 I'm Sasha Fisher. I graduated in May 2010 from UVM Arts and Sciences, the degree in Human Security and Studio Art. After I graduated I went to Rwanda and co-founded and am now the director of an organization called Spark Microgrants. So what Spark is doing and the idea behind Microgrants is to build the organizational capacity of communities living in poverty to get together, design a project together, and receive a small grant as a group to invest in a public sector project. It sounds really obvious, right? Let people facing a problem solve the problem themselves and somehow this just isn't being done in the aid world and what we're doing is we're entrusting people facing problems on the ground and people in rural villages in Rwanda and rural areas of Uganda and we're trusting them with their own development. You know when we provide them the opportunity to start their own projects and they usually are very cynical at the beginning. They say you know well we can't do this you should come do it for us but by the end of the project they're incredibly empowered and see that they can initiate this change and that they can use outside resources to enable that change to happen and so it's a very empowering process for people on the ground and it builds a lot of dignity. It's really exciting to see how proud the community members are after the project is implemented. One of the first projects that we did in Uganda was we worked with a man named Aaron who was running a very small CBO which is a small community-based organization. He helped to organize a series of meetings with the woman in his village so that they could design a microgram proposal and the woman initially asked us to come in and build them a school and we said well we can't build you a school but we have $1,600 you could do whatever you want with it. They designed a whole project proposal around building a school for the kids in the area who either were not going to school or who had to walk very long distances and dangerous distances to get to a very poor school. After three months of project planning and building a project proposal with an action plan, a budget, a sustainability plan they submitted the proposal to us. We reviewed it and we gave them feedback on it and then we gave them the $1,600 microgram to build a school. I was very worried that this wasn't you know not nearly enough money to invest in the school but in February 2011 they opened a school for over 90 students. They didn't think they could do it at the beginning and here they were opening a school for their children and funding it and now they're the administrative team for the school. The school has actually received follow-on support from a partner foundation and has now even tripled in capacity and has over 300 students.