Lynne Patterson, right, consults with an entrepreneur assisted by Pro Mujer in Nicaragua.

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When Lynne Randolph Patterson left her job as a family educator in Long Island and moved to Bolivia in the late 1980s at age 50, she never dreamed she would be instrumental in creating one of Latin America's largest and most successful microfinance networks, Pro Mujer. Since it was founded, the organization has loaned $582 million to poor women entrepreneurs in Latin America and has assisted them with health care and business and empowerment training.

As the nonprofit organization’s cofounder and director, Patterson, now 70, has learned to value the skills and experience of midlife career changers. Many of Pro Mujer's top executives are encore careerists with backgrounds in business and finance.

The organization now operates in Bolivia, Peru, Nicaragua, Argentina and Mexico, serving 220,000 women and impacting the lives of more than 1 million children and family members. While the organization is best known for the success of its microloans, Pro Mujer also strives to empower women through "learning that would be internalized and applied, changing attitudes and practices."

Adela Hualuque, 43, is one of Pro Mujer's many success stories. She started out as a client in 1990 and four years later was offered a position as a credit officer for the organization. She continued to rise within Pro Mujer and is now a supervisor at their El Alto office. Hualuque's experience exemplifies the transformation Pro Mujer's training can inspire in women. "I’ve seen for myself that women can advance, that we are worth something and can help ourselves,” she said.

Patterson has an encore story of her own. She was a schoolteacher and family educator in New York City and Long Island for 25 years before she moved to Bolivia, with her husband, who was working for a relief organization providing food for children through women's groups in El Alto, a poor suburb of La Paz. There she connected with Carmen Velasco, a Bolivian professor of psychology. Together they decided to offer family planning and child development education at the women's meetings.

After spending six months developing a program for the destitute and often illiterate women of El Alto, Patterson and Velasco thought their work was done. But the students asked them to help them with their most pressing problem: poverty.

"Many of these women were already involved in some kind of income-generating activity, Patterson explained, "but they lacked the business training and financial literacy that would allow them to be successful and earn an income that could support their families."

Patterson and Velasco designed a new course in basic accounting and business planning, which was well received. After learning how to run a business and manage their finances, the women were ready to receive loans.

Patterson and Velasco realized they could no longer work from their homes, and traveled to Washington, D.C., to incorporate Pro Mujer as a nonprofit in the U.S. Pro Mujer received funding from the U.S. and Bolivian governments to provide training and loans to the women in El Alto.

Microloans are small sums of money which are lent primarily to poor women and are intended to help them build small businesses that will become self-supporting. Loan recipients form small community groups in which they guarantee each other’s loans to eliminate the need for collateral.

Pro Mujer gives microloans using a "village banking" strategy adapted to each community's particular needs. The nature of its work, which also includes health care and life skills training, has required the organization to look to managers who do not have backgrounds in nonprofit work.

"We are seeing people with skill sets who don’t want to work in traditional commercial enterprises anymore, and want to work for an organization that is having a broad social impact,” Patterson says of her colleagues. Pro Mujer leaders include encore careerists Rosario Perez, chief executive officer; Jenny Hourihan, chief financial officer; and Eugenia Acosta, human resources director.

In many ways Pro Mujer continues to be an extension of Patterson's work as a family educator in Long Island. "We are teachers, basically, using credit to educate women," says Patterson. "I don't think my goal in life has ever changed. I have always had a profound respect for education and a very strong belief and commitment to women and their abilities to alleviate poverty and to change, in positive ways, families and societies."

Author Daniel Werner is an intern at Civic Ventures.