A Lifetime of Giving

When Herb and Rosie Kuehne first heard about FINCA in the late 1990s, they realized that our approach of helping the world’s most marginalized people by providing a hand up rather than a hand out was a perfect fit for them.

As Rosie recently put it, FINCA loans and other services “were helping people overcome hardship, allowing them to get more value out of their time and labor.” Herb and Rosie knew firsthand just how hard the lives of the poor could be. In the early 1970s, they spent eighteen months living in a tiny village in the mountains outside of Taxco, Mexico.

“There were maybe 400 people in the whole community,” Rosie remembers. “There were no roads or running water.” Like their neighbors, Rosie and Herb used pit toilets, pulled water from a nearby well and boiled it for safety, and dealt with the occasional scorpion.

Several years later, Herb won a Fulbright Scholarship that took the family to Uruguay, which was in the middle of a military dictatorship and a long economic slump. The people they met were amazing, welcoming Rosie and her family despite the oppression they faced. According to Rosie, “living in Uruguay and Mexico softened Herb and my hearts.”

As their children grew and became independent, Herb and Rosie slowly increased their giving. In the years before Herb died in 2017, he and Rosie decided to give the bulk of their estate to charity. Rosie is gratified:

I feel happy knowing our gift will continue to improve the lives of families in the developing world for years to come.

If you’d like to give a hand up to those living in poverty around the world, consider making a donation to FINCA today.