This bi-weekly THINK micro meeting was jam-packed with free food, new members and some really interesting MICRO presentations. Thanks everyone for coming!

MICRO presentations

1. Marcus and Alex delivered a very interesting talk about micro insurance, describing how it works and its different implementations.  They discussed how large insurance companies (e.g. Allianz, working through Bajaj Allianz) do the actuarial work, and reinsure the micro insurers, and package together different insurance packages, such as income and life insurance, to be on-sold by local organisations or added to a micro finance loan for a small monthly premium.  Their discussion of “micro pensions” was also very interesting.  I think they are going to write up a little blog post explaining the basics in the near future.
2. I (Yochi) gave a talk about how to use WordPress.com to write for a community blog (like this one).  I discussed creating a wordpress account, writing posts, embedding photos, meta tags, and how to use different post “types” such as links, asides, images and the standard blog post (like this one).  You can find a little PDF spiel here; and, if you have any questions, email me!
3. Hasan discussed the social business he is working on, “Khoombi”, which aims to allow farmers to grow mushrooms, full of protein and other nutrients, alongside their own crops at home.  Khoombi seeks to provide the resources for the farmers to grow the mushrooms, and a market to sell them (cutting out the middle men to increase their profits.  He showed us a video presentation of his business plan, which will hopefully be up soon!
4. Amanda and Nathan gave a talk about Skateistan, and their plan on integrating it with the UTS Long-boarding Society to hopefully run a few fundraisers. It sounds very exciting!

Events

October 11th was the launch date for the first Dine It Forward and was very successful – a sold out event.  There are subsequent events on the 25th and 30th of October, so buy some tickets if you want to come (good food, good entertainment)! All money raised goes to Palmera Projects’ Mannar Rice Mill Project (a social business/micro-finance project in a war-torn area of northwest Sri Lanka).

We also held a fundraiser for the Naandi Foundation, run parallel with the BUiLD awards dinner.  It was a photography exhibition and a silent auction that was very successful, all the photos were sold!