March 7, 2007 – Dr. Dan Zukergood, associate professor of education at Springfield College, will present a one-hour multi-media presentation on Muhammad Yunus, the founder of the Grameen Bank of Bangladesh and this year's winner of the Nobel Peace Prize for Economics. The Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of St. John will host the presentation starting at 9:45 a.m., on Monday, March 11, in the Great Room of the Gifft Hill School Elementary Campus. A discussion and a potluck will follow. All are welcome.
Yunus, a professor at Chittagong University, started the Grameen Bank in 1976 with a $27 loan to 42 desperately poor people in the village next to his campus. One of the first borrowers was a stool maker who earned only two cents a day due to having to sell the stools she made back to the moneylender at a price he set. With a tiny loan from Yunus, the stool maker was free to sell her products at the market rate and her profit soared from two pennies to $1.20 a day.
Since then, the Grameen Bank has served over 6.61 million borrowers, 97 percent of whom are women. Hundreds of microcredit banks around the world have been created using the Grameen model, including many in the US. Come see why microcredit is being touted as one of the biggest success stories in poverty alleviation and why Yunus deserved to win this year's Nobel Peace Prize.
Dr. Zukergood has visited the Grameen Bank, worked with Dr. Yunus and founded a microcredit bank in Syracuse, NY. He has been leading advocacy workshops since 1983 and has been an active advocate for issues dealing with hunger and poverty as a member of the Hunger Project, Hunger Free America and RESULTS. He is the founder of Classroom Classics for a Global Education and publisher of "Monsoon – a Novel to End World Hunger." Zudergood is currently co-writing a book on advocacy entitled "Pedagogy of Power: Educating for Active Democratic Citizenship."
