the dichotomy between being quiet, reflective, relax, working on my practice and also getting a lot done and being a person of action. So hopefully Iâll allude to that in several ways throughout the talk and then just talk about my work, my personal story behind work and some ideas for the future based on this work that maybe you can apply to your work. Real quick this is a picture of me in Cambodia. I was here at a village bank outside of Cambodia. How many of you guys know what a village bank is? Okay. Great, some of you. Village banks exists across the world. Theyâre groups of people that get together and share money. So people put money in a pot and they simply rotate the money around throughout the group. And there are several different schemes, several different forms of this. But whatâs amazing is most of the time in such a setup like this people pay back each other at enormously high rates almost virutally 100% of the time. And usually people like this are illiterates. So when I was there we were going through our accounting training, working through our passbooks, learning how to do basic ledger based accounting. People that donât have any financial background all the time pay each other back all the time across the world. Itâs an incredible phenomenon. I discovered it several years ago when I was traveling in Africa and have just been dedicating myself to working in this kind of work ever since. And Iâm not in the village bank but in this picture I am in the picture. Real quick. I run a website called kiva.org which is person to person lending website. People lend other people all across the world for the purpose of poverty alleviation. We started it in Africa and since then itâs spread to about 65 countries. We have tons of lenders, about a million lenders and we have tons of borrowers, about a million borrowers. People are lending to people. Often times the borrowers are unbanked, so you canât send them the money directly so we work with NGOs all across the world, who source the loans and distribute the loans to people like those people in the village bank in Cambodia. Sometimes we lend money directly to people as well onto their cellphones or their PayPal accounts in certain countries where electronic payment systems exist. They donât exist everywhere right now but theyâre certainly spreading so eventually this whole thing will become an online digital community of people lending to people both locally and globally to help them.
