Mission Statement

“Our mission is to provide micro-loans, training, and support to the women of La Ceiba in order to help alleviate local poverty.”

For me, this mission statement is short, concise, and to the point. It directly explains our actions in La Ceiba, and our ultimate goal. It does not preach a “feel good” attitude, but rather highlights our ultimate goal of alleviating poverty. I have struggled whether to remove the world “help” or not. I look forward to reading the other mission statement posts.

3 Responses to “Mission Statement

  • russellscott
    14 years ago

    Practical observations:

    1- This mission statement restricts us to women as clients. I strongly feel that a mission statement should do what you have said–that is, be short, concise, and to the point–but in as broad terms as possible so as to capture what it is we do, but in such a way that it can be done multiple ways. Restricting us to women as clients limits the potential for growth in the future.

    2- I’m not going to comment on the “alleviate poverty” aspect, since i’m sure my opinions are already known. but what i am curious about is what exactly this mission statement accomplishes. How do micro-loans help anyone? How does “training” and “support” (two more ambiguous terms) help anyone? If you’ll forgive me inserting my opinion some more, but this mission statement has much to say but very little that is concrete. For La Ceiba to be efficient and effective, our mission statement should be the exact opposite of Ambiguous–consider the “walk away” test in one of the previous readings. who is to say that if we expand, other people will have a different opinion on how to satisfy this mission statement?

    3- Long story short, I feel like you have stated the common perception of what La Ceiba does, rather than its mission. Please don’t take that the wrong way, i’m trying to provide constructive criticism and I consider the mission statement to be a very important aspect.

    In General I like what you have. I hope this constructive criticism is beneficial to you (even if you do happen to disagree with some parts of it).

  • I agree with Russell in that I think you are stating what we do now (which is definitely what a mission statement is suppose to do). The only problem I have with it, is that it doesn’t allow us to change in the future. Laura and I were discussing earlier today about how MFIs are considered to be the way to fix poverty right now, but this may change as new information is gathered and analyzed. Who knows, in a few years experts might say that MFIs are actually more harmful than good. If that occurs, our mission will have failed entirely. If we keep the statement more general, then we will be able to change our organization as needed without losing our main goal of poverty alleviation or what we decide it is.

  • While I understand where you are both coming from, I stand firm by my belief that a mission statement absolutely functions to inform people the function of our MFI. While my mission statement may not provide that adequate room for growth we are looking for, we cannot lose sight of the characteristics of our organization that make La Ceiba unique and distinguish us from the rest. We DO only work giving loans to women, and thats an important characteristic of La Ceiba. I love that our class is visionary, but La Ceiba needs to be STABLE and SUSTAINABLE in its current state before we all begin worrying about growth and expansion.

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