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.