Big, Bad, Audacious Unitus: Building a $1.2 Billion Social Enterprise for Microcredit

This action research is a social science analysis of a progressive organization over two decades, Unitus, Inc. It was established to accelerate the microfinance movement starting in 2000 to tear down the barriers in order to expand capital for funding poor people’s struggles. The first few dozen NGOs to do this beginning in the 1980s were mostly small, underfunded, and limited in terms of managerial competence. In contrast, Unitus came into being as a social enterprise to remedy these deficiencies. Its founders sought to design a radically visionary approach that would offer a new model for doing microfinance using investment partners, not just small donors. Over the next decade, it raised $1.2 billion, partnering and providing loan capital to various NGOs in 23 countries benefitting many millions of the poor. After a decade of success up through 2010, Unitus then shifted strategically and morphed into different organizations throughout the following years until the present. This paper analyzes the origins, systems, strategies, and successes in achieving such results, as well as challenges, problems and criticisms until 2021.

The Great Wall of Mexico

Ted Cruz appeared to be in the driver’s seat in the race for the 2016 GOP nomination. He won the backing of key evangelical groups and his message also appealed to nonreligious Tea Party members. He was backed by three billionaires and large numbers of small donors. Then he ran into the “Great Wall of Mexico.” Chapter 4 illustrates how the entire GOP establishment was so discredited from overpromising and underdelivering that an outsider like Donald Trump—bragging about his money while attacking everyone else as corrupt—attracted record crowds and a cult-like following to his “identity festivals.” His “birther” claims about President Obama won him a large following among people who didn’t want to accept a nonwhite president. He was the only candidate with a solution to the immigration stalemate—deportation—and the only one to propose taxing the rich to protect Social Security and Medicare. Trump wasn’t the first to come up with these ideas—nearly every single proposal he made had been made earlier by other Republicans—but he was the first to recognize the anger in the GOP’s voting base, and to take Ted Cruz’s incendiary tactics to an even greater extreme.

Does Public Campaign Funding Crowd Out Private Donation Activity? Evidence from Seattle's Democracy Voucher Program

During each election cycle, the city of Seattle distributes four \$25 vouchers to every registered voter, which may be donated to and redeemed by campaigns for city office. Through a difference-in-differences research design, we study the causal effect of Seattle's program on various outcomes in city council elections in the first two cycles after implementation, with two comparison groups drawn from other cities in Washington and California. We find that the program led to an approximately 62-100% increase in total contributions and a 400% increase in number of unique donors. The effects on dollars and donors are entirely driven by small donors, defined as those who contribute less than $200 to a campaign. We find statistically insignificant evidence of decreases in private donations, although our point estimates suggest moderate-to-substantial crowd-out ratios. We further show that the program led to a 76-86% increase in candidates for city council. These results provide some of the first causal evidence on the effect of decentralized public campaign finance schemes, while also speaking to broader questions measuring the effects of money in politics, campaign regulation, and the effects of public funds on private giving.