When you think about the poor, the helpless, and the one who needs your help the most, what is your compassion that can best help you with? No matter how big or how small the gesture is, one act of kindness can transcend into multitudes. It is true that an individual alone cannot solve the needs of the world. But we can do something together. 

Jodi Fischer, Development Director of Adelante, and her team always look for ways to reach out to people below the poverty line. The foundation’s primary goal is to provide small loans and education to women in Honduras , which is one of the poorest countries in Latin America. They empower these women to achieve self-sufficiency, and that journey is what our talk will revolve around today.

 
---

Listen to the podcast here:

The Tremendous Power of Women Helping Women with Jodi Fischer
Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Today, I want to talk about helping people help themselves and giving people opportunities. My guest today is Jodi Fischer. She is the development director and a US liaison for a foundation called Adelante and Adelante is a foundation that helps women in Honduras, which is one of the poorest countries in the Western Hemisphere, get small loans to start their own business.

 
---
Jodi, welcome to the program.

 

Thank you for having me.

 

Jodi, first, I want to get the audience oriented by talking a little bit about Honduras. A lot of people know it’s one of the poorest countries in the Western Hemisphere but probably not aware of what specifically is going on in Honduras and what’s actually preventing a lot of people there from having the opportunities to succeed that we enjoy here in the US or whatever country you’re listening from.

 

There’s various statistics that support it’s the second to poorest country, second only to Haiti, in Latin America and that currently means nearly 70 percent of the population lives under the poverty line. There’s a lot of factors that play into that but there are some issues with the government, there is definitely things that happen that make it difficult for people to break those cycles of poverty.

 

Essentially, and 70 percent below the poverty line, for some context, we think about the poverty line, we think about the line where you’re barely getting enough to eat every day and you’re under stress about what shelter you’re going to have. Is that an accurate way to think of it? Because I know that dollar conversions can be different for different currencies in different places.

 

True, yes. It usually translates to living under $1.90 per day.

 

Okay.

 

There are different levels of poverty. I know that with Adelante Foundation, for example, we do not attempt to serve the poorest of the poor because giving them a debt burden would not be appropriate. However, a lot of the communities that we serve, people often don’t have anything but a dirt floor. They don’t necessarily have running water, they don’t necessarily have the ability to send their children to school so there’s different levels within the poverty index and we do measure those things and we do track the progress of the participants of our program over time.

 

Tell me about the profile of a typical participant in your program. I know you provide some loans, you give them some economic opportunity to start something up.

 

Well, 90 percent of the people that we work with are women. We will occasionally work with brothers, husbands, fathers usually recommended by women that have already participated or are currently participating in the program.

 

They are typically considered unbankable, meaning that they cannot get a loan from a traditional financial institution and they have to be over the age of 18.Click To Tweet

 

So there are sometimes younger women who would like to receive support but we do want to make sure that we’re doing everyth...