Carolina Planning want you to be part of the 60th Anniversary Celebration
As part of the department's 60th anniversary celebration, Carolina Planning - DCRP's student-run journal - wants
to feature alumni profiles in the upcoming summer issue.  Please send us a brief update (no more than a page)
on what you are doing professionally and how your planning degree has served you in your career.  Some of these
profiles will be featured in the upcoming issue, and others will be posted on the Web site.  This is a great way to
see what your fellow DCRP alums are doing and remind you of your time in Chapel Hill.

Submissions or inquiries should be sent to carolinaplanning@unc.edu by April 1st.


Renew your subscription
While you're thinking about Carolina Planning, don't forget to sign up or renew your subscription.  Sign up by May 1st
and receive our special 60th Anniversary Celebration issue!

You are cordially invited to attend the

60th Anniversary Reunion
of the Department of City & Regional Planning
at The University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill

Beginning Friday, September 22, 2006, 3:00 pm with events lasting through Sunday, September 24, 12:00 Noon

Featuring:
Friday, 9/22, 7:30 pm Siler Distinguished Lecturer, Martin Eakes, CEO and founder of Self-Help (keynote speaker)
Saturday, 9/23, 6:30 pm Cocktail Party followed by dinner at 8:00 pm
Sunday, 9/24, 9:00 am Alumni Association Meeting/Brunch

See Chapel Hill, tour campus, re-connect with old friends and colleagues, meet our new faculty members.
Additional activities are planned, more details to come!



2005 Tar Heel of the Year - Self-Help's Martin Eakes
News Observer (Raliegh)
Jim Nesbitt, Staff Writer

At the heart of Martin Eakes' quarter-century quest to lift folks out of poverty is a stubborn
faith forged by basketball and the mothers of his boyhood friends.  Eakes was a scrawny,
red-headed kid in the mid-1960s whose buddies lived a far poorer life in Marytown, a rural
hamlet on the southwestern outskirts of Greensboro.

In an era of electric racial tension, he and the fellas could be found making another furious
salt-and-pepper run of half- court hoops in the white-washed barn behind his house.  On
those after-school afternoons, race seemed irrelevant…


But poverty was another matter.  Eakes, co-founder and chief executive officer of the Durham-based nonprofit empire
known as Self-Help, was keenly aware of the line between haves and hungries, between himself and his buddies.

…The deepest impression was made by the hard-working grit of a buddy's mother, her determination to keep a roof
over the heads of her children -- despite the absence of a husband, regardless of odds lengthened by skin color and
very little money.  This enduring image convinced Eakes, the scrappy son of a self-made businessman, that lending
money to the working poor so they could buy a house or start a small business wasn't as risky as bankers feared.

"To this very day, I'll make the argument that poor people are better borrowers than rich people," said Eakes.  "If I have
to choose where to put my faith and Self-Help's money, I'll put it with a person who knows how to work rather than a
person with paper credentials."

Call it faith, gambler's luck or a mulish refusal to accept conventional financial wisdom, but this belief is the foundation
of the outfit Eakes commands, including the Self-Help Credit Union and the Center for Community Self-Help. Self-Help
touts itself as the nation's largest nonprofit community lender, making Eakes one of the leading experts on loaning
money to people most bankers would rather not trust.

But faith in the working poor fires Eakes, a passionate do-gooder with a banker's cold eye for the bottom line and a
Main Street cure for poverty straight out of the Jimmy Stewart movie "It's a Wonderful Life."  Handout mentality?
Not exactly.  Eakes gives his borrowers a slim entree into the American dream -- which must be repaid, with interest.
Or else.  "I always called myself a bleeding heart conservative," Eakes said.  "We will meet you exactly halfway -- not
one step further or beyond.  The most important part of this agreement was that you must pay the loan back or we
will foreclose on you faster than any bank."

Complete article: http://www.newsobserver.com/689/story/379454.html