Ethical lending helps some of those facing foreclosure

ABC News:

At the last minute, Moore found Neighborhood Housing Services of Chicago and counselor Sandra Wells. “She told me ‘I want to keep my house,'” Wells said, sitting in the home she helped save, “and that’s all I needed to hear.”

Neighborhood Housing Services is a nonprofit organization and just one of a growing number of so-called “ethical lenders.” In neighborhoods like Moore’s, these lenders are thriving even though they work with the same low-income borrowers who are at the heart of the financial crisis.

…

“We’ve been profitable, but we’re not profit-maximizing,” Mark Pinsky, CEO of Opportunity Finance Network, another lender providing financial services to struggling households and communities, told ABC News.

…

The ethical lending movement began with nuns who were willing to invest some of their retirement savings to provide loans to the working poor. Sister Corinne Florek, fund coordinator for the Mercy Partnership Fund, which has invested in several nonprofit housing developers, says she has witnessed the success of ethical lending.