This summer, Impact Collective got to be part of North Carolina's Governor's Page Program, a program that's been running since 1973 and brings students from all over the state to Raleigh for a week inside state government.
We toured the Legislative Building, the State Capitol, and the Executive Mansion, and sat down with state officials to talk about how policy gets made — not the textbook version, the real one.
Naturally, we couldn't stop thinking about our own work. We see this problem all the time: people and small businesses with no credit history get shut out of bank loans, even when they're perfectly capable of paying one back. So all week, we were asking — what would it look like to tackle this as actual state policy?
By the end of the week, we found out, because we had to present our own proposal in front of state officials. We pitched state-funded microloans for small businesses in North Carolina's smaller counties and cities — the ones without a nearby bank or the credit history to qualify for a loan in the first place.
It was one thing to talk about access to capital in theory. It was another to stand in front of the people who actually write the state budget and make the case ourselves.
Grateful for the experience, and already thinking about what's next for this work.