MAAPL has received a challenge grant! Help us match this generous $7500 donation for Grace's birthday, and your donation will be doubled!!
You can (or invest) in the Mass Alliance Against Predatory Lending!! Why?
- Equal right to have or own a home is justice.
- Because it is what I, Grace Ross, really, really, really want for my birthday.
- Because MAAPL is bringing us closer to housing justice at a societal level for everyone.
Read Grace's heartfelt message:
It's been an honor that the Mass Alliance Against Predatory Lending is celebrating my 60th birthday (for the 2nd time - the Board said I cannot age one year older until we reach the $60,000 goal) with a $60,000 fund raiser for the amazing work to bring justice to… everyone, really, in the US, given our country’s historically high rate of foreclosures.
Since I was a kid, my birthday candle wish was always about everyone having a home. It seemed such reasonable and necessary thing — every human being should have a safe place to rest their head.
So, here I am — working with MAAPL’s amazing, diverse leadership. If we succeed in this fight for justice, we’ll accomplish new in US history: return vast stolen wealth and land.
How did this crisis happen? This foreclosure crisis — the worst since the one that fed the American Revolution— was started by the lenders. After the Civil Rights Movement’s fights halted the use of law to deny people of color the ability to own their home, redlining and what was known as reverse redlining were outlawed. (This was where the few people of color who could get mortgages were given mortgages that were what is now called “doomed to foreclose”). And for the first time, women got out from under needing their husband’s credit for a mortgage.
Yet when these streams of folks finally got a mortgage under the law to own their home, they soon found themselves targeted by the same reverse redlining practices. Those practices were sufficiently successful by the end of the 1990s that the lending industry started applying them to white folks – primarily working-class white men – as well.
Foreclosure has affected every walk of life. We can now prove bank practices are not only civilly illegal, but usually criminally too. After 13 years of fighting, MAAPL is poised to turn this tide. How? With enough organizing and legal staff to blow away the prejudiced lie that people ”bought too much house”, when in fact most mortgages were targeted refinances, loans guaranteed to lose the home.
Giving now will help reach that dream. How? With your help. MAAPL needs $60,000 to hire organizing staff. Will you donate to make history with us?
What will $60,000 do?
$60,000 is enough for MAAPL to hire 2 organizers with some money from our other funds to top it off. Organizers are critical because of their multiplier effect. There are literally hundreds of homeowners and their allies who would be working on projects for justice right now, but somebody must coordinate their efforts, give them support, materials, access to resources and other contacts, and, most importantly, coordinate people working together, because the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.
Hiring an organizer is like engaging dozens and dozens of activists to accomplish major projects. Right now, MAAPL’s only staff person is me, Grace Ross. I must coordinate both the organizing side and our legal work; do all the individual homeowner support and education; and drive our legal research and proactive lawsuits. Not to mention interactions with the court administration and our state government, especially our 11 pieces of legislation that we would like to get passed.
Two more staff who are focused on organizing will be a dramatic sea change in what you see MAAPL accomplish.
How can $60,000 make a dramatic difference against a multitrillion dollar industry engaged in a historic level of illegal activity?
If it was just hiring two people alone, I agree that it would do very little. But we stand on the shoulders of 13 years of organizing statewide, engaging, at our peak moments, hundreds of thousands of people making that kind of engagement possible repeatedly in the coming year and hopefully beyond, is foundational to the size of change that we need.
Invest in MAAPL Our movement also is looking for $360,000 in investment money for my birthday —a whole different way to contribute—for huge, multi-party, legal cases. Be in touch and we can connect you with this transformative and handsome investment opportunity.
And thanks for the honor, everyone.