Local activists help advance a global attack on poverty $1 at a time.

They are not the most modest New Year’s resolutions: rescuing millions from poverty and helping revolutionize the way the world treats its poor. But Carlyle and Alfred Seccombe of Carmel Valley, as the Central Coast’s representatives for RESULTS, a grassroots group founded to rally the political will to end poverty, made that resolution (again) for 2007.

“I think it’s very important for us to know and acknowledge that the end of poverty is actually achievable in our lifetime,” says Alfred, a contractor. “Hundreds of thousands of normal people like us are working to bring it about.”

Alfred’s ambitions are not as naive as they might sound, thanks to an increasingly well-known and well-supported lending practice called “microcredit” (or microloans) originally conceived by Dr. Mohammad Yunus, a Fulbright-scholar economist who studied at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee.

“I don’t want to talk about remodels. I want to be part of the world.”

Yunus found his inspiration for microcredit around 30 years ago in his native country of Bangladesh, while he taught economics and became active in poverty alleviation. After an effort to help local poor people farm land near his university failed to effect any real change, he approached a poor vendor who sold reed stools. Yunus asked about her situation to better understand her plight. What she told him formed the seed of a revolution that has already grown to help more than 400 million people—roughly the entire population of the US plus 100 million—worldwide: Because the only money she could borrow came from predatory lenders, she earned just pennies a day. With her help, Yunus set about gathering a list of other women in her village in similar situations. He asked about their plans and what they needed—which ultimately totaled less than $30—and lent it to them. Each lady went on to gain financial freedom and repay the loan. A much stronger village emerged, and Yunus had his model for changing the world: provide interest-free money to empower the poor to pull their families out of poverty with dignity.

“My belief is poverty is not caused by poor people,” he says on the DVD Creating a Poverty-Free World, “poverty is caused by the system we have built; poverty is caused by the policies.” The most obtrusive policy: banks refuse to extend loans to the poor because they believe the poor will not repay the loans.

As Yunus extended his microcredit to another village, then a whole district, 98 percent of clients repaid their loans (Grameen’s current repayment rate is 98.91 percent). But banks still hesitated to sign on. Yunus responded by founding the noncommercial Grameen Bank.

The change it has helped foster in Bangladesh has been stunning. In 30 years since the first microloans were made, 21 million clients have received loans, affecting 105 million more family members. Better yet, a growing number of microloan banks are extending other servies. Each Grameen client must meet a comprehensive 10-indicator plan—obtaining everything from healthy water and sanitary conditions to steady commitment to education and savings—before Grameen will declare that client successfully liberated from poverty. Nearly 60 percent have. The UN Development Program has joined many in trumpeting Banglash’s superior progress in health programs, education and female empowerment—about 97 percent of Grammen loans go to women, reflecting what Yunus learned early on.

“I see the right to credit as the number one [human right],” Yunus says. “That’s where it starts: income…then other things become easier. The right to food, shelter, education.”

But given the billions still mired in poverty globally, Yunus didn’t stop there. At the first RESULTS-sponsored Microcredit Summit in 1997, Yunus and company drew inspiration from the UN’s Millenium Development Goals, a blueprint for a more just and peaceful world—they thought microfinance aims should be included, so they announced their own goal: microcredit for 100 million of the world’s poorest people—those that earn less than $1 a day—by 2005.