Savings and loan activities can play a critical role in bringing communities together, helping them to address their needs in a very practical way but also bringing about political change within the community itself.  Experiences in many countries including Thailand have shown that savings and loan groups tend to come together to pool their resources into larger and more flexible funds and receive support from those doing similar activities.  These networks add greatly to activities.  They open up community processes to checking and cross-referencing, they also draw together groups facing similar problems such as a lack of land tenure or those working in the same trade.

 In order to further these initiatives, it is important to set up some kind of Urban Poor Fund to directly support large-scale improvements in urban poor housing and related development processes.  The experiences with UCDO in Thailand in organizing the Urban Poor Fund through community saving and loan activities in a national scale have shown that the existence of such a revolving fund is significant and beneficial to urban poor development.  The revolving fund also serves to blend the formal economic and financial system to the poor people’s saving and loan groups so that large-scale community processes can develop that correspond to the diverse needs and process of the urban poor groups.  The Fund provides access to immediate and much-needed credit for community groups.  At the same time, it draws together the process and links various community development processes in different ways.  It is also important to be highly participatory by communities at all level of the Fund management.  In this way, the perspective of the users can influence terms and conditions of lending, helping to ensure it is appropriate, deepening the relationships between the Fund managers and community members, and increasing the analytical capacities of the leaders themselves.