Hollywood actress Natalie Portman receives multiple requests a day from different charities that would like her to help promote their causes. Unlike other celebrities and their ‘fashionable causes’, Portman knows microfinance. “I really wanted to learn about this in depth,” she said.

Since graduating from Harvard in 2003, Portman has served as an Ambassador of Hope for FINCA International (Foundation for International Community Assistance). FINCA is an organization that gives out small loans primarily to women in developing countries to help them start their own businesses through its ‘village banking’ groups.

A village banking group consists of 10 to 20 neighbors who come together to guarantee one another's loans, administer group lending and savings activities, and provide mutual support. The loans are used to purchase start-up materials, such as pots and oil. This method, called micro financing, helps underprivileged people get access to credit. “I have seen that ending poverty is possible if we all act, even in small ways, together,” Portman told Newsweek.

Her passion for micro-credit has taken Natalie to Uganda, Guatemala, Ecuador and Mexico, where she visited women who benefit from FINCA’s services. These women, who were once forced to live in dire conditions, are now able break out of financial disenfranchisement. “When you meet a mother who is forced to sign a letter with a thumb print because she can’t read or write and then you meet her daughter who is graduating from university to go to med school, this change all in one generation is simply overwhelming. And it’s only because of microfinance,” she said at a visit to Stanford University last October.

In the fall of 2007, Portman addressed thousands of students on behalf of FINCA during a two-week college tour that, in addition to Stanford, took her to the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), the University of Southern California (USC), University of California at Berkeley, as well as New York, Columbia, Harvard and Yale Universities. Portman explained how FINCA works, and urged the audience to look for innovative ways to improve the lives of those living in extreme poverty. “We have the technology and the tools to alleviate poverty on a global scale. All that is standing in our way is education and will,” she said at the launch of the Village Banking campaign at New York University (NYU) in May of 2007.

Natalie urged students to use technology and new web tools such as the social networking sites of MySpace and Facebook to support the campaign against global poverty. “On a daily basis, our generation connects with technology that can also be used to alleviate poverty on a global scale,” she said. “Each person can make a difference, often with just the click of a mouse.”

FINCA International has a MySpace profile which currently shows parts of Portman’s video diaries of her experiences last April in Mexico and Uganda. In those two countries, she saw first-hand how Village Banking can transform families and communities.

Portman said that bringing attention to a worthy cause is the least she can do, “I’m lucky, by chance, to have this sort of power and attention because what I love to do also gets media attention.”

As an Ambassador of Hope for FINCA, she takes the challenge of achieving the Millennium Development Goals seriously. “Microfinance is not charity; it is just widening opportunity for the people who deserve it.”

Think. Know. Act.

Learn More

• UN Millennium Development Goals (MDGs)
• Children and the Millennium Development Goals (UNICEF)
• A practical plan to meet the MDGs (UNDP)
• UN Capital Development Fund

Get Involved

• One: The Campaign to Make Poverty History
• Make Poverty History
• OXFAM International
• Kiva: Loans That Change Lives