Tell Us Why Microfinance Matters to You
Luz with her father, Carlos I. Gomez (1936-2006)
The StoryCorps Historias trailer came to town in late January and I had the opportunity to talk about why I’ve worked with small businesses for over a decade. My husband interviewed me about my dad, Carlos Gomez Arriola, who passed away in 2006. If you haven’t heard about StoryCorps, it’s an amazing oral history project that travels throughout the U.S.
Dad was a proud immigrant from Medellin, Colombia who owned his own home-based company in Los Angeles—COEXPO—for 30 years. When I started working with ACCION in New York, he came to visit several times and I would drag him along to site visits of clients all over the five boroughs. He even sat in on credit committee meetings! And when I moved to Miami to start ACCION’s Miami operations, he was there too, helping set up office furniture or providing advice for working with export clients. He totally got the concept of this work since he himself didn’t qualify for financing when he was first starting out in the early 1970’s. Even though I didn’t take over the reigns of his business, you could see that the importance of supporting small business was not lost on me.
So if you’re working in microfinance today—tell us your story about why you got involved.
February 23rd, 2010 at 3:45 pm
Great story for StoryCorp! Keep up the good work.
February 26th, 2010 at 2:00 pm
It’s amazing that you have continued your father’s lagacy, in your very own way. Beautiful post, I will check out Story Corps
February 26th, 2010 at 5:05 pm
Your story is heart warming. My adventure in microfinance started about a month ago when I decided this was the best way I could use my MBA degree in Finance to help drive social change. It’s a perfect match. Hopefully, the sphere of my impact will widen with time too.