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I Will Teach You To Be Rich Scholarship for Social Innovation

Last week, my team was honored to be selected among seven finalists in the I Will Teach You To Be Rich Scholarship for Social Innovation.  Ramit Sethi, author of the wildly popular IWillTeachYouToBeRich.com, inaugurated this contest to empower young people with a scholarship for $2,500 towards developing socially innovative projects.

Our proposal for this scholarship is to radically expanding the boundaries of current microfinance by serving the most marginalized and forgotten people in the world today: former and current slaves in the commercial sex trade. This requires creating viable economic alternatives to prostitution for victims through proven microfinance processes, and then equipping them with the resources, tools, and a support network to empower these aspiring micro‐entrepreneurs to restored self‐worth, dignity, and independence.  The I Will Teach You To Be Rich scholarship would be used in its entirety to provide at least fifteen micro‐loans (of approximately US$150 over a 6 month term) to current or former prostitutes to launch alternative income‐generating micro-enterprises in their communities.
Our initial pilot program would take place through a current and established microfinance institution in the Dominican Republic, Esperanza International.  Esperanza will facilitate and monitor the loan process, while local service providers offer vocational training, medical treatment and education to current or former prostitutes living in impoverished communities of rural Dominican Republic. Through comprehensive research and a candid evaluation of the pilot program, the long term objective is to then develop a transferable concept for rehabilitating and empowering former victims of the commercial sex trade through microfinance opportunities around the world.

I’d like to offer my congratulations to all the other finalists– all impressive in accomplishment and vision, and I trust opportunities such as these will continue the conversation among young people of how we might provide more innovative, radical solutions to the injustices we see in our world.