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Tonelli Heads
Randolph attorney and former Selectboard Chair Carolyn Tonelli has taken down her shingle and is leaving town tomorrow for a year in the small Andean country of Ecuador. Randolph attorney and former Selectboard Chair Carolyn Tonelli has taken down her shingle and is leaving town tomorrow for a year in the small Andean country of Ecuador. Her goal: To work with locals to establish a non-profit institution that will extend "micro-loans" to villagers who want to set up their own small businesses. For start-up capital, Tonelli is bringing $10,000 she has quietly raised among friends and acquaintances here. Now she is banking on the research she’s done and the connections she’s made to turn this dream into a self-sustaining reality. At 62, Tonelli has just collected her first Social Security check, and is checking out the veracity of an aphorism she heard somewhere: "You don’t retire; you refire." "Every single thing has fallen in place," Tonelli said about her Ecuadoran adventure, in an interview in her village home last week. It is also true that Tonelli has been thinking about her retirement options for "most of my adult life," and thoughtfully planning for this particular project for years. Starting five or six years ago, Tonelli made conscious steps —cutting back on personal expenditures and converting part of her house into an apartment—so that come age 62, she could live on Social Security income. Two years ago, she started taking Spanish lessons, as Ecuador seemed a likely destination for a retirement-age project. Tonelli is a member of Bethany United Church of Christ in Randolph, which has had a 10-year relationship with the village of San Cristobal, high in the Andes outside of Cuenca, Ecuador’s third-largest city. This church-village relationship grew out of a personal relationship started in late-1990s when Bethany pastor Kathy Eddy and her husband spent a sabbatical in Ecuador, meeting a young couple who have been ministering to San Cristobal. Earlier Projects Over the years, through various fund drives and group trips, Bethany members have assisted in projects that have brought potable water, greenhouses, and a vocational school to the tiny village. Tonelli thinks that charity is good, as far as it goes, but that self-sustaining projects that don’t dry up when donors disappear are even better. So she started thinking about how the something that she wanted to do could be locally controlled and self-perpetuating. She began researching "micro-credit," and a new kind of "banking for the poor," pioneered by Bangladeshi economist Muhammad Yunus. The recipient of the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize, Yunus established in 1976 a new banking system that made small loans to poor people who could never qualify for conventional loans. Since then, his system has expanded and micro-loans have enabled millions of Bangladeshis to start up small businesses. Tonelli also contacted the founders of The Women’s Trust, a New Hampshire non-profit that has established a small micro-credit foundation in a village in Ghana. Their input was particularly helpful, since that project is "exactly the scale I contemplate," Tonelli noted. Micro-credit programs enjoy an extraordinarily high rate of repayment by loan recipients. The system set up by The Women’s Trust in Ghana, Tonelli noted, uses "peer pressure and support" to encourage repayment of $50 to $100 loans. Tonelli, not leaving much to chance, did a trial run last spring, spending five weeks in Cuenca and San Cristobal. She wanted to find out if her Spanish was adequate, if she could tolerate living at 14,000 feet elevation, and if her half-baked idea was realistic. "I felt like I belonged there," Tonelli said last week, adding that she was welcomed "with open arms," thanks to Bethany Church’s connections. Collaboration Although Tonelli is bringing expertise and cash to this project, she is looking forward to "putting aside my authoritarian, legal self" and letting others run the show. "It has to be a grassroots venture—I can’t go impose a system," she explained. "We’re starting small, not changing everything overnight—maybe not changing anything at all." At present, Ecuadoran villagers in need of cash are dependent on money-lenders who charge exorbitant rates, a system which sometimes results in borrowers losing all. Maybe that’s not a great system, Tonelli noted, but it’s what’s in place in Ecuador. Any change needs to be undertaken with an eye to how other parts of the culture are affected, she stressed. "So I have to be educated," she said. "That is why I am not bringing a specific proposal." Tonelli said she also knows that the poor people of San Cristobal have plenty to give her. She has already experienced their generosity. During her stay last spring, she was repeatedly welcomed into mud adobe homes—homes with no windows, no water, no electricity—for meals and the pleasure of a good visit. "They don’t have some things that we do, but on a spiritual and community level, they are way ahead of us," she said. "Please don’t make me out like Mother Theresa," Tonelli emphasized. "This is for me." ____________ |
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