My Feet Finally Touched the Ground

Sara Shahrokhi on Lending Instead of Giving, and What Rural Iran Taught Her About Herself — Cozy Corner with Hossein Nasiri, Episode 87

For three years, Sara Shahrokhi ran a volunteer charity alongside her full-time job, watching the number of families under her care grow from sixty or seventy to seven or eight hundred. It looked like success. Then she noticed something that stopped her cold: not a single one of the original seventy families had ever left the program. She hadn’t built anything that worked. She had simply made poverty more comfortable to live inside.

That realization is the hinge this entire episode of Cozy Corner with Hossein Nasiri turns on. Sara Shahrokhi is the founder of Ifa, a crowdfunding platform that lends — never donates — to rural entrepreneurs across Iran, built on a conviction that free aid quietly manufactures dependency while loans, paired with real business mentorship, restore dignity. In this conversation, she traces the model from its first improvised loan in a tiny village shop to a platform that has channeled over 57 billion tomans into rural livelihoods — and into the deeper personal reckoning that came with it.

The Woman Who Sold Motor Oil With Pride

The idea for Ifa didn’t arrive as a business plan. It arrived as a moment. Sara describes visiting a village and being pulled aside by a woman named Hajar Khanom, who wanted to proudly show off her “supermarket” — which turned out to be a two-by-two-meter space walled in with garbage bags, where she sold three cans of motor oil to the two hundred households in a region so rocky that only motorcycles, not cars, could pass.

Asked what she dreamed of, Hajar Khanom said simply that with enough money for four cement blocks, she could build a proper room. Sara didn’t have much to give — the equivalent of about two million tomans — but she offered it as a loan, repayable at fifty thousand tomans a month. Hajar Khanom walked an hour and a half each month to reach the nearest bank and paid on time, every time. When Sara returned three months later, the money had run short, so Hajar Khanom had borrowed more elsewhere to finish the room — and still needed working capital for a refrigerator and a cooler. That gap became the seed of everything that followed.

Why Free Aid Became the Enemy

Sara’s central conviction, stated without hedging, is that unconditional charity equals dependency. Traditional aid models, she argues, hand someone cash, clothing, or rent assistance in the moment of need — and that same person remains in exactly the same social and economic position years later. The message embedded in that model, however well-intentioned, is corrosive: that the person receiving help cannot do this themselves.

She draws a careful line: this isn’t about abandoning people who are genuinely unable to work — the elderly, those with disabilities. It’s about everyone else, the people who have the capacity to stand on their own and simply lack a fair shot. Coming from a business background rather than the traditional nonprofit world, she refused to treat charitable work as a zero-sum exercise in emotional relief. A nonprofit, she insists, owes its resources the same efficiency a for-profit company owes its shareholders — except the output isn’t financial return. It’s lasting impact on someone’s life.

Loans, Not Donations — And Mentorship Built In

Ifa’s mechanism is specific: rural entrepreneurs apply online, describing a business idea — a sewing machine, a small shop, a flock of livestock. Ifa’s evaluators don’t simply hand over funds; they walk the applicant through a real planning process. If someone says they want fifty manteaus and twenty million tomans, Ifa asks how much fabric fifty manteaus actually requires, sends them to get a real quote, and often discovers the original number was wrong — sometimes too high, sometimes leaving the business undersized for the actual local market.

Out of roughly five thousand applications, about three thousand have been funded — meaning two thousand were rejected or redirected, often because the applicant’s own market research revealed a flaw before any money changed hands. Successful borrowers can return for second, third, and fourth rounds, with funding amounts doubling each time they repay reliably, building businesses that have, by Ifa’s own monitoring, survived for years against Iran’s brutal inflation.

Radical Transparency, and a Wallet That Never Cashes Out

Ifa’s structure forces an unusual workaround. Iranian financial regulation doesn’t allow nonprofits to operate as pure peer-to-peer lenders in the way platforms abroad do — a lender can’t simply receive a repayment directly into their personal bank account. Ifa’s solution: repayments return to a digital wallet inside the platform itself, which the original lender can then redirect to fund a different entrepreneur, creating a revolving cycle of impact rather than a single transaction. It’s neither pure donation nor pure lending — a hybrid built specifically to survive Iran’s regulatory landscape.

Sara is emphatic about what this transparency means in practice: she knows exactly where every toman of a lender’s contribution goes, and that fee structure is published openly so contributors understand exactly what portion supports Ifa’s operations.

Why the Sewing Classes Always Failed

Hossein raises an obvious comparison: government and charitable institutions have long tried skills training in villages — sewing classes, handicraft workshops — and these efforts have consistently failed to produce lasting change. Sara’s answer cuts to motivation itself.

She describes watching institutions enroll fifty people in a village sewing class simply because attendance unlocked a loan — with no real demand for fifty seamstresses in a village that size. Ifa’s first year carried the same flaw: roughly seventy to eighty percent of early loan recipients were people who wanted to try something entirely new, with no track record. The failure rate was around thirty percent. Today, with a ninety-three percent success rate, Ifa’s target borrowers are people already doing the work — someone who’s apprenticed for years in poultry farming and now wants to start their own operation, not someone discovering the trade for the first time through an institutional incentive.

“A bad idea executed well,” she says, “is far better than a good idea executed badly.”

When Women Quietly Became the Majority

One of the conversation’s most striking statistics arrives almost as an aside: in Ifa’s first year, twenty-six percent of borrowers were women. Today that figure is sixty-three percent — without any deliberate campaign to recruit them.

Sara traces this to something simple: visibility. As a woman herself, visiting roughly seventy or eighty villages in person, her presence alone changed what felt possible for local women, who gained confidence watching someone who looked like them lead the process. Word spread informally — husbands began directing their wives to handle loan applications, since the local Ifa representative was a woman they trusted. Sara also points to data showing women allocate the overwhelming majority of their income directly back into their children’s nutrition and education, while men’s spending patterns diverge more toward personal or discretionary expenses — and that women borrowers, by Ifa’s own tracking, default far less often than men.

A Question Iran Has Never Really Asked Itself

The conversation’s most philosophically charged passage concerns what Sara calls Iran’s lack of institutionalized value-creation: a cultural pattern where people wait for a system, a person, or a relative to place them on a track toward productive contribution, rather than deciding for themselves to build something. Sara saw an opening in connecting that gap with the emerging culture of microfinance — introducing both the motivation to create value and a financing mechanism to support it, simultaneously, into people’s lives who had rarely encountered either.

She points to something she finds genuinely hopeful: younger generations are already comfortable with crowdfunding logic — streaming, donations, audience-supported content feel entirely normal to them — while older generations, including her own, find the concept foreign. Her advice to anyone hoping to fund a personal project this way is blunt: you need a story you believe in completely, one that explains clearly what change you’re trying to create, because friends and family will fund passion and conviction long before they fund a polished business plan.

Zagros, and Going Beyond the Loan

Ifa’s most ambitious current initiative, the Zagros project, extends the same logic toward environmental survival. Roughly forty to forty-five percent of Iran’s renewable surface water originates in the Zagros mountains. Villagers who can’t farm because of resource scarcity often turn to burning or clearing forest just to plant a small wheat field — destroying the very ecosystem the whole country depends on for water.

Ifa’s approach isn’t environmental activism in the traditional sense — it’s targeted economic intervention: helping villagers build alternative livelihoods, like beekeeping, that don’t require burning forest to survive. It’s the same lending model, the same hands-on mentorship, applied to a problem most people would frame as purely ecological rather than economic.

The Moment Mahsa Amini Made Her Feel Powerless

Sara’s most candid and emotionally exposed passage concerns a turning point separate from Ifa itself. Before Mahsa Amini’s death, she describes feeling capable and accomplished. What followed showed her, in her own words, exactly how small, how illiterate — politically, economically, socially — she actually was. She didn’t know how to answer her own question of why this kept happening to a country she would do anything for.

That confrontation with her own limits sent her into a deliberate process of self-education: tracking down economists and political analysts, reading, listening, studying the history of development in Iran and other countries, trying to understand the deeper patterns behind the question of why. She describes the Sara who exists today as fundamentally stronger, more resolved, and clearer in direction than the Sara who existed before that reckoning — while being honest that she’s still only at the beginning of that road.

Why “It’s Been This Way for 200 Years” Isn’t an Answer

Sara pushes back hard against what she sees as Iran’s reflexive explanation for its problems — the habit of tracing every difficulty back to a vague historical cause and stopping there, as though two centuries of repeating the same patterns were simply destiny rather than something to interrogate.

“You can’t operate in the twenty-first century,” she says, “with a twentieth-century mental model. The twentieth century was the century of ideology — people were idealistic, and that shaped how wars and movements happened. The twenty-first century is different: the internet, the global village, economic interdependence — every mechanism has changed.”

Her own contribution, she’s careful to say, was never having a perfect answer — only the willingness to keep asking what could actually work when the old answer clearly wasn’t. She traces Iran’s social infrastructure back to its rural roots — as recently as sixty years ago, seventy percent of the population lived in villages, versus thirty percent today — and suggests that the genuine social cohesion still visible in religious and ceremonial gatherings, organized without formal bureaucracy, holds clues about forms of solidarity that got lost somewhere in the country’s rapid, imported modernization.

Feet on the Ground

Before Ifa, Sara admits she lived in what she now recognizes as a kind of fog — entitled, in her words, without fully realizing it: expecting the world to hand her certain outcomes, frustrated when it didn’t. Watching Hajar Khanom build a business with pride out of almost nothing recalibrated something fundamental.

“I really mean it when I say my feet came down to the ground,” she says. “When you’re under the illusion that you’re entitled to things, you constantly feel disappointed. I don’t have anything left to be disappointed about anymore.”

She describes becoming someone who no longer complains, who takes more responsibility for her own outcomes, and who genuinely believes that if a woman with twenty million tomans and almost nothing else can build a sustainable life, the rest of us have far less excuse for stagnation.

She Has Never Once Considered Leaving

In the days before this recording, amid heavy national distress, Sara describes seriously considering whether she had the emotional bandwidth to show up at all. She came anyway — and used the moment to make something close to a public commitment: despite everything happening in Iran right now, leaving the country has never crossed her mind, even briefly, because of how much genuine work remains to be done and how much room there still is to build something that matters.

“When I walk outside a door abroad,” she says, “I feel like that place doesn’t need me — there’s nothing for me to change there. But here, in my own country, there are a hundred things I want to change, and that I can change.”

The Cozy Corner — The Lowest Point

Asked where her own cozy corner is, Sara’s answer breaks from the episode’s usual pattern: it isn’t a place or a routine. It’s rock bottom. Ifa, Sima, and her newest fintech venture all began, she says, from a point so low she sometimes sat for days simply crying, genuinely believing she’d reached the absolute end of the road. Hossein offers a theory — that her drive toward impact and a deeper sense of meaning is precisely what turns her lowest moments into ignition points rather than dead ends — and Sara, turning it over for the first time, agrees.

She’s clear that this isn’t passive endurance. In her darkest periods, she has never once waited for someone to come rescue her; she has always found her own way out, using whatever tools she had, sharing her joys with others freely while working through her pain largely alone.

A Dedication

Asked who she’d like to dedicate this conversation to, the answer arrives instantly, and she seems genuinely pleased by how fast it comes: herself — for the sheer, tireless persistence to keep going.