Small Business Fund entrepreneurs and leaders in Korogocho, Nairobi hosting Tanya in June. Wambui, pictured on left edge of the group is one of our local coordinators for SIA. It’s back-to-school season in North America! This month is when so many kids head back to classes after a long holiday. If you regularly follow SIA’s blog, you’ll know that many of our Small Business Fund entrepreneurs use their earnings to help send children to school. Government elementary schools in

This post is an update from Barbara Deal, SIA Board Member, on her experience at the SIA Small Business Fund Coordinator Conference last week in Eldoret, Kenya. Dear Companions in Spirit, Greetings from Eldoret, Kenya! The conference for the Spirit in Action Coordinators ended last night. Attending were six Coordinators for the Small Business Fund in Uganda, Kenya, and Malawi. Each work with and mentor between a dozen and almost 200 small business project partners. SIA local

Success stories from three Small Business Fund grant recipients in Nairobi, Kenya. After expanding their entrepreneurial activities, most of the families are able to meet their most basic needs like paying rent and school fees, and providing food for their families. When Jane Wanga Nanjira received the first SBF grant last July, she was able to stock her small pharmacy with the medicines her customers were wanting. She is now able to pay rent and school fees, and buy food fro

This post is an excerpt from a sermon I gave at First United Methodist Church of Point Richmond in December 2015. I saw a sign recently on a bathroom. It was claiming the public restroom space as a safe space for everyone. It was a co-ed bathroom. Anyone could use it – male, female, transgender, everyone across the spectrum. “Assume I belong,” the sign said. No matter what I look like, if I’m using this restroom, assume I belong. Establishing categories helps us make order of

This is reposted from the blog Centre for Social Innovation’s blog. I wrote it for my coworking community in Toronto. Halfway around the world, stepping into the Blantyre Entrepreneurs Hub was reassuringly familiar. Even though the dusty streets and tin-roofed houses of Malawi, a tiny country in southern Africa, are very different from the condo towers and streetcars of Toronto, spaces of social innovation around the world seem to share more similarities than differences. Mot