In the first year of the Youth Credit Union Program's (YCUP) founding, it was clear that the youth participants wanted a way to get emergency money within a week or two. So we started the Loan Program.
Lisa (one of our adult staff at that time) gathered a group of youth to be the Loan Officers in the Loan Program. We first started out by learning what a loan is, how it works, what interest is, where a loan comes from. After we got a good idea of what banks think of a loan, we setup our own guidelines of what a YCUP loan would be. We wanted to be able to give out $100 loan for up to 1 year, at 10% APR. And that loan would be only used for positive uses, like food, rent, school, clothing etc.
Last year, we had two major goals. One major goal was to complete the LOAN TRACKER DATABASE. Mainak Joarder (Loan Officer) designed a FileMaker program to keep track of our loans. The other major goal was to finish all the paperwork needed to backup our program.
In August, we were invited to attend the Youth Lending Board, a program of the California Credit Union League. It was concerned with issues that faced loans and lending to kids. The loan committee gave a presentation explaining our loan program. We shared issues that kids might encounter about lending, from a kid's point of view.
In June 1999, eleven members went to New York to talk to other YCUP organizations about their operations. We traded information about our program, what worked and what didn't work.
This year, we are officially ready to give out loans to our members. Our Loan Officers are ready, willing, and able to review your loan application. We are hoping to get at least 5 loans out this year without incident.
Other goals we have are:
-We want to update our LOAN TRACKER DATABASE from calculating simple interest to calculating compound interest. We will ask the original creator of our current LOAN TRACKER DATABASE to add our revisions in, and hopefully update the whole program while he's at it.
-We are thinking about a reward system for our members who have been on time with their loan payments. For example, by giving them lower interest rates, or letting them borrow more than $100, to show that we appreciate their services.
