Stories

Mission Investing

  • Martin Eakes: Challenging the Status Quo

    Martin Eakes is co-founder and CEO of Self Help Credit Union 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...

  • Preserving the Social Fabric: Southern CDFIs

    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...

    Ines Polonius
  • Justin Maxson: Why Appalachia Matters

    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: Early Orientation and Beginning of Self-Help

    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...

  • The Bread and Roses of Life

    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...