The vision for Lift Kids began with a member of the Lift Kids board, Joseph Barrett, and his decades of overseas experiences in Eastern Europe, Africa, and Southeast Asia. Returning to the states, he pledged to remember the poverty he encountered and to leverage his over 20 years experience in senior positions of the banking and economic development industries to fight it.

Currently a CEO and professor of finance and global strategy, Joseph began to recognize both the power of the micro-credit movement and the need to infuse it with sustainable and educational components, so that recipients of credit—mostly women with children—don’t have to choose between their entrepreneurial dreams on the one hand, and feeding their children or sending them to school on the other. He also began to see how the growing trend of experiential philanthropy could empower these efforts, to the mutual benefit of giver and receiver.

Joseph joined forces with powerful, credible, like-minded professionals to shape the philanthropic model that became Lift Kids—executives from 3M, engineers from the University of Minnesota and Engineers Without Borders, and leaders from General Mills, Travelers, and other major corporations. In 2006, Lift Kids began to identify credible partners, as well as donors, for Lift Kids Villages in Guatemala, Ethiopia, Kenya and Vietnam, and to build the foundation for decades of additional action across the world.