A new survey is shining a harsh spotlight on the urgent need for non-predatory financial services in the South. A recent Gallup poll found minority-owned businesses face tougher challenges obtaining loans. The study, commissioned by Wells Fargo, found that 77 percent of black business owners use their own personal cash to finance their businesses, and 47 percent of black-owned businesses are...
From 2002 to 2015, Justin Maxson served as President of the Mountain Association for Community Economic Development in Kentucky, where he supported and generated innovative development strategies, including small enterprise lending and technical assistance solutions, energy efficiency support strategies and targeted research and policy efforts aimed at creating benefits for low-to-moderate...
Martin Eakes is co-founder and CEO of Self-Help and the Center for Responsible Lending. He holds a law degree from Yale, a master's from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public Affairs at Princeton and a bachelor's degree from Davidson College. A native of North Carolina, Eakes is a nationally recognized expert on development finance and has been honored by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur...
Many of the men and women advancing meaningful change all over the South were children or teenagers when Martin Luther King delivered his How Long? Not Long speech in Montgomery, Alabama, 50 years ago this week. On March 25, 1965, they might’ve watched television coverage of Dr. King telling 25,000 people, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it...
The scene is an early October forum in suburban Atlanta. A gathering of conservative Georgia lawmakers who focus on education issues pose a challenge to the people at the meeting – help us make the case it is time to raise state taxes for the sake of our schoolchildren.
Whoa. What did they just say?
Not many of Georgia’s elected officials publicly broach the...
