Matt Flannery

NEWDAY SOCIAL ENTREPRENEURSHIP DISTINGUISHED SPEAKER SERIES

Matt Flannery, founder of Kiva, will be visiting Tulane in January as a feature expert in the NewDay Speaker Series.  Kiva is a non-profit that connects people through lending to alleviate poverty.  Leveraging the internet and a worldwide network of microfinance institutions, Kiva lets individuals lend as little as $25 to help create opportunity around the world.

In December 2005, Flannery left his job to devote himself to Kiva full-time.  As CEO for ten years, Flannery led Kiva’s growth from a pilot project to an established online service with partnerships across the globe and hundreds of millions in dollars loaned to low income entrepreneurs.  Flannery is a Skoll Awardee and Ashoka Fellow and was selected to FORTUNE Magazine‘s “Top 40 under 40” list in 2009.  In 2011, Flannery was chosen for the The Economist “No Boundaries” Innovation Award.  More recently, Flannery co-founded Puddle.com, which is a village banking service in the cloud for the USA.  Flannery graduated with a BS in Symbolic Systems and a Masters in Philosophy from Stanford University.

The NewDay Social Entrepreneurship Distinguished Speakers Series presents prominent leaders from across the field of social entrepreneurship to share their own experiences, challenges, insights, thoughts, and recommendations to students and the community.  The speaker series provides the Tulane community an opportunity to meet and engage with some of the most remarkable people working in the area of social entrepreneurship today.