Leadership
Martin Eakes
TrusteeMartin Eakes, co-founder and head of Self-Help—a community development lender that has provided almost $6 billion in financing to more than 60,000 homebuyers, small businesses, and nonprofits—serves on the Ford Foundation Board of Trustees. He is a member of the Education, Creativity and Free Expression Committee.
Eakes also founded the Center for Responsible Lending, a leading research and advocacy organization for equitable banking practices. Most recently, he has built a network of credit unions in North Carolina and California with more than $900 million in assets.
In May 2011, Eakes was selected as one of 12 recipients of the Ford Foundation’s Visionaries Award for his contributions to creating financial opportunities for the poor. He is a nationally recognized expert on development finance and has also been honored by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation as a MacArthur Fellow for his work.
In 1998, Eakes helped assemble the Coalition for Responsible Lending, a coalition of financial institution CEOs and organizations representing millions of North Carolina citizens to stop predatory lending practices across the United States. The work of the coalition resulted in the nation’s first anti-predatory mortgage lending law enacted in 1999 in North Carolina.
Eakes’ serves as trustee of the North Carolina Institute for Minority Economic Development and Guilford College, and as director of the Urban Partnership Bank.
Eakes holds a law degree from Yale Law School, an M.P.P. from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public Affairs at Princeton University, and a B.A. from Davidson College, where he majored in physics and philosophy.
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