Lend for Peace
I have been hearing about a cool new organization of Jews and Palestinians doing micro-credit work in the the West Bank. They are ready to launch. Here’s the info:
A group of students at Penn, including an Orthodox Jew and a Palestininan American, have started LendForPeace (a wordplay on Land for Peace) a Kiva-type Microfinance loan direct fund aimed at fostering Middle East Peace. It’s a very idealistic mission – that by lending to West Bank women micro-entrepreneurs, hope for the future will trump ideology and despair. They are launching the fund at a talk and event at Penn this Thursday night and the community is invited.
LendforPeace.org is proud to announce that it will launch to the world on February 5th, 2009!
Come be a part of the excitement by joining us at our launch event. As all four of LendforPeace.org’s founders have current or previous ties with the University of Pennsylvania, we thought there was no better place to launch the site than on Penn’s campus in Philadelphia. Here are the details:
LendforPeace.org Philadelphia Launch Event
7:00 PM, Thursday February 5, 2009
Jon M. Huntsman Hall F95
University of Pennsylvania
3730 Walnut Street
The launch event will include a presentation by the founders, an invocation from University Chaplain Chas Howard and a keynote address on active citizenship by Dr. John DiIulio, the first Director of the White House Office of Faith-Based Initiatives.
Our Philadelphia launch is brought to you in partnership with the Penn Israel Coalition, Penn for Palestine, the Penn Arab Students Society, Fox Leadership, the Middle East Center, PRISM, and the Penn Microfinance Club.
We plan to run events in a variety of other cities in the coming months to bring LendforPeace.org to you. If you would like to host a launch event in your city, let us know by emailing Team[at]lendforpeace.org. If you cannot make it to Philadelphia on the 5th, please visit us via the web next week and participate in LendforPeace.org’s mission to promote economic opportunity and political stability in the Middle East through microfinance.
This is a wonderful idea, I hope it is successful and helpful. Thanks for the post.
It is a nice settlement, but making Palestinians lives easier on them as long Israel continues to deny them civil rights and colonize their homeland out from under them is going to solve this conflict. It is just another case of addressing the effects while overlooking the cause which has perpetrated such injustice for decades.
Seriously, there are two reasonable solutions here; Israel accept Palestinians rights to sovereignty over the West Bank and Gaza with East Jerusalem as their capital, or Israel take all Palestinians as citizens along with that land. Unfortunately, US backing has allowed Israel to avoid either reasonable solution for decades, and with Israel infrastructure now covering nearly half the West Bank and growing the chance for the two-state solution is quickly running out. Taking the land but not the people simply isn’t a reasonable option, regardless of how much chicanery has been employed to vindicate doing so over the years.
Bah, I mean’t “a nice sentiment”.
Just wondering, does LendForPeace implement Islamic banking?