We’re floored on a daily basis by students who have struggled against all odds to finish their education, lenders who time and again come back to change yet another person’s life, and Fellows who dedicate a portion of their own lives to bringing microloans to more students in developing countries. It’s the students, the lenders, our partners, and our Fellows that compel us to do what we do. But at the end of the day, it’s our supporters and donors that make it all possible.

So we are thrilled to announce that Vittana’s efforts received a big boost today! Google.org announced that it will support Vittana to build 24 additional student loan programs by 2013.  This support is perfectly timed at the end of an insane year of growth. We doubled our field partners from 10 to 20 microfinance institutions over the course of 2011 – that puts us in 12 different countries on 4 continents. Whew.  And after taking a little more than two years to reach our 1,000^th student, we’re on track to pass 2,000 students in December, less than six months later.

On stage at TEDx Brussels in November, Vittana CEO and co-founder Kushal Chakrabarti asked “What’s the one thing that can truly change the course of someone’s life? Education.” We’re thinking big. We’re out there to start a global market for education microfinance – one that will reach 1 million students by 2015. Because at the end of the day, we believe student microloans are the most scalable, sustainable, and impactful tool we have to fight global poverty.

So thank you to Google and to our many other donors and supporters for helping us change the conversation about global education.

As I sit here on the day before Thanksgiving, what comes to mind is the over 250 students on Vittana right now who are poised to transform their lives by continuing their education. Whether it’s Omar Ahmad‘s desire to become a civil engineer in Jordan or Lidia Severina Aban‘s goal to drive economic development in Bolivia, each one of our students has a dream. And that dream will not only change their lives, but the futures of their children and their grandchildren.

As many of you know, the past two weeks have been a rollercoaster ride as we swelled to the top 3 of Chase Community Giving – a crowd-sourced philanthropy program that allows users to vote for local charities to help them win up to $250,000 in grants. On the last day of the competition, however, we were devastated to find out from Chase that over 8,000 of our votes were considered ineligible due to technicalities in voting that they are unable to disclose to us for proprietary reasons. We have been in ongoing communication with Chase to discover why these votes have been called into question since Vittana would never engage in auto voting, robo voting, or any other means to create fraudulent votes. We were thrilled to see that our international community turned out in full force to support us and are deeply saddened by the disappointing results of this competition.

What I’m most thankful for today though is our phenomenal Vittana community of supporters and lenders. Whether you voted for us in the Chase Community Giving challenge or have lent directly to our students, you have personally made a difference in someone’s life. And for that every one of you counts.

When I see my 93 year old grandmother tomorrow, who is still full of as much gumption and drive as I can imagine she was seventy years ago, I’m going to thank her. She was the one who set the direction for my family when she graduated from college and gave each and every one of her children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren the chance for a better life. With your support, every one of Vittana’s students can turn to their grandchildren one day and ask, “What do you want to be when you grow up?”

Are you a Rails developer? Join our team!

Job Description

Vittana is looking for a scrappy Rails developer to join our team and help build www.vittana.org into the #1 marketplace for global education. Vittana is already a recognized leader in Seattle (Seattle 2.0: “Best Non-Profit”, Fast Company: “5 Social Capitalists Who’ll Change the World”, New York Times: “next new thing”) but we have our sights set on something even bigger: serving 1,000,000 students by 2015!

We’re putting together a small, top-caliber engineering team and we’d like you to be part of it. You’ll work closely with the team to launch big new features (24-hour lending challenge, anyone?), continuously improve our website product (AARRR!), and help develop back-end systems to help us scale. Your work will be a big part of helping us achieve our mission, so you need to not only be a wickedly smart developer, but you also need to care about changing the world. We’re hard-headed idealists here, and we’re looking for a few more to join our team.

Responsibilities:

1. Launch new website features and continuously improve web U/X (65%)

• Implement pages using HTML/CSS + JS from design PSDs + interaction flows for new pages and/or major new functionality
• Independently iterate and continuously improve customer U/X based on Vittana-specific user metrics
• Develop and launch new functionality using Ruby on Rails, jQuery,

2. Help develop back-end systems for scale (25%)

• Iteratively improve operations pipeline (e.g. customer service, student supply chain) with operations team

3. Help maintain existing systems (10%)

4. Do whatever it takes to get this bird off the ground

Skills

Required:

• Ruby on Rails, MySQL, HTML/CSS + JS
• Passion for building amazing products and rock-star U/X
• Ability to work in agile + iterative development environments

Strongly Desired:

• B.S. or B.A. in Computer Science, HCI or related discipline; however, we’re more impressed by passion than degrees, GPAs or years of experience.
• Work experience at a previous startup or personal side projects

How to Apply

We want to know how you think. Tell us three things you’d love to change, add, remove or overhaul completely about Vittana’s current website: www.vittana.org.

Email your three suggestions,  your resume and a few sentences introducing yourself to jobs@vittana.org with “Rails Developer // [your name]” in the subject line.

More about Vittana & Your Role:

We’ve been successful, and it’s clear that our cause resonates with people. As we enter the next stage of our mission, we need to tap into even more inspiration and translate that into more real impact. Your job is simple: build the best website product on the planet. We’re looking for someone who wakes up every morning, thinking “How do I put more students in college today?”

You will be underpaid, overworked — just like the rest of us! — and may on occasion be asked to carry 6-ton elephants on your back across a bed of nails while being chased by a pack of hungry Antarctic penguins. (And deal with the CEO’s bad jokes!) But, as a very early employee and a member of the core team, you will help re-define what education means for young people around the world and help set the direction of what that really means. In short, what you do will matter.

Though we’re still a young organization, we are backed by world-class VCs and entrepreneurs, and have been rocketing forward for the past 3 years:

• growth: 10x annual portfolio growth for last 3 years: 0 -> $50K -> $500K; on track for $3-5M to 5,000 students in 2011
• impact: 291% income change, e.g. $3/day -> $8/day after a Vittana loan in Vietnam
• viability: 99% repayment by ~1,000 students
• press: “Best Non-Profit” (Seattle 2.0), “5 Social Capitalists Who’ll Change the World (Fast Company), “hotbed of innovation” (Economist), “next new thing” (New York Times), “superbien” (LA Times), etc.
• supporters: Mitch Kapor, Tim O’Reilly, Motwani Circle, Peery Foundation, early executives from Amazon, Google and Microsoft
• team: key executives, staff and board members from Amazon (CEO led tech for $1B team at Amazon), Unitus (15-year industry veteran COO), and Kiva

Our Mission

In most developing countries, student loans just don’t exist. Together, as a community of people who believe in the power of education, we are enabling young people around the world to finish their education and achieve their dreams.

Vittana works with microfinance organizations in developing countries to build student micro-loan programs, often providing the first and only real access to financial aid to would-be students. Students from those programs appear on our website and, because of the $25 and $50 loans that people like you and I make, are able to get the money they need to finish their education.

When you make a loan through Vittana, 100% of your funds go to the student. Using your loan, the student finishes college (or vocational school or technical school) and gets her degree. When the student repays, Vittana repays you the full amount of your loan — if you lent $25, you are repaid $25.

We continue to be humbled and honored by the support of Seattle’s tech community. Two weeks ago, we won the Seattle 2.0 Award for Best Nonprofit Startup. Over the weekend, TechFlash ran this great article on Vittana.

Here’s a favorite quote about how our CEO Kushal Chakrabarti sees the world and how we face challenges:

We’re not in it for the money, we’re in it to really make a difference in the world for young people. But the challenge and the opportunity is to take something that we know works [micro-loans for students] and that can fundamentally alter the lives of young people around the world, [and use it to reach] hundreds of thousands and million young people… it sounds like an absolutely exciting challenge.

Microfinance and hip hop don’t usually find themselves being used in the same sentence, but a week ago on @DJHyphen and J. Moore’s Sunday Night Sound Session, that’s exactly what happened.

If you haven’t heard of Sunday Night Sound Session, this late night radio show is on Seattle’s Kube 93 station and showcases hip hop, reggae and R & B music. (The Seattle Post-Intelligencer once called it “the best radio show you’ve never heard“). It’s not often that the hosts invite non-musical guests to their Queen Anne-based studio—they usually keep themselves busy with the likes of Lupe Fiasco, Bilal, and Wiz Khalifa. But last week DJHyphen made a special exception for Vittana team member (and SNSS fan) Nick Cain.

Nick joined DJHyphen and J. Moore in the studios, where they listened to the show together and Nick got the chance to tell the audience about Vittana on the air.

We wanted to say a special thank you to DJHyphen and Sunday Night Sound Session for the great opportunity, and also give you a recap on the impact that you and your listeners have made here at Vittana:

In the last week and a half, over 60 new lenders have joined the Vittana community and made loans to Vittana students thanks to you and SNSS community!  Thanks for all you do, and keep the good music coming!

Click the image below to stream or download the show. It’s full of great music, so we recommend you give the whole show a listen, but if you want to skip ahead, the Vittana interviews are at 25:30 and 55:20.

A few weeks ago we got a nice surprise in our inbox; we got the news that Netted was featuring Vittana in their daily email.

Quite nice of them, don’t you think?

Here’s the article in case you’d like to take a peek.

Netted sends a daily internet-focused email that introduces its members to one great new app, website, and online products and tools. Their tagline is “Better living through the internet”.

We’d like to take this opportunity to thank everyone at Netted (which is the brain child of the same folks that brought you the Webby Awards) for helping Vittana get the word out about our work to bring student lending and better education to the rest of the world.

We woke up this morning to some disturbing news: that Nobel Prize Winner (and “grandfather” of the microfinance movement) Muhammad Yunus has been asked to step down as Managing Director of Grameen Bank (which he founded 1983).

We’ve been following the story and wanted to send you a chronology of articles so that you can keep up-to-date on these big changes going on in microfinance.

March 2:

• NYT: Microcredit Pioneer Ousted
• Forbes: Muhammad Yunus Told to Step Down from Grameen Bank
• Nicholas Kristof (Editor at the NYT): http://www.facebook.com/kristof
• NPR: Bangladesh Forces Microcredit Pioneer From Bank
• BBC: Bangladesh: Muhammad Yunus Disputes Grameen Sacking

Feb 28:
The Guardian: Grameen Bank Founder Muhammad Yunus Survives Attempt to Oust Him

Feb 21:
The Guardian: Microfinance Guru Faces Removal From Grameen Bank

Feb 15:
BBC: Muhammad Yunus: Bangladesh Urges Him To Retire

Jan 26:
The Guardian: Microfinance and the Fallout from the Muhammad Yunus Case

Jan 18:
The Guardian: Grameen’s Muhammad Yunus in Court for Defamation Case

Jan 12:
BBC: Bangladesh Announces Probe into Grameen Bank

Jan 5:
NYT: Is Bangladesh Trying to Take Over Grameen Bank?

Earlier this week we posted about the great stuff going on at the Clinton Global Initiative, but yesterday was a particularly special moment in Vittana history.

Wednesday September 22, we announced the launch of our new initiative Vittana/Africa: Bringing Student Loans to Africa on stage at the special plenary session on Democratizing Education at CGI. This initiative marks our entrance into Africa, where we hope to serve more than 10,000 students with access to loans for post-secondary education within the next five years. (Learn more in our full press release.)

We were recognized as a CGI Commitment Maker by special guests like retired General Wesley Clark and were honored by receiving a handshake from President Bill Clinton himself.

We don’t have the official photos yet, so please forgive the blurry shot below, but here’s our fearless Co-Founder and CEO with General Clark at CGI.

And if you’d care to view it, here’s the entire plenary session on how education is the key to economic growth:

It’s time for the news roundup! Vittana has appeared in some great articles in the past few weeks. Let’s take a look:

Faces of Vittana
Huffington Post wrote a wonderful article about Vittana and featuring some of our students. They said: “Through Vittana, people from around the world pledge money to students — often in small increments — and help them to achieve their dreams.“

Microloans Help Students
Associated Content posted this piece informing about Vittana and how you can be involved. They encouraged others to be a part of Vittana by saying, “think about being a miracle to someone! Help a person get an education and you will be a hero.“

The Imperative Need for America…
Arianna Huffington herself wrote this post about the future of America, and mentioned Vittana highly in it. She wrote: “A great illustration of this is the work being done by Vittana, a micro-lending site for higher education… It’s a shining example of how innovative non-profits can lead the way — especially now that so many governments are struggling and cannot be depended on to meet every need.“

Microfinance Program
The Seattle Times published an article on a Microfinance Program in which they mention Vittana. They said: “Vittana helps fill a niche that for all its success, microcredit had not addressed. Micro loans typically go to people operating small businesses, but loans for college had no such source of funding. Some students have already landed jobs and started to repay the loans, said CEO Kushal Chakrabarti.“

We have also received a lot of mentions from blogs. Thanks to the ones listed below!

Dowser

Rising Pyramid

Urban Research

Seattle Seattle

Cool Great Stuff

Know of a post or article we missed? Leave it in the comments!

In case you missed it, here is your reading guide to Vittana in the news for the last month:

Huffington Post: “HuffPo Game Changers: Your picks for the Ultimate 10”

After 1.7 million votes, our CEO Kushal Chakrabarti was named the Ultimate Game Changer in Philanthropy by Huffington Post readers.

NextBillion: “Vittana: Student Loans and a New Generation of Microfinance”

NextBillion states that there is a “lack of attention paid to possible synergies between microfinance products and education”, and explains how Vittana addresses this market failure.

Check out our video and hear directly from our students!

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Myz8llpbpDU[/youtube]

Seattle Times: “More on crowdsourcing: ideas for philanthropy and development”

Kristi Heim shares that our CEO made the Huffington Post “Ultimate Game Changer” list and that voting is open. She also wrote about us here back in July.

Social Earth: “Vittana Applies Microfinance Model to Education”

Social Earth supporter Naiomi believes “that everyone should have an equal opportunity to pursue a world class education”. Her article outlines what we are doing at Vittana to work toward that goal.

TBD: “Vittana // Simply Genius”

I think the title says it all for this post.