Poverty, Gender, and Microcredit

BACKGROUND TO SERVICE LEARNING AND COURSE OVERVIEW Alexis de Tocqueville in the 1800?s observed that the strength of American democracy lay in its spirited voluntary associations and emphasis on community. He declared however, that democracy and its manifestation of individualism, while a virtue, could become a vice when taken to extremes, especially in the form of hyper individualism. Several contemporary scholars have revealed that America has already reached this vicious stage of its democracy, one in which people are so preoccupied with their own concerns and successes that they have shut out of their consciences and consciousnesses the concerns of…