Working Capital for Community Needs, Inc.

Our mission is to create opportunities for access to microfinance, services and markets to improve the lives and communities of the working poor in Latin America. Our change theory is that by connecting community actors that finance, serve, train/educate, employ or do business with working poor persons and communities in Latin America, we improve the working poor family's income, welfare, and women's empowerment which leads to better lives and communities for the working poor. Our goal is to increase the number of working poor beneficiaries our organization serves through its financing to 38,750 people a year by 2017, a 25% increase over 2013 figures.

Our strategies include a combination of organizational reinvestment and offering more choice on how to get involved to our current and future donors, investors, and advocates. This includes:

1. Updating our understanding of the working poor person's needs and context of poverty in Latin America and learning how to empower working poor persons and families to move out of poverty and stay out of poverty --build in more resiliency to their lives to weather economic shocks and be less vulnerable to their daily risks of falling back into poverty. This strategy includes updating our mapping of where poverty is concentrated in each country where we work, or in countries where we should be. It also includes examining the factors keeping people in poverty and pro-actively addressing them. Targeting low-income women and rural-based beneficiaries remains a priority, due to their continued prevalent poverty rates in the region.

2. Expanding investor/donor choice and outreach into more communities, including opening up choices for which pro-poor offering from WCCN best suits the individual investor/donor's values. It also means finding new partners operating in the same or new under-served poor communities in the region. This also includes making ourselves known to impact investors by attending select conferences and events to better connect with people interested in our work. It also likely includes expanding into at least one new country and new market sectors to reach more poor persons and communities.

3. Bolstering staff and organizational capacity for managing more working partnerships with investable organizations and supporters in the US by investing a portion of WCCN equity and generated surpluses from the WCCN C4C Programs I (Access to Finance & Markets) & II (Access to Housing & Equipment) back into the C4C III/ Access to Incubation & Innovation offering in line with our WCCN Mission focus and non-profit tradition.

WCCN currently has a base of supporters across the US, including donors, investors, and advocates or some combination of all three. WCCN staff and board have expertise in law, financial analysis, accounting, impact measurement, impact investing, lending, nonprofit management, fundraising, marketing, and information technology. In addition, our staff has traveled extensively to the Latin American region and in some cases are from that region, thus bringing perspectives about what will work and what our partners need. Much of that expertise has gone into the creation of WCCN's strategic plan, which provides social impact and financial targets with which to judge our progress. WCCN's board meets monthly to review progress towards its financial and impact goals. In addition, we have been doing this work for more than 30 years in the region.

In 2016, we served 21,996 microborrowers and farmers, 53% of whom were women and 64% of whom were from rural areas. Our average loan size to a microborrower was $1,234, 38% below the 2015 regional average of $2,000. Our total portfolio outstanding at 2016 year-end was $11.2 million and we have invested $116 million in Latin America cumulatively since 1991. Through our value chain partners, we financed 1.5 million pounds of coffee.

WCCN has historically not had the systems and capacity to properly report on the indicators of the success of part 2 of our change theory. Implementing the systems to easily and efficiently capture that data remains a key challenge for this year and beyond.