Inspiring updates from Vittana!

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Early this morning I received a really exciting email from Vittana, which is one of the three micro-enterprise organizations edot will donate to when our edotters reach 500 dots.

Vittana partners with local microfinance organizations around the world to build student loan programs from the ground up, often providing the first and only access to college loans in the countries where we work.  That’s exciting!

Here are a few of the updates in the email from their CEO and Co-Founder, Kushal Chakrabarti.

“Several weeks ago, Vittana announced they’d just funded over $100,000 to students. Today, they announced that Vittana lenders had given over $200,000 in loans to hundreds of young people who want to become engineers, policemen, biologists and much more.”

Okay.  That got my attention, which is hard to do before the first cup of coffee has gone down the hatch.  I read more of the email and was really impressed with what followed.

“Just last week, the Clinton Global Initiative recognized Vittana for its work in bringing higher education loans to developing countries for the first time. Some of this is still under wraps, but I wanted to give you a preview of what’s to come — you’ll be seeing some very cool things come out of this partnership soon. In the meantime, we’ve also been getting some wonderful other press:

• voted as the “#1 Game-Changer in Philanthropy” by 1.7 million people on Huffington Post
• featured in New York Times as “the next new thing in charity”
• nominated as one of “5 Social Capitalists Who’ll Change the World in 2010″ by Fast Company
• named as one of the “Top 10 Innovative Finance Companies” by Fast Company (end of quotes from the email)

The punchline is that this amazing organization just celebrated its one year anniversary.  They have gone from dream to reality for so many college students in developing nations.

Vittana, thank you for the amazing work you are doing!

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