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. A hard foul, a nose bloodied by an elbow -- that was just roundball with the Marytown boys, some of them white and well-off, most of them black and not.

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.

He still wears the brand of that knowledge.

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, 51. "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.

Celebrating its 25th anniversary this year, 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."

Faith into deeds

If Stewart's character, George Bailey, were recast as a skinny, short, white-haired guy with glasses, a cheap suit and a reedy Southern accent, Martin Eakes would be a flat natural for a remake of the Frank Capra classic.

But if Eakes stepped into the role, the good people of Bedford Falls would have to get used to an obnoxious cackle, a needling wit and a habit of wearing mismatched socks.

They would also make the slow-dawning discovery that Eakes, a Yale-educated lawyer with a public administration degree from Princeton, is a financial wizard who has pushed his belief in the working poor far beyond the confines of a storefront savings and loan.

Since he and his wife, Bonnie Wright, launched the Center for Community Self-Help in 1980, Eakes has turned faith into deeds, making loans to single moms, minorities or displaced textile workers -- with an annual loss rate of less than 1 percent on home mortgages, about half the national average for similarly sized credit unions.

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