Self-Help’s Eakes Joins Ford Foundation Board

Posted under Industry News on October 4, 2011

The Ford Foundation board of trustees announced in September that Martin Eakes has been elected to its 14-member board. Eakes, CEO and co-founder of the community development lender Self-Help and its policy and research affiliate, the Center for Responsible Lending (CRL), was named earlier this year as one of 12 recipients of Ford’s Visionaries Awards.

Eakes helped formulate the Coalition for Responsible Lending (separate from CRL) in 1998 after learning that a Self-Help borrower was locked in an abusive loan, and that numerous other borrowers were having the same experiences. The coalition comprised 120 financial institution CEOs and 86 organizations representing 3 million North Carolina citizens to stop predatory lending practices in NC and nationally. According to Self-Help, “the work of the Coalition resulted in the nations first antipredatory mortgage lending law being enacted in the state of North Carolina in 1999. The Coalition was also responsible for helping sunset the authority for payday lending in state of North Carolina.

From the Ford Foundation

The Ford Foundation Board of Trustees today announced the election of two new members, Martin Eakes and Sir Tim Berners-Lee.

Martin is one of the most successful social entrepreneurs of his generation, having founded a series of national nonprofit organizations. Tims work in the early development of the World Wide Web makes him one of the great innovators of his generation. They have launched ideas and built institutions that have had enormous impact in the lives of people around the country and around the world, said Luis Ubias, president of the Ford Foundation. Together they represent an extraordinary addition to the Ford Foundations board.

Eakes co-founded and leads Self-Help, a community development lender that has provided almost $6 billion in financing to more than 60,000 homebuyers, small businesses, and nonprofits. Eakes also founded the Center for Responsible Lending, a leading research and advocacy organization for equitable banking practices. Most recently, Eakes has built a network of credit unions in North Carolina and California with more than $900 million in assets.

Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1989. He is currently a professor at MIT as the 3Com Founders Professor of Engineering in the School of Engineering with a joint appointment in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. He is also a professor in the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton in the United Kingdom.

Berners-Lee is director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which develops open standards to ensure the long-term growth of the Web. He is director of the Web Science Trust, which supports the global development of Web science. He is also founder of the World Wide Web Foundation, launched in 2009 to fund and coordinate efforts to advance the potential of the Web to benefit humanity.

Through their work and in their lives, these individuals have shown a deep commitment to the values of individual opportunity and social justice that lie at the heart of the Ford Foundations mission, said Ubias, adding, We are honored to have them join our board and know they will contribute greatly to our work across the globe.

Including Eakes and Berners-Lee, seven new trustees have joined the 14-member Ford Foundation board since Ubias arrived in January 2008.