Self-Help Who?

A New York surrogate judge wrote in 1866: "No man's life, liberty, or property are safe while the Legislature is in session." That's especially true when the body is charging toward adjournment, as was the case with the North Carolina General Assembly in late spring of 1997. An innocuous bill, embarrassingly devoid of descriptive language, breezed through the senate and landed a comfortable berth in a house committee. There, it was stripped of everything but its title, and language was inserted to allow Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina to shed its nonprofit status and convert to a for-profit corporation. Similar conversions of Blue Cross and Blue Shield franchises in other states were complete or under way, and the personal fortunes banked by the company's executives were breathtaking.

About the only person paying attention to these legislative shenanigans was a young, newly commissioned public advocate named Adam Searing. He had been on the staff of the nonprofit N.C. Justice Center for about three months when the bill, introduced by two of the state's most powerful legislators, one a Republican and the other a Democrat, caught his eye.

The measure was well down the track to passage in the waning days of the session when Searing rose at a committee meeting, took exception to the bill, and declared the emperor had no clothes. The fix was in, he said, and the bill, which was described as a minor change for N.C. Blue, as the insurer was called, was, in fact, an early Christmas present for company executives. Searing still remembers the bill's senate sponsor, Democrat Tony Rand, growing red in the face and fulminating publicly over the audacity of this "pup." A man still in possession of his youthful appearance, Searing was often mistaken as a legislative intern in 1997. The rant by Rand, a party leader of considerable weight, left him convinced that he was "going to get run over like a bug."

Sitting in on that meeting was Martin Daniel Eakes, the co-founder and chief executive officer of a nonprofit, the Center for Community Self-Help, or Self- Help for short. He had been rousted from his office in nearby Durham by Mary Mountcastle, a senior staff member who had read a warning about the bill posted by Searing to his growing list of health care allies. Mountcastle told Eakes that he had to do something. That's when he hopped into his dusty old car (one breakdown away from the salvage yard) and drove the twenty-five miles to the Legislative Building in Raleigh.

At the time, Self-Help was a financial institution, albeit an unusual one. It was a credit union joined at the hip to a charity that was operating as a community development financial institution. It served North Carolina's under- and unbanked population — primarily people of modest means, especially African Americans, single mothers, and rural folks who needed a loan for their first homes or money to start small businesses. Underlying its work was the belief that the civil rights movement was not over until everyone enjoyed the economic benefits of society.

So why was Self-Help getting involved in a legislative fight with a provider of health insurance? In 1997, Self-Help was, and still is today, a nonprofit corporation, just like Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina. Eakes was outraged that executives at N.C. Blue would use legislative sleight of hand to cash in on six decades of public benefits as a nonprofit, leaving nothing in exchange for the tax-paying public. Such a move, he believed, threatened the integrity and public standing of every nonprofit in the state.

So the battle was on. All of Eakes's years of building coalitions and networking with like-minded people was brought to bear in what would become a tipping point for Self-Help as an institution, and for Eakes personally. Life would not be the same after he launched into this very public fight and Self- Help enlarged its reputation as a public advocacy and civil rights organization that would later include national honors and recognition.

Eakes collared Searing after the meeting, gave him an injection of energy from his own boundless reservoir, and promised unlimited support. Soon, Searing and Eakes were working with a statewide coalition of volunteers encompassing a broad array of public interest and health care groups. Their allies included county health officers, senior citizens' groups, nonprofits of all sizes and descriptions (including board members of influential community foundations), religious and civil rights groups, a few political heavyweights, hospital administrators, and, cheering from the background, corporate clients dissatisfied with N.C. Blue's rates.

Eakes lined up pro bono legal services from one of the top law firms in the state, and, riding a bandwagon of righteousness, this coalition finally stopped N.C. Blue's plans for conversion. Out of it came a compromise that required N.C. Blue — should it ever convert to a for-profit corporation — to put all the assets accumulated since its inception as a nonprofit in the 1930s into an independent foundation. When that happened, if it happened, more than $2 billion could become available to improve the health care of North Carolinians.

It was not a single-handed victory by any means, but it is doubtful if the public campaign and resulting tough, line-by-line negotiations that produced the conversion bill would have been as successful without Self-Help's resources and Eakes's organizing ability and determination not to leave the table until every item had been addressed. Of the forty critical items raised in the negotiations, N.C. Blue's opponents got what they wanted on thirty-nine of them, and Eakes fought to the end for number forty.

N.C. Blue's reputation was dinged and tarnished; Eakes and Self-Help emerged as dragon slayers.

The victory was a long way from the early 1980s, when the Self-Help Credit Union got its first deposit of $77 from a legendary bake sale — most of it from the sale of a $65 pound cake — and began soliciting members among a community of believers eager to organize worker-owned businesses. Eakes promoted this collective approach as the way to save lost jobs as owners closed textile plants and moved production out of the state of North Carolina. If workers controlled their own destiny, then they and their communities would benefit from such empowerment.

Its real muscle and sinew began to develop in the late 1980s after Self-Help began issuing home loans to people on the fringes of the economy whom bankers considered beyond the boundaries of sound risk. Eakes turned such discrimination on its head and later would say that he simply applied old-fashioned banking principles where a borrower's character amounted for as much as a credit profile. His faith was not misplaced. In its...