{"id":1837,"date":"2008-09-09T07:00:00","date_gmt":"2008-09-09T14:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/azaroff.com\/?p=1837"},"modified":"2025-09-06T05:25:38","modified_gmt":"2025-09-06T12:25:38","slug":"vancity-and-the-microfinance-wiki-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/azaroff.com\/?p=1837","title":{"rendered":"Vancity and the Microfinance wiki."},"content":{"rendered":"

I am so pleased to announce the new wiki Vancity has launched. It is for the Microfinance community in Canada, and lives at microfinance.ca.<\/p>\n

Why did we launch a wiki? Well, in short, we are a longtime Microfinance practitioner wanting to expand knowledge amongst those who are involved with Microfinance in Canada.<\/p>\n

We have a product called Circle lending, in which a peer group takes out very small loans together, and help each other to succeed in what are usually home-based businesses to repay their loans together. It is an amazingly transformational product, designed to help lift people out of poverty and give them a new chance.<\/p>\n

Additionally, we have a Microcredit Toolkit, which is an open source peer lending model so any institution can replicate it. We were incredibly honoured that Muhammad Yunus<\/a>, who won the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize for founding Grameen Bank<\/a>, personally endorsed our toolkit a couple of years ago.<\/p>\n

As you can see, we are deeply involved with the Microfinance model in Canada, and wanted to create a place where we could take the open source concept a little further. So we created and are hosting a wiki where anyone can add information as a practitioner, researcher or follower of Microfinance in Canada, with the aim of growing and evolving a central knowledge repository about the subject.<\/p>\n

I think it’s a great example of a very inexpensive solution to create affinity within a specific community. Now let’s see if people find it useful.<\/p>\n

I want to recognize the amazing Catherine Ludgate, who manages Vancity’s Microfinance programs, and without whose support this never would have been launched. The second I came up with the idea of a wiki to bring together the Microfinance community, Catherine was enthusiastically on board. If you want to know more, here’s a great article about Catherine<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I also must thank Tim McAlpine<\/a> and Currency Marketing<\/a> for creating a wiki that doesn’t look like a wiki. See the screenshot below to see what I mean…<\/p>\n

Oh, and PS:<\/span> Colin Henderson<\/a> at CommunityLend, I am hoping you’ll be the first to add yourself to the wiki…<\/p>\n

\"microfinance.ca\"<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I am so pleased to announce the new wiki Vancity has launched. It is for the Microfinance community in Canada, and lives at microfinance.ca. Why did we launch a wiki? Well, in short, we are a longtime Microfinance practitioner wanting to expand knowledge amongst those who are involved with Microfinance in Canada. We have a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[19,31,44,61,28,4,17,82],"tags":[185,190,136,198,209,188,171,183,223],"class_list":["post-1837","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-banking","category-credit-union","category-innovation","category-social-media","category-underbanked","category-vancity","category-web-2-0","category-yunus","tag-banking","tag-credit-union","tag-currency-marketing","tag-innovation","tag-social-media","tag-underbanked","tag-vancity","tag-web-2-0","tag-yunus"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p37qUH-tD","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/azaroff.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1837","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/azaroff.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/azaroff.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/azaroff.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/azaroff.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1837"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/azaroff.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1837\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16720,"href":"https:\/\/azaroff.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1837\/revisions\/16720"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/azaroff.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1837"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/azaroff.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1837"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/azaroff.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1837"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}