Grapevine: Ballet Dancer Turned Charity Disrupter

Founder Stories

No one could have predicted the path of today’s founder. Emily Rasmussen may have grown up in a log cabin in the Sierras, but that didn’t stop her from having big city dreams. Her love of dance brought her to New York with the hope of becoming a ballerina. 9/11, coupled with an injury forced Rasmussen to rethink her path and so she opted to slip off her ballet shoes and go to college where she focused on studying international relations and interned at the UN. From there she traveled to India where she harnessed her talent for combining community and philanthropy in the form of microfinance loans, eventually starting her very own model. This is the story of Grapevine.

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