When you think about the poor, the helpless, and the one who needs your help the most, what is your compassion that can best help you with? No matter how big or how small the gesture is, one act of kindness can transcend into multitudes. It is true that an individual alone cannot solve the needs of the world. But we can do something together.
Jodi Fischer, Development Director of Adelante, and her team always look for ways to reach out to people below the poverty line. The foundation’s primary goal is to provide small loans and education to women in Honduras , which is one of the poorest countries in Latin America. They empower these women to achieve self-sufficiency, and that journey is what our talk will revolve around today.
—
Listen to the podcast here:
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 41:11 — 37.7MB) | Embed
The Tremendous Power of Women Helping Women with Jodi Fischer
Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Today, I want to talk about helping people help themselves and giving people opportunities. My guest today is Jodi Fischer. She is the development director and a US liaison for a foundation called Adelante and Adelante is a foundation that helps women in Honduras, which is one of the poorest countries in the Western Hemisphere, get small loans to start their own business.
—
Jodi, welcome to the program.
Thank you for having me.
Jodi, first, I want to get the audience oriented by talking a little bit about Honduras. A lot of people know it’s one of the poorest countries in the Western Hemisphere but probably not aware of what specifically is going on in Honduras and what’s actually preventing a lot of people there from having the opportunities to succeed that we enjoy here in the US or whatever country you’re listening from.
There’s various statistics that support it’s the second to poorest country, second only to Haiti, in Latin America and that currently means nearly 70 percent of the population lives under the poverty line. There’s a lot of factors that play into that but there are some issues with the government, there is definitely things that happen that make it difficult for people to break those cycles of poverty.
Essentially, and 70 percent below the poverty line, for some context, we think about the poverty line, we think about the line where you’re barely getting enough to eat every day and you’re under stress about what shelter you’re going to have. Is that an accurate way to think of it? Because I know that dollar conversions can be different for different currencies in different places.
True, yes. It usually translates to living under $1.90 per day.
Okay.
There are different levels of poverty. I know that with Adelante Foundation, for example, we do not attempt to serve the poorest of the poor because giving them a debt burden would not be appropriate. However, a lot of the communities that we serve, people often don’t have anything but a dirt floor. They don’t necessarily have running water, they don’t necessarily have the ability to send their children to school so there’s different levels within the poverty index and we do measure those things and we do track the progress of the participants of our program over time.
Tell me about the profile of a typical participant in your program. I know you provide some loans, you give them some economic opportunity to start something up.
Well, 90 percent of the people that we work with are women. We will occasionally work with brothers, husbands, fathers usually recommended by women that have already participated or are currently participating in the program.
They are typically considered unbankable, meaning that they cannot get a loan from a traditional financial institution and they have to be over the age of 18. Click To Tweet
So there are sometimes younger women who would like to receive support but we do want to make sure that we’re doing everything in our power also to encourage women to do education as long as they are willing and able to.
And what makes someone “unbankable”? I’m guessing that’s a term that a lot of my audience is maybe not familiar with.
They lack credit history. There’s a lot of people that we work with that are in peri-urban or rural areas so they may have never even attempted to get a loan. They lack any kind of ability to put down collateral and they haven’t established any kind of credit history. When they participate in our programs, they have the opportunity to establish their credit history so our goal is ultimately to give them the opportunity to not only start and grow businesses but also be able to develop a credit history so that if they want to move beyond our level of support that they will be able to do so.
And so is everybody living in the US technically bankable? Is there a default bankability to anyone that’s born in the US because of, say, your parents having a credit history or something like that? Or is that a problem that many people here are not aware of and that, to become bankable, you have to somehow establish credit, which most people do when they get like their teenager job or something like that?
That’s a great question. I mean, financial inclusion issues are definitely a problem here in the US as well. There are domestic microfinance organizations that exist here in the US. I know here in Colorado, we have the Rocky Mountain MicroFinance Institute, for example, so a lot of people will elect to participate in a program like that because even if they might be able to get a loan through a traditional financial institution, sometimes, it makes more sense to work with an organization that is keenly aware of the challenges that entrepreneurs who either want to start or grow a business may have so that they’re able to give them not only the microloan but also the support services, the education, vocational training, etc., that might best accompany those microloans so that we’re setting those entrepreneurs up for success.
I see, because if someone were to get a loan from a standard bank, there wouldn’t really be any support services, they just, “Here’s your loan, make this payment by this day,” and if someone were to get a loan from a venture capital group, of course, there’s a little bit more leeway because they’re expecting most of their loans to fail but there are still these expectations. I know part of your program is providing some form of education to a group of people that may not really understand how business works. How does that work?
Good question. I do also want to address that a lot of the women and families that we work with in Honduras, I would say, are naturally quite entrepreneurial, meaning they’ve had to struggle and they’ve seen their parents or other family members participate in some kind of enterprise in the informal sector so they understand the ethos behind a small business. Adelante has existed for over 20 years. In the past, we had education offered through assemblies, so in-person, small group gatherings. Because we have five different branch offices located throughout the country, we would have wellbeing officers or branch officers that were able to go into communities and offer these in-person, small group assemblies. That has shifted since COVID. Because we were prohibited from being able to gather clients, we did do a lot of shifting to ensure that we were getting more education material, aggregating the different types of modules that were frequently offered and starting to get them available online. We did a poll with our borrowers and we found out that over 80 percent have access to some form of technology that allows them to tune in remotely. So, we are still in the process of adding more content and looking for funding to support that endeavor but we will continue to work directly with borrowers as well to the additional things that we do is because we have wellbeing officers, it’s a term that we use instead of loan officers, wellbeing officers that work directly with our clients, our borrowers on a monthly basis so they are either visiting them physically in person and so there’s a lot of one-on-one mentoring that also happens. However, we also do a lot of suggesting that clients connect with other clients who are at different stages of their business development.
Oh, wow. And are any of those relationships also — is the mentor-mentee relationships some of those like business partnership relationships where it’s like, okay, well, someone has a business and this person’s business might be a natural supplier or something, business you already work with, they work together toward their goals?
That happens, but I will have to say with the mentor-mentee, it depends. If they’re a peer versus someone with Adelante, we make sure that our wellbeing officers are versed in the different industries of the women that are pursuing enterprises.
Are there certain types of enterprises that you tend to focus on in your organization or that you try to encourage more than others? Or are you broadly looking for any Honduran woman who has a good idea and has that aptitude that you’re looking for?
We have a lot of women that are involved in a lot of different types of activities. The majority of them are in the informal sector so cottage industries. There’s a lot of, for example, retail, pulperias, I think I mentioned that earlier. They’re like little tiendas. They’re like little — imagine like a little mini 7-Eleven, might have food and drinks but they’ll also have cleaning products and other things that you might need and those are very prevalent. I have visited clients that have — I’m thinking of one example that’s a little bit more obscure about like a woman who will take recycled metals and melt them down, only the certain types that are appropriate to do so, but then she makes metal placards for tombstones. There’s like a very wide — there’s a lot of women that we work with in the agriculture sector. We have a lot of people who have creative businesses or sell clothes or make clothes. So there’s a variety.
That is really interesting. And then one of the questions I have is that, as you help these women start these businesses, what is the impact that you’re having on the overall economy, because more businesses obviously creates more opportunities for a lot of other people?
There’s a trickle-down effect.
When you help one woman, the conditions of her family improves remarkably, which is easier for us to identify and measure. Click To Tweet
That said, when a woman is gaining more income and is also gaining a sense of empowerment over decision making, there’s a lot more wealth distribution that happens within that community as well, not to mention knowledge sharing, and then when communities have more access to both the physical as well as alternative resources necessary to learn, the entire community and beyond gets to benefit.
Nice. Yeah, I mean, there’s more economic activity, I think we all have driven through or seen towns and cities where things are booming. I live in Denver and there’s so many construction sites, I like to joke that a luxury apartment is built every other day here. And then we’ve all driven through some of these abandoned small towns or even some of the Rust Belt cities where you see that there’s less activity, less people doing things like that, and that’s when people are more likely to, I don’t want to say turn to drugs and stuff like that, but turn to any kind of symptom of hopelessness, and what it sounds like is one of the things you’re giving a lot of these families, these women, these communities in Honduras is hope, is that here’s something I can do to create a better life and actually do something that matters to my community.
Absolutely. I think there’s a lot of people that I’ve met over the year that I’ve worked with Adelante and whether it’s our board members or people who are from Honduras, the observation typically is that when people are given this opportunity to gain access to resources to then pursue the different things that they want to do and that they feel is valuable for their families and communities, there is a definitely a sense of empowerment. I am always inspired when I visit with clients how hardworking and just grateful, I mean, I work with a lot of different types of organizations in my own backyard as well and I find that, in Honduras, there is very low expectations and there’s a lack of blame for anyone else or any group or even their own countrymen or politicians and so I think that there’s just a sense of like if they get a chance to do something, to lift themselves up, they grab it and they work really hard to make that work.
That’s amazing thing that we all can try to steer away from a little bit is the whole blame game, because blaming is very much momentarily gratifying. At the very moment, you’re like, “Okay, I’m not responsible for this outcome. I’m not responsible for this. This is that person’s fault or that group of people’s fault,” but, in the long run, it is disempowering. And what it sounds like is that getting the opportunity and working hard to bring something into fruition is a very empowering thing. It very much gives people more power over their lives so it’s wonderful to hear that story. And the other wonderful thing is the opportunity that you get and your co-workers as well to experience some other cultures. We recorded a few podcasts before about travel, about getting experiences in other countries, and I think it’s so wonderful a way of putting your own culture, your own expectations into context. Now, you go down to Honduras, it sounds like, a few times a year, every couple months. What do you notice there about their culture and what aspects of their culture can we learn something from?
Oh, that’s a great question. Yes, I usually go down there on a quarterly basis, that wasn’t quite as frequent during COVID. They have such amazing natural resources. So I often will fly into Roatán, for example, because that’s just an hour and a half ferry ride to where our headquarters is located on the northern coast of Honduras in a city called La Ceiba. Even in La Ceiba, you can either like be in a city or, within 20 minutes, you can be in Pico Bonito National Park, so I will sometimes go up and stay in the jungle and they have eco resorts and beautiful places and wonderful people that live both in the city as well as up in the more rural, jungle area. I’d say — I’m going to revert back to what I said earlier, which is I am always inspired by how hardworking and grateful, the people are super friendly. I’ve done a lot of traveling throughout Central America, South America, Southeast Asia, a lot of Muslim countries, and I really enjoy both the staff, we have 45 staff that work for Adelante Foundation, I’m in fact the only American that supports their work outside of our volunteer board and committees. Yeah, the people are just very warm, very friendly. My Spanish is quite intermediate so I sometimes will have some language barrier things that happen but, for the most part, even when they can’t entirely understand, they’re trying to understand, they’re grateful for the people who are there visiting from other places. There’s a little bit of a different interplay within the Bay Islands because you have the folks that came there many, many, many years ago that were from African countries, but then you have the mainland Hondurans, who are sometimes intermixed in those communities. But, for the most part, the gratitude and the hardworking ethos that the majority of the people I meet there is really inspiring. And the food, the food is delicious.
Yeah, actually, we met at a Honduran food event, essentially, through The Same Plate, which is a podcast episode I recorded with Kayla Ferguson. If you go pretty far back into my episode list, you can hear all about her experiences. But is this hard work and gratitude something you’re seeing a lot throughout Latin America or is Honduras unique amongst all the other countries in Central South America?
Well, I don’t know if that’s a fair comparison because some of the experiences I’ve had in other Latin American countries are kind of visiting for pleasure versus I get the unique opportunity in Honduras to be interacting regularly with women who are participants of the Adelante Foundation program.
It’s going to be very different, for sure.
Yeah, I’m sure they’re not alone in that there’s a lot of people who are really not just trying to survive but thrive. I think that there’s a lot of people with a strong moral compass that I’ve encountered too.
And what made you decide that Adelante, that helping the women of Honduras, was the path that you wanted to follow as opposed to any other potential idea or opportunity out there?
Oh, goodness, how much time do we have?
Yeah, I know, that’s probably — it’s your story, right?
It’s my story, yes. I lost my father when I was a teenager and I think that gave me a perspective that tomorrow could be my last day. I spent a year studying in Cairo in college and when I saw that level of poverty, I was very moved. And although I will always have a passion for helping in my own backyard, I was definitely moved to learn more and to find ways where I could get involved, then went on to study food security and global hunger issues and decided to go back to grad school after a few years of teaching right after undergrad and I decided to pursue a degree after studying and doing some additional work overseas and got my master’s at University of Denver in international development, after which time I moved to DC and work for a government contractor and got a chance to do humanitarian work on a different level. And, although I very much appreciated how far dollars can go in that context, I really preferred opportunities that were at the nonprofit and more grassroots level where I could see and feel the impact of the support more frequently. And so, yeah, when I returned to Colorado, I worked for an organization that supported the infrastructure and trainers and teachers in Pakistan for over five years. But I had learned Spanish in school and had worked and done an internship in Bolivia for a summer and so I just really — the combination of loving the Latin American culture as well as having done an internship in microfinance domestically and having seen the power of financial services, it really is a hand up instead of a hand out. And when you think about, I mean, goodness, I know that you and I could probably ask 10 people within the next hour for $50 and they would happily provide it to us if we wanted to do something valuable with it, the people who benefit from our programs are just not only unable to access $50 to start or grow an enterprise from their local financial institutions, they can’t even borrow it from friends or family. I know that’s a long response but…
No, that’s your story, and it’s like how you ended up in the place where you are, which is what we’re all trying to do here, everybody out there listening as well, is trying to end up where we really feel like we belong, where we really feel like, “I’m supposed to be here, I’m supposed to be doing this,” and there’s not this constant FOMO around of like what if I had done this instead or what if I try this instead? Not that that’s never going to come out and not that you’re never going to have other ideas, but feeling that confidence that, “I am here, I am doing this. This is a good use of my time, my skills, my talent, my interests,” and also doing something good for the world, which sounds like you’ve gotten to that point. The interesting thing about it is that, yeah, like I think a lot of people here in the US don’t understand that in some of these countries, as much as there is definitely poverty in the US, the levels, it’s on a completely different level in some of the world’s poorest countries, like you had mentioned that you’d experienced and that your path is quite a bit motivated by empathy, a topic that a lot of people have been discussing and discussing more and more in the workforce. Is empathy one of your driving forces, when you think about, “Why am I getting up today? Why am I doing the things I’m doing? Why am I putting my own effort? Why am I grinding?”?
Absolutely, but I will have to say that because I’ve had the privilege of studying international development, getting to see the information and the activities and the research over the last several decades, caring isn’t enough. You can do a lot of harm. I think there’s a lot of people with good hearts and good intentions but to really understand that it’s about connecting with local communities and listening and then being able to find out if what you may have to offer in terms of whether it be an organization or as an individual by providing some information and/or resources that it’s relevant for allowing them to have that autonomy.
I like to say like microfinance essentially gives people the economic self-sufficiency that they already seek, what business to pursue. Click To Tweet
We may have, during COVID, for example, said, “Goodness, let us help you pivot,” and when I say “we,” I’m saying that collectively, but, like I said, this program is implemented by 45 local Hondurans, not by me. It’s Hondurans communicating with Hondurans about what might be possible for their next steps. I do also want to go back a little bit and just reference that although I have been fortunate to have found something that I’m passionate about as early as I did, perhaps through circumstances that were difficult but still put me on that path, I will have to say, sometimes, I have friends or family that will be like, “Oh, my goodness, look what you’ve done, look what you’re doing,” and I always like to remind them that you don’t have to pursue this as your life’s work, like I heard a statistic once that was along the lines of, often, people attribute what they spend less than 5 percent of their time, talent, or treasure on towards over 90 percent of their happiness and sense of fulfillment. So, you don’t have to do things like I do in order to feel good or to be able to pursue things that result in these types of impacts. As long as you spend a little bit of your time or talent or support, whether that be in the form of donations or there’s a lot of alternatives to just a straight donation, but that can really fill those buckets of finding fulfillment and meaning.
It sounds like what you’re saying is that someone can still spend 80, 90 percent of the time doing something that might not necessarily be like my life’s work or my life’s fulfillment, but as long as you find the time to do whatever it is, whether it’s like, oh, I’m the person in my friend circle that everyone knows that they can always call on when they’ve had a bad day and everyone knows that I’ll always listen, or whether it is I’m a sponsor and I sponsor, I know there’s so many organizations that sponsor a child around the world or even your organization that does sponsor a business, I haven’t asked you about the specifics of your model yet, but that there are ways to know you’re a good person and feel that level of fulfillment without it necessarily having to be your primary spot in life.
Absolutely. I have friends and family who don’t love their jobs. They may even have like a matching employee gift program or volunteer days that they’re allowed to do and I’m always just encouraging them to take the time to think about what you care about and whether that’s homelessness or poverty or women’s safety, there’s thousands of wonderful causes out there and whether that’s in your own circle or within your community or a global level, I know a lot of people in my circle enjoy traveling so I’m always like, “Hey, you can, no matter where you go, make sure to find out who’s doing what on the ground locally,” because there are inevitably really interesting ways to plug in and learn about what they’re doing. And, for me, it’s like, okay, I know that I can either do some credits to offset my flights and/or I always look for who is doing what in the communities that I visit because I usually like to support them in some shape or form. And I know that a lot of people are attracted to this concept of volunteering and although that’s great, I’d say that usually, in the context of developing countries and visiting, sometimes that’s not always very possible. But, anyway, there’s lots of ways to plug in, engage, and support.
There’s definitely no shortage of causes, like I’m sure just looking around the world, we’re seeing all sorts of things. I’ve done a few podcast episodes already about mental health, which is something that is near and dear to my heart. It feels like it’s deteriorated in the US, in the West over the past decade for a variety of reasons. There’s, obviously, stuff around the globe, there’s all the misunderstandings, there’s always going to be something to do and always going to be something to tackle. Now, you also talked about, briefly, people with good intentions possibly doing more harm than good in some of their activities. What does that look like? What would you recommend that we try to avoid when we go in somewhere and like, “Okay, I really wanna help these people,” but don’t do this?
When I mentioned that earlier, it was in the context of organizations that — and I don’t see that quite as much anymore. I think we’ve learned a lot over the decades about what’s appropriate and I think there was this misconception that, and I’m sure there’s still organizations and individuals that do this, but have you heard of savior complex? The individual or the group will go in thinking that they know best and they’ll implement or suggest something that’s, say, someone says, “You need a well and you need this kind of a well,” and if that community says, “Okay, fine, whatever you say,” because they’re just grateful to get anything, but they don’t know how to maintain it, then it becomes dysfunctional. So I’m always a person who will support whatever is already working or what the community is inviting an organization or individual to do.
It certainly helps decrease displacement and migration and then — so there’s all these other intersecting benefits that happen when you are working with communities instead of giving and saving them.
Imposing this one-size-fits-all solution, I think that’s a problem that we’ve seen where people go in and they say, “Okay, the way we do it here, we’re gonna teach you how to do it the way we do it,” and conditions are very different. I remember once hearing this phrase with regards to food and international food in general, the hotter the climate, the spicier the food, which largely came about because before refrigeration, you had to spice the food to maintain it and, of course, Norwegian food, for example, very little spice, like the spice is mostly dill and stuff like that, but then if you go to a lot of the Central American countries, the food tends to be a lot spicier so there’s different conditions on the ground and so what it sounds like you’re saying is that as opposed to coming in and saying, “I’m gonna impose my solution, I know best,” you’re going to have to come in with a little bit of curiosity and ability to listen. Is it a matter of listening enough to figure out the solution or is it a matter of just listening to them and just facilitating the solution that the locals in any one place likely have?
There’s this whole area of like we know what we know, we know what we don’t know, but then we don’t know what we don’t know so sometimes there are communities that benefit from the exposure to new information or resources but only if it’s appropriate in the local context. I always think that organizations that have buy-in both by the local as well as the government level is going to be more successful on the longer term as well. I also want to say that I don’t proclaim that microfinance is a panacea. I do think that, back in the day, there was a lot of attention being paid in the early 2000s to this particular international development solution. It fell short of the expectations at the time, but, as I mentioned, as long as you’re not increasing debt burden for the poorest of the poor, it is a very important opportunity for those who live in poverty but are not at the lowest rung of it.
And I’m wondering about the poorest of the poor, because, oftentimes, they are in the same community, nearby communities, does any of the activity, that economic activity that you’re bringing to the mid poor, for lack of a better term to use it, then have an effect on the poorest of the poor? Like if there’s that little convenience shop, I forgot the word you used multiple times to describe it, or some of these other business ideas, does that sometimes make it more hopeful for this poorest of the poor that you don’t want to add more debt burden to?
Absolutely, Oh, yeah, because there’s more money to spend in the communities. The people who are able to elevate their income levels are spending it within the community, for the most part.
And then — because I think just a more economically vibrant community tends to be better for everyone, regardless of where you are in the spectrum, from the richest to the poorest, because there’s just more happening, there’s more opportunities, there’s more places you can go to get the resources you need and get the jobs or anything else.
Absolutely, and the nice thing about the microfinance model is that, often, it has a very high repayment rate so as an organization, for example, we have over a million dollars that gets recirculated. So, when you have people who are paying back into the loan pool, those funds are still available to then be lent out the following year. We have different loan terms for different types of industries but, for the most part, even though my role as development director is to write grants and raise funds, a lot of that is to just increase the scope and scale of the programming or to ensure things like making sure that we’re expanding some of our services to include different types of loan products so, for example, right now, we have working capital for entrepreneurs to start and grow businesses but we also do water and sanitation loans or home improvement loans. If they have a faulty roof that is leaking and a lot of the women are working out of their homes, then we want to make sure that they have the conditions that are most conducive for them to be successful. So we may sometimes, for example, say, “Hey, we wanna support something that is more along the lines of making sure women have access to clean cooking stoves.” Although we may not impose that, we may say that that is something amongst the variety of things that we want to offer that are available to them, if they so choose.
So your funding, does it come from donors here in the US? Does it come from grants? Does it come from a little bit of both? And is it investors that get a return on their investment or is it just a contribution?
We have a combination. We definitely, for our first several years in terms of growing that loan pool, a lot of that was donors. We did receive some substantial funding from organizations like Whole Foods has an organization called Whole Planet that gave us a lot of funds to mobilize. We were also given funds through Kiva at one point, I’m not sure if you’re familiar with them. We have talked also about making sure that we have the ability to tell people like, “Hey, if you want to support 20 women who are starting and growing businesses and small farms and agriculture,” that we can then earmark those funds so although we may not have the same type of model Kiva does in terms of like, “Here, we’re gonna show you a picture of the woman that you’re supporting,” it gets quite burdensome for the field team to follow up with that level of reporting but we certainly can do it and we have done it and we’re happy to do it as long as it makes sense.
So like the Whole Foods money might be earmarked and you might want like more food-related businesses because of who they are and what they support and what they care about and so that’s where some of that goes. And now you also bring some of the donors, whether it be individual people or these larger organizations, to Honduras to tour them around and see some of the businesses. What does that look like?
It can look a couple of different ways. More often than not, it’s usually an individual saying, “Hey, I wanna go to Honduras. I wanna go see the jungles,” or, “I wanna go to the islands,” or, “I wanna go do both, I wanna spend a half day or a day or two shadowing with a wellbeing officer,” or with you, if they don’t know Spanish, the majority of our staff do not speak English, and because of the frequency in which I go out, I say, “Look, let’s make sure we coincide with my front end or tail end or while I’m there, whatever,” and depending on what that looks like, if I can either meet them at the ferry and make sure that they get settled or if they’re quite comfortable traveling in a country like Honduras then I make some recommendations of places they should consider staying based on what the type of vacation they’re looking for and then I connect with them and then we go with like a branch manager to visit two, three, sometimes four different clients, depending on if they’re like, “We really wanna see someone who is working in agriculture,” or, “We wanna go visit a woman who’s, —” sometimes they have preferences of what they want and sometimes it’s just about like, “Hey, let’s — whatever. Whatever you’re doing today, whatever’s on the docket, we wanna go do,” and so, usually, we’ll go, we’ll meet, we’ll explain why we’re visiting them so they understand the context and then they usually share a little bit about their story, how a microloan or several microloans over the course of several years has impacted them as a person and within the context of their business.
That’s awesome. Sounds like an amazing experience. And so if anyone is interested in donating, providing funds, having any kind of involvement with the Adelante Foundation, how would someone go about best contacting you or whoever the appropriate person would be?
Yes, they can absolutely reach out to me. They can either call me, they can email me. If they’re in Colorado or California, I often go back to the Bay Area for certain types of activities throughout the year, I’m happy to meet in person, if that would be — and all of our information is on our website, which is adelantefoundation.org.
And for those not familiar with Spanish language, spelling?
Adelante, which does mean forward in Spanish.
That’s awesome, so, hopefully, it’s enough information for anyone that wants to visit the website, see all the amazing things you’re doing and possibly get involved, can look into…
There’s always ways too that people are like, “Hey, I don’t wanna visit but I’ve been there before,” and we always have opportunities like either joining a certain committee or sometimes there’s board positions that open up. I’m always looking to do like outreach activities and awareness generating activities so sometimes that means a pint night out at a local brewery or things like that. So, anytime people are offering to help in terms of that kind of engagement, it’s really welcomed as well.
That’s the way a lot of people prefer to find out about things because I know we spend a lot of times online, probably a bit too much of our time online, to be honest, in so many places so it is always refreshing to see things happen IRL, in real life, in person. And that’s one of the things that seems so rewarding about the trips to Honduras is that when you actually get to know the person getting the microfinancing, you actually see, “Oh, yeah, this is what they’re doing. This is how it’s impacting the community,” it’s got to be like certain feeling that you observe whenever you bring people around or see people being brought around that they’re getting that feeling, even if it is that like 5 percent of your life, it’s like the part you’re getting that warm feeling like I’m actually making a difference.
Absolutely. It’s super powerful and I know that there’s been some borrowers where I’ve visited more than once and there’s still things I’m learning on different visits. We had one woman who has, she’s just got pigs and ducks and all kinds of livestock all over the place and then, the second visit, when we were asking, “Hey, how have things changed over the last six months?” and then she had made some reference about her grandkids and it occurred to me like, “Oh, wonder what her kids do?” and I didn’t realize that two of her kids, the parents had died and so she was responsible for taking care of these kids and I’m sitting there like trying to hold the tears back and I’m like, oh, not only is she running this successful enterprise but she’s making sure that her grandkids are going to school and it’s just super powerful to see it IRL.
Amazing. Amazing adoption stories. Jodi, thank you so much for joining us today on Action’s Antidotes telling us all about the Adelante Foundation, which, yeah, forward, in front of type of thing which is just an amazing concept. We all wish you the best continuing to connect people that want to help some of the poorest people in the Western Hemisphere, some of the people that you mentioned that are just amazing individuals that have hard work and gratitude spirit that you’ve observed in Honduras. And I would like to thank everyone out there for listening today to Action’s Antidotes, encouraging you to listen to some more episodes. I’ve referenced a few earlier ones. There’ll be some later ones that cover all kinds of topics about people who are pursuing their passions and hopefully you’ll find the story that resonates with you.
Thank you so much, Stephen.
Thank you. Have a fantastic rest of your day.
I appreciate it. You too.
Important Link:
About Jodi Fischer
Jodi Fischer is a community development specialist with over fifteen years of program management experience serving social impact organizations in the US and abroad. Specializing in education and microfinance, she also possesses experience working on clean energy, global health, and food security issues. Jodi currently works with Adelante Foundation supporting impoverished women in Honduras with microfinance. She goes to Honduras on a quarterly basis and enjoys sharing the country with other visitors. Jodi graduated with a MA in International Development from the University of Denver in 2004 where she occasionally serves as an adjunct. In her free time when not plotting her next travel adventure, she spends time with friends, family, reading, or playing outdoors.