ABOUT US

Educating students about social impact and changing lives, one project at a time.

Our Story

Back in mid-2010,

While completing his Bachelor of Commerce at the University of Melbourne, our founder, Fernando Tamayo, studied at the University of Pennsylvania for a semester as an exchange student. There he stumbled across Penn Microfinance, an organisation through which he had the opportunity to see Microfinance at work first-hand in his native, Peru.

He came back to Melbourne to find that there weren’t Microfinance organisations that provided students with the opportunity to experience what he did in Peru, and that most students did not know what Microfinance was. 

So with five passionate BCom friends, they founded the Melbourne Microfinance Initiative in mid-2010, the first Australian student-run Microfinance organisation. And in a little over six months, MMI grew from a group of six students to an organisation of more than three hundred members. 

In 2011, MMI provided semester-long consultancy services to NGOs in Cambodia, Laos and Ghana, ran the Global Student Microfinance Day, and was operated by twenty-five students and alumni. 

Now,

Over 13 years later, MMI continues to create a lasting impact in communities across the globe. We remain the Australia’s largest student-led Microfinance organisation, with over 200 members in 2023. Now with a focus on our own backyard, MMI runs six year-long consulting projects each year both at home and abroad, reaching 13 countries over 54 projects. We also organise a diverse portfolio of events and workshops that aim to up skill students, to enable them to create positive change in their own communities. 


We’ve now held our two largest and most successful events now for 11 years running - Careers in Social Impact, a panel event that features individuals working in impactful careers; and the Global Microfinance Case Competition, an international case competition that is held in partnership with eight different universities, where students are tasked with finding and presenting a solution to a current problem of one of our clients. 

Our values

  • We are driven to help people.

  • We embrace the power of microfinance.

  • We are business-minded and high-performing.

  • We are curious and thoughtful.

  • We are genuine and honest.

Our strategic pillars

  • Empower: We aim to maximise internal committee opportunities to grow professionally and personally

  • Exposure: We will expand the breadth and depth of our event offerings and external relationships

  • Wellbeing: We aim to create a safe and comfortable space for the MMI committee to share their wins, struggles and reach out for help.

  • Evaluation: We will constantly measure, evaluate and monitor our impact quality

  • Evolution: We aim to cultivate a constructive culture of trailblazers and thought leaders

Our mission

MMI strives to be the unique feature in every student’s university experience by providing the opportunity to apply their university degree to have a positive social impact.

We connect like-minded students who care about issues of poverty, inequality and global economic development to ignite a community with the desire to make a real difference in our world.

At MMI, we aim to challenge the causes of poverty by bringing together a diverse range of knowledgeable, curious and driven students to perform innovative social impact projects.

To improve the lives of the marginalised by promoting sustainable and inclusive business practices to microfinance institution across the world.

Our goals

  • Social Impact: to have a direct impact on communities in the Asia-Pacific and the world

  • Student Engagement: to empower students with practical knowledge and skills

  • Inspire: to inspire people to take action against poverty and social inequality

“MMI has truly been the highlight of my university life, whether it’s the friends that I have made along the way or the professional skills that I have developed. Moving from Brisbane at the beginning of university, I was grateful by how welcoming the committee is and quickly found a second home within MMI. The mentorship in the club is difficult to find elsewhere and being surrounded by such high calibre people has pushed us all to achieve our best selves. With social impact as our core, MMI has evolved into an organisation that operates on a global scale and continues to make a tangible difference in our world.”

— Zhixuan Zhang (President, 2024)