Invest Credit: Improving Lives Through Accessible Financial Services
A guest post from Invest Credit, one of Impact Foundation’s Portfolio Companies.
Invest Credit’s mission is to build trustworthy relationships with their clients by providing excellent financial services that empower them to realize their dreams for their businesses and families. Their vision is to spur social, financial, and spiritual transformation.
Reforming Education and Supporting Educational Equity
Using mentoring, coaching, and urban education reform, Clever Characters empowers adults who impact children—parents, school staff, and community-based mentors.
They strive to help adults support the social-emotional and mental health of students, through training experiences and short educational videos.
Transformational Prayer: A Personal Journey
PRAYR is more than just a faith tool—it's an avenue for building strong Christ-centered communities. Ministries are excited to use PRAYR to rally their members, coordinate efforts, and provide consistent peer-to-peer support where you know you are being lifted in prayer. It streamlines communication and facilitates groups, ensuring that prayers remain prominent and those who are in need are never forgotten.
Peregrine Turbine Technologies
Peregrine's technological innovations bring real value to the power decentralization effort across the globe, and the company believes that distributed generation is the model of the future.
Providing Hope for Education: Hartwell University
In 2021, after prayer, research, and development, Matthew Flippen and a team of expert educators launched Hartwell University, an affordable, online private Christian University to address teacher shortages.
Hartwell is equipping, encouraging, and preparing a growing number of future educators.
The Totalfit Approach: Unleashing the Power of Meaningful Fitness
Totalfit recognizes that we cannot train our bodies like machines. By engaging the body, mind, and spirit simultaneously, we can unlock the desired destination of optimal health.
Connecting the Dots on the Other Global Pandemic
Girls First Finance (GFF) supports young women's education and professional development worldwide, starting in Africa, through student loans and personal empowerment tools. Girls can apply for affordable higher education loans through the GFF mobile app. The eligibility criteria ensure that vulnerable girls are not excluded from consideration due to poverty. The pilot phase of the app launched in Kenya in 2022 and will expand to other African countries and regions after 2023.
Machine Learning Technology to Protect Kids Online
Canopy is the best way for busy parents to keep their kids safe online.
Filter out inappropriate content on your kid’s smartphone, schedule breaks from screentime, and know if your kid has left home or school. And that’s just the beginning. Canopy gives families everything they need to thrive in the digital world.
Building Bridges of Opportunity
“We decided that day that we were going to take back everything the earthquake had stolen,” Julie says. They built a job-training center out of a tarp and plywood they’d found in the streets. They began cutting up rubber with razor blades. They went to work, every day, and others joined them. After 10 months, they’d created a prototype.
Ten years later, it’s a real company.
Think Native: Leveraging Technology for Human Flourishing
Imagine you just received a life-changing medical diagnosis. You stumble out of the doctor’s office thinking, “What do I do? How will I get through this?” Then imagine immediately finding yourself connected with someone who walked through the exact same journey. That’s just one kind of powerful connection the peer support platform Think Native facilitates daily.
LivFul: Justice Through Health Innovation
“When will I feel safe? When will things go back to normal? When the curve flattens? When a vaccine is created?”
As the world continues to reel in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and economic fallout, those in the developed world are particularly shaken by this microbial threat and all the uncertainty surrounding it. But in many parts of the globe, particularly Sub-Saharan Africa and South-East Asia, these kinds of dangers are normal parts of daily life.
Abide: Sharing God’s Comfort During COVID
A pandemic, racial injustice, economic uncertainty, prolonged isolation — it does not take long to come up with a list of factors contributing to the current increase in mental health crises across the United States. Jokes about “quarantinis” lose their humor as studies continue to point to an increase in substance abuse, domestic violence, depression and hopelessness in the wake of the COVID-19 outbreak and the events sparked by the death of George Floyd.
Looking for Redemptive Movies to Stream?
We all find ourselves in need of hope. As you search for something uplifting to stream, here are a few suggestions from Impact Foundation portfolio companies.
To Build Rural Economies, Offer Farmers Choice
By - One Acre Fund, oneacrefund.org
At the 2018 African Green Revolution Forum (AGRF), Rwandan President Paul Kagame said, “We have everything we need to succeed. We must start treating farmers as clients. They need the latest skills and services to increase their productivity.” At One Acre Fund, we agree. Treating farmers as clients ultimately will build our rural economies and support our the region’s farmers in becoming sustainable entrepreneurs.
So what does it meant to treat farmers as clients, rather than beneficiaries?
Impacting Lives through Agriculture: AgGrandize Global
Approximately 500 million smallholder farmers in the developing world operate farms under 13 acres. They play an outsized role in reaching the U.N. Sustainable development goal of zero hunger. It is estimated that these smallholder farms operate on 12% of the world's agricultural land and produce 80% of the food consumed in Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. And yet, these farmers often lack the training and access to resources to optimize their land. AgGrandize Global works to meet these needs through partnerships worldwide. The AGG team serves two distinct, but interdependent customers.
Elevating a Country’s GDP: Laos Agriventures
Sitting between Thailand and Vietnam, the country of Laos is marked by rugged mountains and one of the lowest per capita incomes in the world. This poverty fuels two of the largest industries in the Golden Triangle (Laos, Myanmar, Thailand): opium trade and human trafficking.
Jobs and the hope of the Gospel - they're needed here perhaps more than anywhere else. Fortunately, the Lao government has been implementing reforms meriting attention from US investors.