Class of 1993

TRACEY PETTENGILL TURNER brings charity to eBay.

It's easy enough to invest in stocks or bonds, just as it's easy to give charitable donations to help the poor in developing countries. Last fall Turner merged the two concepts by launching Micro Place, an eBay-owned startup that allows ordinary people to invest in the world's working poor and earn a return on their investment.

At Dartmouth Turner went on an environmental studies foreign study program to Kenya and used an off term to intern at the World Bank in Nairobi. After earning her M.B.A. from Stanford in 1998, Turner traveled to Bangladesh to work for Muhammad Yunus, the Nobel Prize-winning father of the microfinance movement, which provides very small loans to help poor people grow their small businesses. "Once you talk to women who had taken out loans and changed their own lives, it gets in your blood a little bit," she says. Turner's first startup, 4charity, built a Web-based service to facilitate online donations. MicroPlace (microplace.com), a registered broker-dealer, acts as an online marketplace for microlenders around the globe to offer securities at any interest rate they choose. MicroPlace securities currently support loans in 21 countries, with more to come. "I believe in my soul that to grow the microfinance industry from the 100 million people it serves now to the billion people who could benefit from microloans, everyone from the investor to the hard-working poor person in Bangladesh has to benefit," says Turner.