NEW YORK, Sept. 29, 2011 /PRNewswire via COMTEX/ — The Ford Foundation Board of Trustees today announced the election of two new members, Martin Eakes and Sir Tim Berners-Lee.
“Martin is one of the most successful social entrepreneurs of his generation, having founded a series of national nonprofit organizations. Tim’s work in the early development of the World Wide Web makes him one of the great innovators of his generation. They have launched ideas and built institutions that have had enormous impact in the lives of people around the country and around the world,” said Luis Ubinas, president of the Ford Foundation. “Together they represent an extraordinary addition to the Ford Foundation’s board.”
Eakes co-founded and leads Self-Help, a community development lender, which has provided almost $6 billion in financing to more than 60,000 homebuyers, small businesses, and nonprofits. Mr. Eakes also founded the Center for Responsible Lending, a leading research and advocacy organization for equitable banking practices. Most recently, Eakes has built a network of credit unions in North Carolina and California with more than $900 million in assets.
Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1989. He is currently a professor at MIT as the 3Com Founders Professor of Engineering in the School of Engineering with a joint appointment in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. He is also a professor in the Electronics and Computer Science Department at the University of Southampton in the United Kingdom.
Berners-Lee is director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which develops open standards to ensure the long-term growth of the Web. He is director of the Web Science Trust, which supports the global development of Web science. He is also founder of the World Wide Web Foundation, launched in 2009 to fund and coordinate efforts to advance the potential of the Web to benefit humanity.