The Cambridge Microfinance Initiative was recently featured in a Boston Globe article, describing some of CMI’s most inspiring success stories:

If not for a flier stapled to a telephone pole in Central Square, Anastasia Mathis-Belay might have abandoned her dream of owning a document-processing business. That scrap of paper, posted amid announcements for band gigs and cleaning services, eventually led to a boost in her confidence and her credentials by giving her a resource she didn’t know she could access: Harvard…Last year, Mathis-Belay made just $26,000, $10,000 more than the year before. No bank wanted to give her a loan, the 39-year-old said, though she was proud of the jump in her income. She had been to the federal Small Business Administration and to SCORE, an organization of volunteer retired business executives, for guidance, but neither lends money or assists in applying for loans. “It was getting pretty daunting and discouraging as time went on,” she said. “I wanted to start small and still no one could help me. My friends all thought I was crazy, and my family thought I was unrealistic. But now I have hope.”

Nasrin Imam is CMI’s first loan success story. She and her husband own a Bangladeshi restaurant, the Bengal Cafe, in North Cambridge. She was recently granted about $5,000 to expand her business. Initially, she wanted to expand her delivery service by buying a van and hiring a full-time delivery person, she said. But after meeting with CMI each week and creating a business plan, she saw other changes she needed to make first — such as increasing the menu prices to reflect the cost of materials and labor, and increasing her marketing and advertising.

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