Housing Counseling
Helping Families to Buy and Preserve Their Homes
The Housing Partnership Network's counseling program is at the forefront of homeownership and foreclosure prevention counseling. The Network provides funding, technical assistance and peer exchange opportunities for members who have helped tens of thousands of working families achieve and maintain their dream of affordable homeownership. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) has ranked the Housing Partnership Network's Counseling Program the highest among national counseling intermediaries for four consecutive years. Since 1995, we received $20 million in competitive HUD grants, which members leveraged to obtain $100 million more from banks, foundations and state and local governments.
Unfortunately, in April of this year, Congress voted to eliminate HUD's Housing Counseling Program. As a result, counseling agencies across the country, many of them Network members, are struggling to provide the services needed by so many families in this difficult economic environment.
At the same time, the Network is pursuing new models for counseling services, including the development of an online homebuyer education curriculum, called Framework. Framework is an interactive, online homebuyer education tool to help reach a broad and diverse set of clients such as people located in rural areas, as well as a younger demographic that increasingly comprises the first-time homebuyer market. The Network is also working to establish more partnerships between neighborhood stabilization and counseling programs to both help place additional families in single-family homes and prevent foreclosure for struggling homeowners.
For more information, contact Danielle Samalin.
