A Billion Bootstraps

In this riveting narrative, philanthropist and former CEO Phil Smith and microcredit specialist Eric Thurman trace Phil's fascinating philanthropic journey toward microcredit investment-a charitable enterprise that multiplies the power of every dollar by using basic business principles to launch businesses, improve local economies, and reinvent lives. They prove that donating to microcredit is the cutting edge of effective giving today and into the future.
Smith and Thurman explain how microcredit-loans as little as $50-help people to start small and home-based businesses. In taking charge of their own destiny, these businessmen and -women are given the dignity to improve their own lives and pay back the loan, instead of simply accepting charity.A Billion Bootstrapsalso explores how microcredit can reverse poverty permanently and shows how this charitable giving can produce astonishing returns across the globe.
A Billion Bootstrapsshows how successful people in the West can usesound business practices to create economic opportunities for poor families in other parts of the world. -Sir John Templeton, philanthropist and founder of the John Templeton Foundation
Giving away money is hardly the hardest thing in the world to do. Giving it in a way that multiplies the intended good is a whole other matter. -Malcolm S. Forbes Microcredit has proved to be an important liberating force in societies where women in particular have to struggle against repressive social and economic conditions. - Nobel Prize Committee Microfinance is not charity. It is a way to extend the same rights and services to low-income households that are available to everyone else. It is recognition that poor people are the solution, not the problem. -U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan