👑 CROWN LETTER: JESSICA JACKLEY

“If we solve this, we can solve world hunger.”

Lender Mentor

Lady Banyan of Vouched Short Loans

Date: February 21, 2026

Dear Jessica Jackley,

Your admirable and excellent work has been part of my design brief for years, even before I had words for what I was trying to fix.

Village Enterprise and Project Baobab put you in front of very small entrepreneurs in East Africa, where you saw that tiny amounts of capital, coupled with close relationship, could change a family’s trajectory. Out of that came Kiva — a way for anyone with $25 to back a specific person’s work, one loan at a time — and later ProFounder and your investing work focused on financial inclusion, the sharing economy, and social justice.

I know you know all that of course. I reference it because reading it seemed somehow familiar — except you’ve reached destinations I’m trying to get to. I grew up watching a different set of systemic failures, but I recognized the same pattern: the hardest-working people are often the most structurally undercapitalized.

My parents were missionaries in Tanzania; we left on the last commercial flight ahead of Idi Amin’s invasion, then they spent years as foster parents in the States. I grew up without television, reading and watching systems fail in slow motion. When I finally had the tools to build something, I treated platform cooperativism the way you treated micro-enterprise in Uganda and Kenya: not as a metaphor, but as a design specification.

The USAA Principle

I have been in so many circumstances where I needed a mini-loan.

I thank God, truthfully and with respect, for USAA, because when I had at least one dollar in my checking account, I could go to the gas pump and fill up in order to drive and pick up the kids from school, and USAA would pay it, and charge my account no fee if I paid it back within a day. Free baby car seats. A dispute system that saved us $800 when a van rental company tried to double-charge us. A program where I took our rent money and got a CD, used it as the basis for a credit card when my credit was shot, then used that card to pay my rent and rebuild — until my kids started life with 700+ credit ratings and rented their first apartment without a cosigner, because I added them as authorized users and they shared the good history. That counts as a success in my world.

A little generosity, just a tiny little bit, made ALL the difference in my life, and my wife and children’s lives.

That’s one of at least 16 reasons why I built what I built. Every humanitarian feature in this platform exists because I or someone I knew of needed it and it didn’t exist — or because someone like USAA showed me what it looked like when it did. A sadly rare example.

You saw the same thing in East Africa. The woman who needed $25 to buy a sewing machine. The farmer who needed $50 to buy seeds before the rains came. The difference between “structurally undercapitalized” and “thriving” was often absurdly small — if someone would just trust them with it.

The Throughline

Where Kiva and ProFounder helped individuals route capital to specific entrepreneurs, Liana Banyan is my attempt to re-wire the market those entrepreneurs have to operate in.

We start by equalizing economies around the world by employing a patented-so-it-can’t-be-misused three-gear currency differential. In essence, and the white paper is attached, the system uses three interlocking currencies — Credits, Marks, and Joules — that function like an automotive differential: external currencies turn at different speeds (exchange rates), but the internal platform economy maintains stability. This enables users from weak-currency economies to participate equally with users from strong-currency economies through effort-based debt clearing and stored-value instruments.

The differential absorbs the economic disparity so that Bob in Greece and Mary in Switzerland both get exactly 1 Credit worth of value — regardless of what the forex markets do. “If we solve this, we can solve world hunger.” Even though the problem isn’t really about money, or supply; this gets the solution a lot closer.

Anyway, I’m getting ahead of myself.

Then instead of a donor or lender choosing a borrower, we built a cooperative marketplace where every transaction runs on a simple rule — Cost + 20% — with 83.3% of top-line revenue flowing back to the people doing the actual work, and long-term ownership residing with the workers instead of outside investors.

The throughline from your work to mine:

Village Enterprise / Project Baobab: Grants, training, and accompaniment for the smallest entrepreneurs, rooted in relationship.

Kiva: Person-to-person micro-lending, turning that relationship into a scalable, global platform where “someone like me” could be matched with “someone like them.”

ProFounder and Untapped / Collaborative-style investing: Tools and capital that trust communities and “unexpected founders” to know what they need.

Liana Banyan: The infrastructure layer that bakes those same values into every purchase, so that once an entrepreneur shows up, the default economics already favor them.

Or in one line: Where Village Enterprise, Kiva, and ProFounder showed that small, relational capital can transform one entrepreneur at a time, Liana Banyan is the cooperative infrastructure that lets those same entrepreneurs keep 83.3% of every dollar they earn — with Cost + 20% and worker ownership wired into the platform itself – on equal footing, worldwide.

VSL: Vouched Short Loans

One of our sixteen initiatives is called VSL — Vouched Short Loans.

Not a bank. Not “village savings.” Vouched.

Your circle vouches for you. Social trust replaces credit scores. Small loans — starting at $50 — backed by the people who know you, not by collateral you don’t have. The USAA principle, scaled through community accountability instead of institutional generosity.

The borrower might also be a meal provider in Let’s Make Dinner, a musician in JukeBox, a small manufacturer in Let’s Make Bread, a grocery coordinator in Let’s Get Groceries. The loans aren’t isolated. They’re part of a network where every transaction already returns 83.3% to the person doing the work. The loan helps them start. The infrastructure helps them keep what they earn.

What I’m Asking

I know you’ve spent years helping people ask “what if things were different?” — in their finances, in their communities, and in the stories they tell themselves about what’s possible.

Liana Banyan is my answer to that question: a business model, not a charity; mutual aid with infrastructure, not disruption theater.

I’m not asking you to endorse it. I am asking whether you’d be willing to look at the mechanics and tell me if you recognize the same heart you carried from East Africa into Kiva.

There’s a red carpet reservation for just you to examine… whatever you like – the mechanics, the philosophy, the math, the papers, the patents, the structure, all of it; from inside, without a chaperone. If you go to www.LianaBanyan.com/red-carpet, and enter a domain-specific email address, then you’re in – on your schedule, unsupervised. I built it in public anyway, but this gives you a grand tour of the highlights while allowing you to wander at will with the same permissions I have, minus editing ability.

If you’re open to it, I’d love 30–45 minutes for a focused conversation on one concrete question: Given what you’ve seen across Kiva, ProFounder, and your current work, what would you change about a Cost + 20%, worker-owned marketplace before it hits scale?

Even one or two “watch out for this” notes from you would likely save us years — and help more of the people you’ve been fighting for from a different angle.

If That Conversation Goes Well

I have a Crown waiting for you.

Every initiative in Liana Banyan operates as a council. The Crown is the First Seat — the leader, the tie-breaker, the voice on our Steering Committee. VSL needs someone who understands that microfinance isn’t about money — it’s about dignity, trust, and connection.

You’re that person.

But I’m not leading with the ask. I’m leading with the question. Because if you look at what we’ve built and don’t recognize the heart — then the Crown wouldn’t fit anyway.

Enclosures

Along with this letter, I’m sending:

1. A Considered Approach to Universal Sustained Economic Prosperity — The academic paper outlining the theoretical and economic foundations of Liana Banyan.
2. Three-Gear Currency Differential — The white paper explaining the economic equalization mechanism.
3. VSL Business Plan — The operational blueprint for the initiative I hope you’ll consider leading.

The implementations are at LianaBanyan.com. The full documentation — claims, diagrams, operating agreement, and ledger logic — is at Cephas.LianaBanyan.com.

Read them. Pick them apart. Tell me what breaks.

Either way, thank you for the work you’ve already done. It made it easier for someone like me to believe that asking “what if” and then actually building the answer is possible.

Help each other help ourselves.

With respect —

Crewman #6

Jonathan Jones Founder, Liana Banyan Corporation Founder@LianaBanyan.com · 406-578-1232 LianaBanyan.com · Cephas.LianaBanyan.com

“I was so completely blown away by the idea that I quit my job, dropped everything and moved to East Africa to help.” — Jessica Jackley, on hearing the esteemed Muhammad Yunus speak

FOR THE KEEP ⚔️ BISHOP — Version 005 — February 21, 2026 Status: CANONICAL — Ready for Send