The Power of Social Activism: A Conversation with Mark Levine
Mark recently assumed a position as Vice President for Programs at One Economy, a national non-profit working to empower low-income families through technology. Mark majored in physics at Haverford College and went on to teach bilingual science at Junior High School 149 in the South Bronx. He received a Masters in Public Policy from Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. In 2001 Mark ran for City Council in the Manhattan's 7th District, and finished second in a hotly contested ten-way race. He serves on the Boards of several non-profits, including Fresh Youth Initiatives and New Yorkers for Fair Representation. Mark is 34 years old and resides in Northern Manhattan with his wife and two sons.
Excerpts of this interview were also published in The News on Sunday in November 2003
October 27th, 2003
By Fawzia Naqvi
FN: When we first met in November 2000, you were involved in several things, one of which was running Neighborhood Trust a Community Development Finance Institution and running for local council in the neighborhood of Upper Manhattan. May be we could start off by your going over your back ground and how you got started setting up Neighborhood Trust and your whole foray in to politics
ML: Well, I studied physics in college and I got a lot out of that major but I knew enough to know that I did not want to spend my life in a laboratory and I became a science teacher after college in the South Bronx using my base in physics but use it for social purposes. The experience of being a teacher in a junior high school in the South Bronx in the early 90s-pretty tough time for New York City. Really, it really affected me deeply, it sparked in me a passion for community development that you can’t get from reading about America’s urban problems you get it from living them and I was amongst kids from families with pretty hard economic realities and I was face to face with unemployment and poor housing conditions and lack of access to financial services.
I had a minor in Economics in college and so I had enough of a tool set to see that so much of what was making my students’ life so difficult came back to economics. And I began to talk to fellow teachers and folks in the non-profit sector and everywhere you looked there were symptoms arising from economic disenfranchisement. The number of families which had no formal connection to banks or any other financial institution, the number of families which relied on check cashing stores, loan sharks, pawn shops all sorts of informal fringe providers, some of whom would employ violence as means to ensure repayment. The symptoms were pretty stark and I began to work with a group of fellow teachers to form a non profit, in multinational terms an NGO although on a very small basis a very small concentration in one community in Upper Manhattan to specifically deal with one aspect of what we considered to be an economic crisis among low income immigrant communities of New York and that was lack of financial services. We formed a parent non-profit called Credit Where Credit is Due which was launched from my apartment in Washington Heights, so for a few months I had a very short commute from the bedroom to the kitchen where we had my desk set up and eventually we got a small office and that became a vehicle for chartering a federally sponsored Financial Institution specifically a credit union.
Credit unions are similar to banks in some respects they can offer almost all the services that a bank can offer all sorts of checking and saving accounts, ATM cards, and most importantly on the lending side small loans, business loans and even mortgages. They are different from banks in one critical aspect which is they are not-for-profit- institutions. They are cooperatives, everyone who joins a credit union is a part owner and a share holder so the deposit of a credit union are not sent overseas, or to another state, they remain within the community of the credit union to be relent and develop the local economy. No one is making a profit off of the credit union. If there are any extra earnings it’s returned to the membership as dividends. So it’s a pretty empowering tool not one which is necessarily used for low income communities but out of the 12,000 or so credit unions in the United States there’s a small but growing contingent, may be 300 or so that are community development credit unions that are based in low income neighborhoods.
So we formed this type of institution, as you said it’s called Neighborhood Trust, we got up and running in 1997. We got a hold of an old abandoned bank branch, unfortunately there are many abandoned bank branches in inner city neighborhoods in the United States as banks have consolidated and receded. We did a big renovation and opened to the community and its been 6 years since and its been an incredible experience.
The credit union now has 4,000 members, mostly folks who never before had a bank account. So literally people were bringing cash out from under their mattresses, out of shoe boxes in some cases because they’ve never had a relationship with a formal financial institution and that could be because of fear, could be because of language barriers, issues around immigration status and there’s many structural barriers as well.
Banks frankly have no interest in serving someone whose going to deposit $100 in their account, they want to serve people with thousands of dollars. And that’s fine for middle class people but a impossibility for someone living from pay check to pay check. So we were able to provide a place for people to save where the minimum was $50. For fifty dollars you could open an account with Neighborhood Trust and there are no fees and all you had to do was keep $50 which is manageable in U.S terms that’s a very manageable amount of money. Credit unions perhaps have their biggest impact on the lending side. Neighborhood Trust now six years in to it has made over 1500 loans, very small as little as $500 which in United States term is really a micro loan and maxing out at $10,000. These are in general used to buy home computers, to buy furniture, a lot of micro-entrepreneurs are using the loans to buy their first piece of equipment for example a commercial refrigerator for a cake baking business, many home based businesses. Some folks doing nothing more complicated than buying wholesale products and then selling them door to door in the community and for a couple thousand dollars you can buy your first batch of wholesale goods and you’re on your way. Some people doing garment assembly in a very low level way where again with a few hundred dollars for basic material and a sewing machine you can generate some income.
FN: Describe for me if you will the demographics of the Washington Heights Area
ML: The non-profit and the credit union are based in Upper Manhattan in a neighborhood called Washington Heights which is an incredibly vibrant, dense, predominantly immigrant community. Its got a long history of immigration starting really after World War II as a refuge for Jews fleeing Nazi Germany. Famous celebrities like Henry Kissenger, whose politics we don’t agree with, but he grew up in the neighborhood.
Beginning in the 60s there was a significant migration from the Caribbean, originally Cuban and Puerto Rican but Washington Heights became Washington Heights with the arrival of, a major wave of Dominican immigrants. The Dominican Republic is a small country with 7 million people, barely constitutes a city in most nations in Asia, particularly in India and Pakistan. But that small country has managed to send a million immigrants to the United States. Think about that, that’s about 14% of the population which in Pakistan would amount to about 20% of the population. And their epicenter is Washington Heights.
There are 300,000 people living in an area of just 3 sq. miles of Washington Heights which is an incredibly dense urban concentration. And they are overwhelmingly people who are low income and unfortunately people who are disconnected from the formal financial system. So the membership of the credit union is overwhelmingly Latino, although there are small numbers of members from a total of 40 countries including Pakistan, we have a couple of members, and other nations in Asia. They are generally what I would call the working poor, they are people who are not homeless people, not the poorest of the poor, they are people who have taken a half step up the ladder and now have a little bit of income may be just living paycheck to paycheck but are in position where they are ready to think what comes next, ready to think big, they are thinking about may be starting their own business, maybe one day many years hence purchasing a home, may be thinking about buying their son and daughter in high school their first home computer which can be a pretty big deal for some families.
And it’s a time where its very critical moment for, I think, immigrants in the United States where they’ve taken that first half step and this determines whether they’re really going to make it in the economic mainstream. So they are getting basic savings and basic lending services and crucially education services. The credit union’s non-profit parent which is called Neighborhood Trust has a significant education arm we have a classroom where we are offering classes in the evening, mostly in Spanish to meet the local need on topics ranging from how to manage a checking account or how to write a check. Understanding investments, understanding the stock market, how to start a business, how to budget for your family. Where we get to issues like the lottery for instance, there’s a lot of broad life issues that are wrapped up in personal finance. And this country unfortunately has an addiction to things like the lottery and you can see people spend a significant amount of their disposable income, we see families spending up to a $100 per week on lottery tickets and we really breakdown the economic impact of that on the family. That would be considered haram I guess in a Muslim country, thank fully, I wish we had that same moralistic view in the U.S. So really its education in savings, borrowings and it can become a pretty empowering tool for people to step ahead and get engaged in the American system.
FN: And tell us a little about your political experience and running for political office.
ML: My political foray was an incredibly exciting experience. It was in 2000 when my campaign was just getting going. For me the move from community development to politics was really natural. It was chance to fight and advocate for issues which I believe passionately in, but at a different level. Perhaps at a more systematic level as opposed to one neighborhood, one community, to have a voice at the level of city government, in a city of 8 million people. Where the city government is spending $40 billion a year which is a budget as big as some nation’s in the UN. And clearly community economic development was central to my platform as was education being a former teacher and at the time I had a several month old son. Parenthood having been coupled with being a teacher I think made education a really important issue to me.
FN: Well this sounds astonishingly familiar to our context in Pakistan where an established feudal system seems to have been brought back in the 2002 elections.
ML: I am not sure how bad it is in Pakistan, it might be even worse than here, I certainly hope not! But For a young guy like me who wasn’t part of the “feudal system” if you will, to make a run for it, it was definitely an insurgent campaign. One with fairly long odds, but the experience for me was wonderful in so many ways and I learned many many lessons, some hard about how tough the things are in New York City politics.
But I also had the chance to connect with thousands of people from all walks of life. And council district which was evenly split between Latino and African American because it also took in a piece of West Harlem and white residents spanning the income spectrum living in public housing and expensive co-ops, and a number of religious backgrounds all the major faiths and to engage with thousands of people like that was just a wonderful experience. I learned so much about what makes Upper Manhattan tick, what moves people and what matters to them in their daily lives. I am very thankful for that experience.
It was a ten way democratic primary. And in the United States we have what we call “first pass the post” electoral system. There’s no run off, so in a ten way race, the winner could easily have no more than 25% or 30%, and some other system if you don’t get more than 50% there’s a runoff, but that’s not the case in the United States, in most cities at least. I came in a close second out of the ten with about 25% of the vote vs. the fellow who won who had 30%. The day of the election I woke up and I actually felt great and I was very surprised at myself that I wasn’t depressed or broken up, because the campaign had started as such a brutal experience and so difficult emotionally and in so many ways with so many ups and downs. But I woke up the next morning and realized, you know what? Only good things have come from this. And I’ve learned, I’ve grown, I’ve built relationships and I’ve built a name for myself. And I realized I could build something from that. And the two years since have been fascinating because now folks coming to office now turn to me for endorsements which is kind of a joke because I don’t deliver much but I think they see me as a person who built a following and in some way can deliver a portion of that. There’s a seat or two that looks like it might open up in a couple of years which I think I would have a decent shot at and folks are now talking about me as a potential candidate for a couple of seats.
FN: So you actually created a political base in this process?
ML: Absolutely. And if you look at the history of the United States, Abraham Lincoln ran for the House of Representatives twice and lost and ran for U.S Senate and lost and then he ran for President and won. And you don’t feel it when you are in the middle of the campaign but afterwards with hindsight you realize that you have built something. If you give it 100% effort and behave honorably you don’t make enemies you make friends and you win respect. I was shocked at how many people who were part of this establishment, part of the political machine if you will called me after the election and congratulated me and I said “what do you mean, I came in second and didn’t win” they said no, you got 4000 votes, you raised a lot of money and affected a lot of people. It was a wonderful experience for me.
To kind of continue the narrative and bring it up to date, there have been a couple of other interesting changes. After the campaign, which you might recall, was originally September 11, 2001. So I should point out that the first election day was cancelled at about 10am when the planes hit the Trade Centers. So we had about 100 volunteers out on the streets, we immediately shut down and obviously the election was off. We had a long day of getting everyone back to safety. We woke up the next day and had two more weeks before the rescheduled primary was held on Sept 25th. Probably the hardest two weeks of my life, dealing with the emotional shock of the attack on the Trade Centers. Dealing with the loss of several acquaintances, friends of friends and then having to reassemble a campaign two weeks later and we pulled it off and when the dust settled literally and figuratively and I got back to my job with the credit union I realized that our city had been shocked economically. And that people who bore the brunt of that were not the CEOs and CFOs and the top executives but the people with the blue collar jobs working class people who were security guards at the Trade Centers who were doing house keeping in the trade centers or secondary industries such as travel.
FN: What were the affects of September 11th, 2001 and in particular on illegal immigrants?
ML: Well, people who are undocumented immigrants are always the first to go. We had people who worked in airports and other travel related industries that travel to New York took a steady drop for months after 9/11. Well that meant that people who drove the shuttles from the airport lost their jobs. Well that’s almost exactly who the membership of our credit union is. So all of a sudden we had hundreds of members who were out of a job, some of whom had been working off the books and therefore didn’t have the recourse of unions and other safety nets. And when people lose their jobs they stop paying their loans.
So not only was our community suffering but as an institution we took a hit and ended up losing a significant amount of loans. As a community development financial institution we never had much of a margin and losing loans made it even tougher. I had in my mind of moving on from the credit union in late 2001. But I couldn’t because I couldn’t let anything happen to the institution at such a precarious moment. We spent about 9 months just fighting while the economy thankfully steadily improved, and fighting for our members and funding while funding was largely redirected toward relief efforts for the families of those who were lost. In many ways it was the most challenging period of my life after 9/11 to bring the credit union back from the brink as all of us were dealing with the aftershock of the attack.
FN: You made a very interesting shift in your career in 2002. Could you tell us a bit about this move?
ML: Finally by the spring of 2002 we had achieved a measure of stability in the credit union and at that point I began to think about possibly moving on. Not because my passion for the credit union has ever diminished, I will always be part of it, in fact I am still President of the Board, on the phone with them all the time and I live only 5 blocks away. But professionally I’d been there since my mid-20s until early 30s and had gotten more out of it than I had ever dreamed, but I had reached a point where I wanted to experience non-profit management from a new perspective. So I joined a national non-profit called Teach for America, which you may have heard of. It’s a great organization which recruits young people from all background coming off college campuses to become teachers in inner cities and rural areas where they’re most needed. In the U.S at least schools suffer serious shortage of quality teachers, short of teachers of any sort. And I spent a year and a quarter as Executive Director of Teach for America New York operations.
FN: As you know Mark, Pakistan has one of the lowest indicators on literacy and education, particularly in female literacy. It will be very useful to know what lessons you learned in the Teach for America program and what kind of lessons do you think a country like Pakistan can learn from this kind of program?
ML: The first thing is that there are a number of schisms in the American education system. The first is between what we call primary and secondary education which is education up to 18 years of age or high school as we call it in the U.S and then college and University. The lead private universities in the United States are truly world class, they are well funded, well endowed, well staffed and doing exciting research.
FN: Now you studied to Harvard?
ML: I went to Harvard for graduate school and I went an undergraduate school called Haverford in Philadelphia which is a small what we liberal arts college. What we call public schools in the U.S generally kindergarten to 12th grade education in the U.S is a much more mixed bag, and its not a coincidence that you don’t see a huge number of people coming from abroad to study at the high school level in the United States. Because education up to about 18 years of age actually doesn’t rank at the top of the world on most indicators unlike most universities. The situation is even more dire when you separate out public education in middle and upper income communities such as suburbs and schools in poorer neighborhoods, particularly inner city and rural areas.
FN: How do you define “inner city?”
ML: In many countries of the world, the downtowns of cities are beautiful well-maintained and places where the wealthy often want to live. You think of Paris for example, the outskirts of the city are where the slums or the shanty towns are as is the case in many cities of the developing world. Its certainly true of Paris where immigrants from North Africa live in the outskirts. In the United States its inverted, where the automobile has created an exodus out of the city for many of the wealthy, leaving the urban core to deteriorate and to be essentially a refuge for low income families and immigrants.
That trend has reversed somewhat since the 90s where you’ve got what we call gentrification in parts of Manhattan and downtown Boston and few upper end urban neighborhoods. But broadly speaking, urban communities and urban schools are deeply impoverished. And if you look at a city like New York, Northern Manhattan, much of the Bronx, large parts of Brooklyn and Queens are incredibly low income and have indicators that might be comparable to those of the developing world.
If you look at infant mortality, if you look at measures of health indicators like asthma, if you look at rates of children without both parents living at home, if you look at educational attainments. Some of them don’t look like developed world indicators and that’s nowhere more apparent than in schools where schools are so deeply embedded in the communities, they both affect the community and reflect the community, so the ills of a neighborhood whether they be violence, whether they be drug addiction show up at the schools and in very profound ways. Problem is seriously compounded by the fact that funding levels between schools in wealthier neighborhoods are nowhere near comparable to those of inner city urban areas. That’s because unlike many countries in the world where education is funded federally, like Japan, almost the entire education budget is funded by the central government.
One side affect of that is that you have relative even ness in the level of funding. In the United States something like 7% of the school funding is from federal sources. The rest is State and local, that means if you’re drawing on the local tax base and if you have a big tax base then you have a lot of money for the school if you have a small tax base you have far fewer. So its created a system where schools in urban areas like New York are under funded compared to those in suburban or wealthier areas. So teachers are paid less and the physical plans of the schools are less well maintained. There’s severe overcrowding. This is true particularly in Upper Manhattan because of the immigrant influx from the Caribbean and in many parts of Queens including in places like Jackson Heights which are heavily populated by immigrants from Pakistan and India and a number of other South Asian and Asian countries. Where overcrowding is so severe that you have people being taught in closets converted in to classrooms and gymnasiums converted into classrooms. You have schools that run on two, three or four shifts. Where some kids are in there by 7am and out by 12:30pm and some are in by 11am and not out till 5pm. Which creates all sorts of problems for families in after school programs.
And almost anyone would agree that as a whole urban schools in America and particularly New York City are dysfunctional, they are not achieving levels of math or reading literacy anywhere where we want them to be. They are not even achieving simple graduation rates anywhere near where we want them to be. They are not sending kids to university or college at the rate we would hope they would be. And its an extremely entrenched problem.
Teach for America is a fascinating model because its attempting to bridge all the schisms which I have just described by taking young people graduating from the top universities, from the Harvards, from the Yales and students from Universities you might not know. University of Michigan, but young people who could go anywhere. Young people who could be lawyers, could be doctors and engineers and they commit to teaching these two years in the schools which most need them in schools where you wouldn’t expect to see graduates of these schools going.
FN: Why would these students do this as opposed to going on to their big careers on Wall Street or elsewhere?
ML: That’s a fascinating question and a very hopeful indicator. A sense that many young people of our generation or the generation just behind us that have heard the call of public service and have understood that citizenship in the United States isn’t just about getting a good job and making a lot of money and consuming. That each of us, particularly those of us that have been benefiting from the freedoms and the economic strength of the system, that we’ve got an obligation to give back.
FN: How do you instill that in a society and in a community? The United States has a great tradition of community participation but many others do not have that culture of “giving of your time,” so how do you catalyze that?
ML: It is difficult. Some of it has been led by very powerful moral stances taken by John F. Kennedy and his brother Robert Kennedy, in the era when the Peace Corp was founded. Which was our attempt to help around the world. These are clichés now but in the 60s they weren’t, comments from people like President Kennedy saying, “Ask not what you country can do for you but what you can do for your country.”
This country no longer has obligatory military service and I think that strong moral leaders have said, “Ok you’re not going in to the military, that doesn’t relieve you of the need to serve” and we need to help young people understand that whether its military, or domestic, medical, education or poverty relief of any sort, you’ve got an obligation to serve. And that patriotism isn’t only taking up arms for your country and it isn’t only going to demonstrations that it is also turning to those most in need around you. And that’s typically been the message of the left and the left has historically had ceded the notion of patriotism to the right. We’ve allowed the right to say that to be patriotic is to wrap yourself in the flag and go out and join the military and go out and make a heck of a lot of money and donate to your church, your mosque or your synagogue. God knows we need to secure the borders of the United States like Pakistan needs to secure her border and every modern nation needs a strong military. But that alone does not solve the wide array of entrenched problems that we have.
I think the left needs to say that to be patriotic, to serve your country also means to deal with the social ills of the nation. I think that’s what JFK did brilliantly and the Peace Corp actually has a very patriotic sense to it, in the sense of Americans going out and serving the world but at the same time we’re making the United States stronger. So the name “Teach for America” applied to the service corp, I think subtly plays up on that. Teaching for this country, doing something for this country. Its not teach for yourself but teach for America and the model has caught peoples eye in many nations around the world and there’s a similar program which has just started in London, I think its called Teach for London. I think they are realizing that this call can be inspiring for young people. You’re not asking them to forego entirely a career in law or business, you’re asking them to take a minimum of two years and one do some good in a school which needs you but there’s a crucial second good which is that being in that environment also can instill a passion in you for community development causes which you would never get by reading books or watching T.V.
I both taught in this program and ran it, and I taught during the 90s which was the height of the crack epidemic, gun violence was at an all time high. Everyone in this nation knew about that intellectually but its very different from living it and so Teach for America has a very important secondary mission not just providing direct service but creating a generation of future leaders, leaders that do go on to become doctors and lawyers and what have you or run for office who have a very profound experience on the front lines and are going to be advocates for education and advocates for urban needs in general. I think in the developing countries there tends to be very wide divisions along class. They can be either wealthy and socialize with those who are wealthy or be poor and never have a relationship with someone who is wealthy and I think that can have an extraordinarily negative consequences for the social fabric of any country, including the United States. I would submit it’s just as bad as divisions along ethnic and religious lines ultimately.
FN: Pakistan is suffering from a lot of violence, the gun culture, the drug culture and the jihad culture, sectarianism are layered upon each other. How much impact can young people have if they get engaged in society? Can we still as a nation rally our young people to do what, say, Kennedy envisioned tocreate this sense of giving back or Roosevelt envisioned for to nation building?
ML: Well, we must. It’s imperative that we do. Because violence although sometimes directed toward external communities, almost inevitably does more harm to the communities from which it originates. And the United States is a perfect example of that where the vast majority of gun violence in this country is not for one ethnic group to another but is within the very neighborhoods, the very communities and sometimes the very families which are suffering from these entrenched conditions of poverty and presence of drugs. And I think as a nation we have come to realize that violence is ultimately self destructive. That does not mean we should ignore its root causes, it doesn’t mean we’re off the hook when it comes to poverty and disenfranchisement.
We’ll never end violence if we don’t deal with these issues. But I think its simplistic and ultimately dangerous to say that violence is an acceptable means to deal with poverty and disenfranchisement in the United States. This can only make matters worse and we have lost many many young lives over the decades since urban America began to suffer these ills.
But you have made an incredibly powerful point which is that young people are craving an outlet and a sense that they can have an impact on the world around them and those of us who are now assuming leadership positions in the country whether its non profit, government or business sectors have to provide outlets for young people that are constructive. Try to create positive experiences for young people around community services. Young people’s sense of self worth is greatly enhanced by the fact that they are helping others. Its sad, but I think young people don’t think they have anything to offer and that is just not true.
Every human being has something to offer, particularly the young. And when you give a young person that experience of teaching a 5 year old how to read, helping a homeless person, I think all of a sudden they realize that there is another way to have an impact. You talk about the conditions in Pakistan. I think engaging young people in teaching. Those who know how to read, teaching others who might be illiterate. Those who know about medicine helping those who have no healthcare. Those who don’t understand how to maintain a bank account can turn to those who are working in the banking industry. It can be young people who are still studying, college age people. Almost any major you pursue in college can be passed on as a skill to a less fortunate person. And it can be an incredibly powerful constructive outlet. Far more powerful than turning to violence which is ultimately self destructive.
I think most of the leaders which you and I admire, Martin Luther King, Gandhi for understanding the power of non-violence, I would think Nelson Mandela is a respected figure in Pakistan and they all ultimately understood the power of channeling energy in to constructive, predominantly political peaceful protests but also once they achieved the end of apartheid constructive community building initiatives as opposed to an endless string of reprisals.
And so one thing the United States has to teach others is that the entrepreneurial spirit doesn’t only have to be about making money. I hope that people abroad don’t just look at the U.S and admire Bill Gates. I hope they admire an entrepreneurial spirit in social activism. Per capita we might have more NGOs than any other country. Because a 25 year old guy like me can start a non- profit and start a community development financial institution.
There’s no reason that a 25 year old in any country on earth can’t start a microfinance institution, can’t start an educational initiative or start a legal clinic, can’t start a health clinic. If there is one thing I would like to see people abroad emulate of the U.S, it’s the sense that you don’t have to wait for government to solve all your social problems. Because, to use an American vernacular, it ain’t gonna happen! That doesn’t excuse government from attacking social ills. It doesn’t mean that those who are politically active should let up on the pressure on government to act to solve social ills, but it doesn’t let us off the hook either. Its not enough to go to work and pay your taxes. You’ve got to engage personally with your time and your intelligence and your brain power, your resources and your relationships. Make changes in your immediate community. If your readers in Pakistan take that away, that could be a pretty powerful message.
FN: Pakistan as you know is a fairly fragmented society, politically, socially and economically. On top of that we have the “war on terror” creating immense pressures and creating major distrust of the United States amongst the Pakistani people. If you Mark were given the charge to address one social issue in Pakistan, what would be that one social issue you would address first?
ML: I would certainly draw upon my background in looking at financial issues which at first sound dry and irrelevant to the fate of impoverished people, but upon further examination are clearly a crucial element for lifting people and nations out of poverty.
You look at the question of assets and the power of assets such as property and homes as a leverage for building a business, for lifting a family out of poverty in many ways because once you own a piece of property for example you can then borrow against it to do almost anything, may be to buy your first home computer, maybe to start a business, may be to pay for education. There’s been some very powerful thinking done along these lines looking at the millions of people in the developing world living on land which they don’t own, perhaps they are squatters. Its land which de-facto is there’s, they may not own it. It’s often in undesirable locations and its not about to be paved over for a shopping mall. The simple act of creating a title, a legal document of ownership and passing it on to people also means that they can borrow against the value of that asset. That can help start a business or what have you.
Assets also mean savings. Not savings by putting cash under your mattress where it doesn’t earn interest, its vulnerable to theft where you can’t write out a check because you have no checking account. I think we have seen global capitalism traditionally as the domain of the elites and that can become a self fulfilling prophecy. I think those of us who are thinking about poverty and about the less fortunate should figure out a way to use the tools of capital to benefit everybody, to engage people and I would like to see a world in developing countries where everyone had access to credit to start businesses, to pay for education to buy a home. To purchase assets like computers.
I would like to see a situation in developing countries where people had a way to save and earn a little bit of interest, where their funds can be secure and not held in cash at home. As great as the disparity is in income between the rich and poor, assets are multiplied by many folds because assets are really accumulation of a life time of income and wealth and often the poor have assets which are close to zero or even negative. And that locks people in poverty so I think the NGOs and institutions that are looking at this are on the forefront. I hope that activists abroad don’t cede the world of finance and capital to the business of the elite. I hope they use it as a tool to fight poverty.
FN: On the question of interest. When we met, it was Ramadan and you had mentioned that some of your clients were Bangladeshi newspaper vendors who did not want interest. If you could tell us what you did about that as an institution?
ML: We do have some clients who do not want interest for religious reasons. Actually we have a few members from Pakistan as well and Muslims from India and some Muslims from Africa. There’s a couple of ways to deal with the interest question. First is simply to have a no interest account which any institution anywhere can do. Now that’s unfortunate because you’re going to have someone whose foregoing interest although it can be made up for by waiving all fees and on a small deposit account fees can often outweigh the interest. And the depositor would actually come out a head if they forewent interest in favor of no fee account.
Well, if you’re not getting interest then why even bother, well that gets to some of the issues I mentioned earlier about the security of savings, its human nature that when you have cash in your pocket it disappears quickly. And when you have your cash in a quasi inaccessible place your just less liable to spend it on impulse.
An important third aspect is that it allows you to begin building a relationship with a financial institution and the day you need a loan, if you’ve held an account at an institution and you’ve been a member in good standing, then you’re far more likely to get the loan. Savings really are a tool in to borrowing ultimately. I think this is true abroad as well. So even without interest there is a compelling reason to get people in to savings. But there is an interesting twist to this when you look at credit unions which I mentioned before, are slightly different from banks, technically they don’t even pay interest, they pay dividends which are purely a distribution of the earnings of the institution, its almost like an equity stake.
I’m not an Islamic scholar to say the least, but those in the know tell me that its considered a “Halal” form of banking because there is no interest. And you know as far as I’m concerned, call it what you want to call it but anything that’s going to get people in to the financial system and is going to take down that barrier is a good thing. I would hate to see anyone locked out of banking for religious reasons.
You know Islam is not the only faith which has an uneasy opinion of interest. So its not alone in that respect. I would hate to see people of any faith of any background, of any income locked out of banking for this reason. Also becomes complicated with borrowing, again there are ways to get around it. As long as you can get people a way to save and way to borrow I think its pretty important that we do. You’re not going to ultimately alleviate poverty without giving people these tools.
FN: Were your clients (Muslim) satisfied with these solutions?
ML: Absolutely. Many of them used this as jumping pad to the vast array of services we were offering. Some of them came to us because they wanted an interest free account and discovered that we had classes that would be relevant to them, particularly business people. So again, anything that gets people in to the door is just incredibly valuable. Some of them were able to accumulate savings of thousands of dollars which is pretty impressive. Much of it was sent back home to Bangladesh and other countries and that just fine, but its hard to accumulate that kind of savings without the security of an account. We felt great about it and its continuing to be a small but important part of the work that we’re doing in Upper Manhattan.
FN: You have now moved to another Not-for-Profit called One-Economy, could you describe for us what that is?
ML: One Economy is a national non-profit, an NGO looking to use technology as a vehicle for empowering low income people. Its founded on the basic notion that we have not even begun to tap the potential of technology for transforming the lives of low income people. It really presents an opportunity, a quantum shift in the way low income people interact with government, society, business and educational institutions.
We take a multi-pronged approach. First we started with some of the basic work of connecting low income people to technology through one wiring of public housing, housing for low income people, wiring it for high speed internet access. And then through a combination of loans and grants helping people to obtain their first home computer. The hardware is great and necessary but we really believe its not sufficient and that we then have to connect people with the tools once they’re on line to engage with American society on many fronts. So we’ve created this web site which is called the Beehive.
And you’ll be fascinated to know that significant portions of it is translated in to Urdu, because we got funding from a bank in New York to serve some of the immigrant communities in a neighborhood in Brooklyn called Flatbush. And the three biggest languages spoken in that neighborhood are Russian, Haitian Creole and Urdu. Some of your readers might be interested in looking at the website, which is www.thebeehive.org. The focus is primarily financial literacy and all the things we have spoken about, tools for understanding how to save how to invest, how to manage your finances how to write a check. Tools for how to engage with healthcare, how to obtain childcare for your kids- so using the power of the on-line world to teach people. And then we have got another component which is on the ground education, which is training of high school students to become computer workers in the neighborhood, so we teach them to repair computers and they provide the service for free to the neighborhood, so double impact. It helps the kids build a career in technology and just as importantly gives a service provider to the neighborhood. So I’m national Vice President of the program, its been a great experience.
We’re in 9 cities in the U.S, New York being one of them. Its been very much in line with my core belief of the need to connect low income people to mainstream society. Working with technology has been a new experience for me but its been very fulfilling. Cleary it’s got a strong educational component drawing on my past experience and a strong financial literacy and financial empowerment, even microfinance component. So fits very nicely with my interests and passion.
FN: And finally Mark. There is a lot of mistrust right now, between the United States and the people of Pakistan. A lot of it could be because Pakistanis don’t know what people in the United States are thinking. What do you think is a possible solution to bridging this gap?
ML: One of the first things which people in Pakistan have to understand is that just like its important not to confuse the government of Pakistan for all strengths and weaknesses with the people of Pakistan, we shouldn’t confuse the government of the United States with the people of the United States. That there are deep frustrations with the administration of George Bush, a man who was not elected with the majority vote. This may have been forgotten but this is a man who entered office thanks to some dubious legal rulings and intervention. With a minority of the vote in the United States, the first time in history that I believe it’s happened. And who since then, particularly in the last year has seen his popularity erode.
I’ve traveled in the Muslim world a fair amount, I haven’t been to South Asia yet but I have been to the Arab world and I could not have asked for a warmer reception. And these are people who probably hate the policies of George Bush as I do. But I think it’s important to encourage people to see the difference. And important for people to seek person to person dialogue as you and I are doing now. And others should do, without the noise provided by governments to see the humanity in different people. To see that we have far more in common than we ever expected.
Look at how much the battle against poverty in the United States and Pakistan has in common. Different history, different traditions, different ethnic make ups but pretty much all the main points that were discussed apply equally in both countries. Boy, wouldn’t it be great if we had more dialogue between NGO leaders in the American inner cities and Islamabad, and I think that is the solution. Person to person dialogue.
Mohammed Khatami gave an interview to CNN a couple of years ago, in a relatively promising moment in Iranian-American relations in which he called for a dialogue of civilizations and I thought that was a brilliant point because that implied, people to people relations, cultural exchange, scientific and academic exchange. Exchange among non-profit NGO leaders. That’s going to do more than any summit between Presidents and Prime Ministers and any summit between Secretaries of State as far as I am concerned.
And its folks like yourself who are living a bi-national existence that have a critical role to play. People of any nationality when they look at the United States, in a sense, they have to see a part of themselves. There are millions of Muslims in the United States. Its arguably the fastest growing religion in the United States. And there are communities of every nationality just in New York City, significant Pakistani community, significant Bangladeshi community. A significant Indian community, of Indians of every faith.
Probably every country has its representation here. I think it would help if people didn’t only look at the United States as George Bush and saw people of Anglo-Saxon Protestant Christian decent. Very important part of who we are and important part of our history but by no means is that an accurate representation of the entirety of the American people of 285 million people. We have Zorastrians here, we have Shias, we have Sunnis, we have Sufis, we have every ethnic group reflected here, I think it’s important for people to see that. But there’s nothing more important than person to person dialogue, so, indirectly I am happy to be speaking, even if its only to a few thousand people through this newspaper in Pakistan, I am very happy to play a small role in the dialogue.
FN: Mark, thank you so much!
ML: Its been a pleasure.
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