Kiva Playbook: Building a Kiva Community

Why  a Kiva  Community  Matters

Even the best leaders need buy-in from their team to make a great idea work. Kiva is a powerful platform, but it’s only effective to the extent that a community uses it as a tool to leverage capital and access.  When people come together to talk about, explore and use Kiva, it becomes integrated into the fabric of a  regional economy such that it’s a normative part of the entrepreneurial process. Without that buy-in, particularly in more rural areas without a population of early adopters, Kiva will remain the enclave of third-world countries and in-the-know urbanites.After the launch of Kiva Louisville in November 2014, Access Ventures realized the need for a more developed playbook on launching a successful community. By shifting from external leadership and funding to local leadership and funding, Access Ventures was able to create a much more agile model in which a larger portion of launch-generated funding went to local entrepreneurs. More importantly, the new model established a process that supported ongoing buy-in from the local community, who inevitably is best suited to manage regional Kiva efforts in the long run.As of September 2018, the efforts of this playbook across three regions (Louisville, Columbus, & Tulsa) has resulted in:

• Borrowers 250+ (55% female & 54% minority)
• Lenders 15,600+ (12,700+ from the United States & many first time lenders)
• Total loan amount $1,500,000+ (of new money to support local small businesses)
• Match Loans $450,000

 

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