<font style="color: rgb(204, 255, 255);">Understanding the reality of poverty is the critical step in addressing the problem. Time and again, microfinance has been proven to be a reliable and effective method of combating poverty. With the goal of educating others to the reality of living on a dollar a day and helping to contribute to a solution through microfinance fundraising, we wish to create a documentary that will be impactful and engaging to our fellow university students, who have the potential to create the innovative solutions needed to combat world poverty. By living on less than one dollar a day for nine weeks in a rural Guatemalan village working as subsistence farmers, we hope to bring attention to the pivotal role that microfinance can play in empowering the poor. </font> <br><br> <font style="color: rgb(204, 255, 255);">To achieve this, we will shoot a documentary in which 4 American college students will systematically research how Guatemalan subsistence farmers in rural villages manage money by working alongside them, interviewing them and living as close as possible to the financial reality with which they are faced. Specifically, we will follow the development of 6-8 families/entrepreneurs in the town of Peña Blanca as they face the complexity of the financial reality that confronts them, using </font><font style="color: rgb(204, 255, 255);"><u>Portfolio's of the Poor</u></font><font style="color: rgb(204, 255, 255);"> financial diaries as a model. While not compromising the integrity of our documentary, we also want to create a compelling story to which people living outside of poverty can relate. We feel that traditional documentaries have often fallen short in this regard, failing to bridge the gap of understanding between people trapped in poverty and those outside it. We will begin by taking a $300 microfinance loan to be used to rent a quarter-acre piece of land and purchase seed. Our budget for the nine weeks will be 63 dollars each (to be unpredictably distributed by the filmmakers), which we will budget to grow crops, feed ourselves and pay our bi-weekly installments towards our microfinance loans. This will provide an inside perspective into how the Grameen Bank, the world pioneer of microfinance, operates, including both challenges and benefits.</font>
