It's Kiva Time!

To Our Dedicated-Blog-Following-SIDers,
As promised, I'm finally getting around to posting about last week's meeting. Again, many apologies for the delay--unfortunately it's just that time of the semester.

First up--announcements!
First and foremost--SID this week will be on Wednesday at 7pm NOT our normal meeting time of Thursday at 7:30. We will be honored with the opportunity to hear from Michael Gerson, former Bush speech writer, and Matt Higginson, our ONE Regional Director. They'll be speaking about development through advocacy and their responsibilities with the ONE Campaign. They'll take some time for Q&A, too so come with some good questions to ask! Also, don't forget to join our ONE Campus group by registering at one.org/campus. We're trying to encourage more action in SID this year and our ties with ONE is one of the ways we're trying to get busy! Join in!

We also want to do more activities outside of our weekly SID meetings this year. If you have an idea of a good activity or service project we could do as a club please contact the SID presidents by either talking to them in person at a club meeting or by e-mailing them at byu.sid@gmail.com

Neil from Love at Work gave a little spiel on his organization and the work that they do in Latin America mentoring street kids. If you're interested in learning more about ways to get involved contact the SID presidents for his contact information. Neil likes to attend our SID meetings too so you can probably catch him there as well.

A Plea for Help
I've been thinking about changing things up a little bit on our blog. As entertaining as I am, I want to hear more from YOU, our other club members, every now and then. I firmly believe that SID is full of extremely talented and involved students and I want to celebrate that here on our blog. I also want the blog to move beyond being just a simple record of what we do as a club and become an additional forum where BYU students can discuss issues related to development. As such, I'm looking for possible guest posters here on the blog. If you're keeping your own development blog, have written a fantastic paper on something development-related for a class or just want to write about development, feel free to submit your writing for consideration at byu.sid@gmail.com. Also, I want to highlight the good work that our club members are doing individually, outside of SID by having a SIDer of the Month (or maybe week... I haven't decided how frequent it will be). As I don't know what each of you are doing individually, I need your help! If you're interested in being highlighted or have a friend you think could use a little recognition, I would love to hear from you about how you or your friend have been involved in development. In addition to giving recognition to SID members, I hope that these spotlights will help connect students with questions about ways to get involved with students with answers.

Now that we've gotten through all that--on to Thursday Night's Club Meeting!
Last Thursday we had our first Kiva night. We, as a club, broke into four groups and selected projects in Africa, Asia, South America and the Middle East to loan to! After much deliberation the following projects were chosen:

Mrs. Ret Aeth Village Bank Group in Cambodia
Nueva Esperanza Group in Peru
Fatima Abu Abdo in Palestine
Lanaya Group in Mali

It is hoped that this will be a sustainable activity that SID can continue for years to come as our loan recipients continue to pay us back, allowing us to make loans as a club to other promising new entrepreneurs throughout the world.


I hope you guys are all getting through the craze of midterms and as always, feel free to leave comments/questions!

Much love,
Ama Rachel