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The Key to Collaboration is Coordination

Bartholomay pointed to not just collaboration, but a strategic, coordinated effort to respond to the Twin Cities’ foreclosure crisis. This is the aim of the Minnesota Foreclosure Partners Council (MFPC), formed in late 2006 and early 2007 to identify, fund, and implement coordinated policies and programs that address the effects of foreclosures on families and communities. The Council grew when the state and the Family Housing Fund (the aforementioned Twin Cities nonprofit) saw a growing number of foreclosures. The partners include local and county government, foundation, lender, and nonprofit representation—basically a stew of all of the likely actors involved in addressing foreclosures.

Melissa Manderscheid, echoed Bartholomay’s sentiments that coordination is good, but planned coordination is better:

“We needed to understand the problem first before we were going to solve it.” And part of that understanding was establishing effective data collection, a system that Manderscheid termed as “not organized” and still remains to be developed and implemented, which will be an “enormous task” for the county. From there, the Council could get to work.

While working to understand the scope of the problem, MFPC examined the important role counseling plays in foreclsoure prevention. “Prevention is very cost effective, far more so than buying and fixing properties if and when we get to the point,” Manderscheid says. But the counseling network in place was simply unable to respond to the “sheer volume” of subprime concerns, Manderscheid says. “There was no hotline, no phone number where people could call for advice. The lines of communication were not readily available but there were people—lots of people—who were facing a foreclosure sale, were running out of steam, and needed advice quickly.

So MFPC directed funding to strengthen the capacity of the existing network to meet the growing need for more counselors, especially multi-lingual ones.

Nobody Shows Up Unless They Know About It

In addition to the actual counseling, there’s a continued effort to make homeowners aware that counseling is, in fact, available, and not only to help prevent foreclosure, but also to help people post-foreclosure. Further, 60 percent of foreclosures in the region are tenant occupied, and even though Minnesota law allows for tenants to stay in their homes for at least a year, most residents didn’t know what their legal rights were. The state also passed a cocktail of predatory lending legislation in 2007 that made certain types of mortgage products illegal, but again, without adequate counseling, few homeowners or prospective homeowners know about these laws and often are unable to take the proper course of action to defend their rights.

The Minnesota Homeownership Center, a statewide, independent network of more than 50 nonprofit, public and tribal organizations has also provided homeownership counseling for many years. Julie Gugin, the Center’s executive director, credits a centralized and standardized approach to their success in handling the current crisis. “We had a network in place. We had agencies on the ground doing foreclosure prevention reporting to us and able to say what was going on.”

The Center has been in existence for about 20 years, starting as an organization providing leadership and direction for agencies in and around the Twin Cities, but as demand grew, so did the Center, and it eventually began to collaborate with foreclosure prevention agencies that were launched by the Family Housing Fund (FHF). Together, they built a statewide counseling model for the Center.

And it tuned out that the FHF model was a pretty good one. By its nature, the FHF is the essence of “institutionalized collaboration,” says Tom Fulton, FHF president. The Family Housing Fund is a vehicle for public-private collaboration, acting as a coordinating and convening agency, FHF also functions at a Community Development Financial Institution, able to support many of foreclosure response programs in the Twin Cities.

FHF has a long history of focusing on important housing issues. In the 1980s, homelessness was the order of the day and the FHF led a joint effort with two cities devising a comprehensive plan to address the issue. That built a lasting foundation for cooperative efforts to handle homelessness. Like so many of the players working to stave off the state’s foreclosure crisis, Fulton points to that kind of existing collaborative culture that, at the very least, lets partners move quickly to focus on the crisis and not on learning how to collaborate: “You never actually know when you’re creating a true collaborative relationship that could be needed again, or what it’s going to be needed for.”

“There is definitely a desire here to do things and do things right,” says Eric Muschler, the Region and Communities program officer for the McKnight Foundation, which helped form FHF and supports inter-nonprofit collaboration. “It keeps people fresh and thinking about solutions creatively.”

“We’re the strongest if we govern in collaboration with private and nonprofit partners,” says Elizabeth Ryan, one of the first FHF co-chairs. Fulton adds that most organizations hit a “critical tipping point” when they realize they must work together to serve a mutual mission and do it more effectively. He also notes the fear among some nonprofits that collaborations will water down the organization’s identity, though he takes a decidedly more optimistic tone: “If the collaboration works, not only is the collective work elevated, but individual organizations are more successful. Success builds on success.”