Interesting Meeting

I had a very interesting meeting this morning. The Habitat Executive Director, our Mortgage Services staff member, and I  traveled to the city of Hamilton, OH this morning for a meeting with the staff of LifeSpan. LifeSpan offers personal financial planning, credit consolidation, pre-purchase homebuyer education, and a lot of other services in Butler County, Ohio and beyond.
We already have a good partnership with LifeSpan. They offer free credit counseling to our home ownership program applicants. The purpose of today's meeting was to learn about how we might better serve our home owners who have been struggling to keep up with their mortgage payments. As you might guess, when the recession hit, many of our home owners were some of the first impacted. Many have had their hours cut back and some have lost jobs. Along with this, because our families are always struggling to make ends meet, whenever the price of gas or food or other every day expenses increase, they struggle even more.
I find it infuriating that so many of the Wall Street folks who helped get us into this mess in the first place walked away with huge bonuses and everyone else, especially the poor, got the shaft. But I digress. Maybe I should save those thoughts for another blog posting. Anyway, it looks like there are some very helpful things that LifeSpan can do for some of our families who are really struggling to keep up with their mortgage payments.
One of the topics that we discussed quite a bit in the meeting is our whole philosophy and approach to working with home owners. One of the LifeSpan staff members laid it out pretty well. She said that we can either be our home owners' friend or we can be their creditor but we can't be both. I think she hit the nail right on the head. We build relationships with our families over time as we partner with them to build their homes. We know their family stories. We know their struggles. We know their financial history. And while knowing all of that is helpful information, sometimes this means that we still think of our home owners only as people who still need our help. This makes it really difficult to hold them accountable when we need to.
This is not to say that we coddle our families. We do our best to hold them accountable to the agreements in their mortgage documents. We do indeed foreclose on families who stop making their payments. We take this very seriously and understand that families can't live in their houses for free. We also understand that our donors and volunteers expect us hold families accountable and empower them to be succesful home owners.
It's a real balancing act. I always like to err on the side of grace if possible. However, I also understand that if I really want to give families a hand up out of poverty, I can help but they need to do the heavy lifting.
So, I'm giving God thanks for the opportunity we had this morning to meet with the folks from LifeSpan. It's a great organization and I am grateful for the partnership Habitat has with them. I am also grateful for the ways in which LifeSpan educates and empowers families to take control of their personal finances.
I hope you will join me in praying for our Habitat home owners and all people who are stuggling during this uncertain economic time.
Thanks for your prayers and thanks for being a part of my journey!