Long before I started Coalition, I was 24 or perhaps 27—it was too long ago to remember exactly—I bought a round-trip ticket to Nairobi with nothing but my thesis research plans and a stubborn conviction that if we didn't truly understand what women experience, we would never be able to truly help them. I was an adventurous, rebellious, risk-taking grad student (not a lot has changed), and for my thesis, I wanted to better understand the daily lived reality of women whom the world had forgotten.
Poor African women are often lumped into one homogenous category, void of all nuance and personality. I suppose it's easier that way—if we don't truly get to know them, then we don't have to be a part of their suffering. We're neither the problem nor the solution, and we can carry on with our days without giving them much thought.
But I wanted to know them. I needed to understand their reality, not the sanitized version that made for tidy academic papers.
What Decolonizing Research Actually Looks Like
Here's the uncomfortable truth about most academic research: Scholars fly into communities, conduct studies "on" people, publish findings for Western audiences, advance their careers, and yet nothing changes for the people who participated. The communities are left exactly where they started, if not in worse condition.
I was determined not to be part of that extractive model. In an effort to decolonize my graduate work, I chose to give back to the women who were core to my research in a way they clearly articulated: access to microloans.
This was the early 2000s, before microlending became a development buzzword. The only model that existed was Mohammad Yunus's Grameen Bank, which he had founded by lending $27 of his own money to 42 families in Bangladesh. I cashed in a few thousand dollars of savings bonds from my grandparents and started a small microlending program with the eight women who were part of my research project.
That's how this began. My grandmother's savings bonds funding loans for women half a world away.
When Your Calling Finds You
I continued traveling back and forth to Kenya, and eventually, people started asking what I was doing on these trips. When I explained I was giving small loans to rural Kenyan women, to my absolute surprise, people wanted to financially support my efforts.
So what do you do when people start writing checks for your charitable work in an African country? You start a nonprofit, even though you have absolutely no idea what you're doing. That's how Zawadisha began.
I learned many hard lessons during those first few years, but I was determined to build an organization run by Kenyan women, enabling them to best serve Kenyan women. In the process of refining our model—we started with cash loans and then moved into products—I was introduced to Monica, who would transform my chaotic vision into a sustainable reality. With a solid team, a small office in Maungu, and a proven model, Zawadisha began to flourish.
The Transformational Impact of Microloans
It was never easy—this kind of work isn't meant to be—but we witnessed firsthand how transformational it was in the daily lives of these women. Imagine one day you're spending hours walking to fetch water, and the next day you have a rainwater tank at your house. One day you're lighting your house with toxic kerosene that makes your children cough through the night, and the next day you have a three-bulb solar lamp. Your children sit on the dirt floor and jiggers burrow into their bodies, and then the next day you have chairs and your babies are finally safe.
Because when you have no electricity or water, a thatched roof and mud walls, and no ability to afford the upfront cost of goods that would improve your life, Zawadisha's microloans make the biggest difference. We're not claiming to alleviate poverty—extreme poverty is structural and requires interventions at every level. But we make life fundamentally better for women and their families, and that's not nothing.
The Big, Scary Change That Worked Out
Initially, we concentrated almost exclusively on expanding our donor base, particularly monthly donations. And it was doing quite well. Then COVID hit, and the fear it invoked led to an absolute collapse of our donations overnight.
I had to figure out a new business model to keep our team employed and our women supported, so I started selling sisal baskets made by women in our community at the local farmers' market in Reno. I built an online shop from scratch. I diversified products—sisal baskets grew into market baskets from Ghana, jewelry from South Africa, textiles and more from talented artisans across the continent.
There I was, CEO of Coalition Snow by day and basket vendor on weekends, selling handmade goods from the side of a van in parking lots. And I loved it.
Every basket represents a loan for a water tank. Every piece of jewelry helps fund a solar lamp. Every purchase is both an investment in beauty and an investment in women who deserve partnership and real economic opportunity.
Bringing It Full Circle: Microloans Come to Coalition
For fifteen years, I kept these two worlds separate—Zawadisha in Kenya, Coalition in the mountains. Different continents, different missions, different communities. Or so I thought.
But here's what I've learned from spending half my life working with microloans in rural Kenya: Access to capital is the single barrier that keeps resourceful, capable, hardworking people from achieving what they're already capable of doing. Remove that barrier, and everything else follows.
So why should that principle only apply in Kenya? If microloans work this remarkably well for women in rural Kenya, breaking down the single barrier of access to credit and unleashing all the resourcefulness that was always there, why couldn't Coalition create something similar for women in the US?
Zawadisha taught me that removing one barrier—access to credit—unleashes everything else. Women who were always hardworking, always resourceful, always capable, finally have the capital to prove it and transform their lives on their own terms.
That's why we launched a membership program like you've never seen before, one that's actually worth your money, with perks that matter and two tiers that take everything I learned from Zawadisha and apply it directly to creating access and opportunity.
Learn More About Coalition's Membership Program
ALLY Members contribute to a giving circle that funds programs supporting women and girls globally. We pool our resources, vote together on which organizations and groups to support, and fund donations that make real impact. It's collective giving at its finest, and you get a voice in where that money goes.
COMRADE Members fund microloans for women-owned businesses in the outdoor industry. Zero interest. Flexible repayment. The same model I've been refining for fifteen years in Kenya, now supporting women entrepreneurs right here who are trying to build something meaningful but can't get traditional financing because banks don't understand passion-driven businesses.
I have more than fifteen years of experience developing and facilitating grassroots microlending programs across Kenya. My real-life expertise is strengthened by my graduate work studying bottom-up approaches to social change, feminist economics, and resilience theory. I know how to structure these programs so they actually work, so the money goes where it's supposed to go.
And here's what makes this different: You're not just a customer funding our pet projects. You're part of the decision-making. You vote on which organizations receive grants and which women-owned businesses receive loans. This is transparent, participatory, and built on fifteen years of learning what works and what doesn't.
Because helping people even in the smallest ways matters. Because we have the platform and the expertise and the passion. Because we want to do more than sell products. Because we can create something beautiful together that breaks down barriers to the outdoors, the same way we've been breaking down barriers in Kenya for the past fifteen years.
What started with my grandmother's savings bonds in rural Kenya has come full circle. Now we're using that same model to create access and opportunity in the outdoor industry, one loan at a time, one woman-owned business at a time, one barrier removed at a time.
Maybe that's what comes next—taking what works in one place and having the courage to apply it everywhere.
Jen Gurecki, she/her
Founder, Zawadisha & CEO, Coalition Snow
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