Just putting a bit of money to help other causes is smart. (1) One of the ways I’ve found pretty interesting is the idea of Micro Loans. Instead of just giving money to charity. You give a loan to someone who then pays you back. And then you give another loan. And so one.

There is a service that helps to do that, it’s called Kiva. There I’ve put 148.69$. And it created already 395$ of loans. That’s what they call the Kiva effect (2).

Because when people repay, I can make another loan. There I can support people who are transitioning to sustainable energy sources, working on second hand shops, and a lot of cool things.

Action question

How could you create within your service your own Kiva effect? What would be a reasonable amount that you could as a team, individual or company put on the side for micro loans?

Footnotes

(1) I’ve mentioned in other principles nice ways of doing this. In this book I’ve shared this idea: “Put 5% of your time to serve others”. In the previous book I shared another one: “Invest 1% to do good”

(2) .It’s pretty nice, especially when you’re not a rich dude, and you still want to use some of the money you have to do some good.

Daniele's notes

• This is the first shitty draft of this principle

• This principle might one day make it in the fifth book in the "Service Design Principles" series that explores how to better serve humans and the planet.

• If you're curious about service design principles, you can get the four previous books in the series, with proofread principles and less grammatical creativity.