I am happy to have been an ACORN member for the past 20 years.  ACORN is a very great group.  ACORN helped us organize our neighborhood against crime and for safer streets and better schools.  Those are just some of the things that we fight for. 

As a result of joining ACORN, I was able to get an affordable apartment.  That allowed me to save money to buy a house in 2004.  When I see what a lot of people are experiencing now, losing their homes through foreclosure, I am so grateful to have gone through ACORN Housing Corporation’s first time homebuyer program.  I have also fought against predatory lending, as ACORN tried to prevent the kinds of predatory practices that have led to this foreclosure crisis.

This is why I am so proud to be part of ACORN.  ACORN is proactive and we see what could happen if we don’t stand up for ourselves.

I will fight tooth and nail against the people who are trying to break down my organization.  I think they are just jealous of what we are doing.  They realize we get results and that we are uplifting low and moderate income people.

Marie Pierre, Brooklyn

President, Arizona ACORN

Phoenix, Arizona

Following her brother's footsteps

When her brother Erasmo Villavicencio died in September 2005, Alicia Russell wasn't an ACORN member yet. She knew about Erasmo's ACORN work – that for over two years he had worked on neighborhood improvements like speed bumps, and he fought passionately to raise Phoenix’s minimum wage – but she had not yet joined the cause. "After my brother died, when I was going through his things, I collected a whole bag full of his notes about ACORN's minimum wage campaign," Ms. Russell explains. "Then I decided to join ACORN and carry on his work."

Ms. Russell steadily increased her work with ACORN. In July 2006 she became an ACORN Precinct Action Leader, or APAL, and began registering and engaging a network of voters in her neighborhood.

As an APAL, Ms. Russell helped 43 friends and family members register to vote, and then enlisted them to register others. Her daughter assisted students to register to vote on the campus of her community college, while Spanish-speakers in Ms. Russell's APAL network reached out to West Phoenix's Latino population.

Ms. Russell's next step was to inform the newly registered voters about Proposition 202. She knew what it was like to work for low wages – since she had spent 12 years as a single mother raising two daughters on a poverty income – so she related these experiences to voters to motivate their support of Proposition 202. "When I told women voters that a wage increase would benefit 58 percent of Arizona’s female workers, they listened," she says.

When the wage initiative passed with 66 percent of Arizona's vote, Ms. Russell knew her brother would have been proud of her work. "Erasmo knew what it was like to work for low wages. We were both raised in the Arizona cotton fields, working from the time we were eleven. Erasmo would have been thrilled about this victory," she said.

By the time of the 2008 ACORN National Convention, Ms. Russell had been elected President of Arizona ACORN. She took the stage on Monday, June 23, to implore more than 2,000 convention attendees to stand up for immigrant families.

Due to current U.S. immigration policy, she said, children are often separated from their parents without any warning. A mother may be picked up from her job by immigration officials and immediately sent back to her country of origin. Her son or daughter, meanwhile, might sit outside his or her school for hours waiting to be picked up by a mother he or she will never see again. The children are then put into the foster care system.

"It does not matter what you think about immigration," Russell said. "The separation of children and their families has to stop."

Apple Valley, Minnesota

"I'll get you a good home loan. I'll take really good care of you." That was what Al Ynigues was told in 2004 by his mortgage broker, who was a trusted friend and the father of two of Al's guitar students. At the broker's urging, Al, who was buying his first home, signed for a subprime loan. In just three years, Al's mortgage interest rates jumped higher and higher until his payments nearly doubled. "When I closed on my home in 2004, I was paying $1,645 a month. In three years, the payment jumped to $3,000 a month," Al explains.

Like many homebuyers who were deceived by predatory lenders, Al struggled to scrape together house payments and blamed himself for taking a bad loan. Then one night in February 2007, he saw a TV news segment that showed ACORN members helping homeowners who faced foreclosure. Al called the phone number flashing on his TV screen and met the next week with an ACORN mortgage expert who investigated the circumstances of Al's loan and discovered some disturbing facts.

ACORN's mortgage expert told Al that his credit rating of 585 could have gotten him a much better loan, and explained that Al's broker had lied when he said Al didn't qualify for a first-time homebuyer's program. As a reward for selling Al such a high-interest loan, the broker had earned a $5,000 kickback. Worst of all, the broker had forged paperwork. "My income is about $3,000 a month. In order to get me this loan, he listed my income as $10,000 a month. I ended up with the worst kind of loan anyone could get. And I thought this guy was my friend!" Al said.

ACORN's mortgage expert helped Al renegotiate his mortgage with his lender. After several months of negotiation in which he turned down three offers, Al accepted a loan modification to a fixed interest rate of 5.5% and a monthly payment of $1,745 starting July 1, 2008.

In the meantime, Al his spent his nearly two years with ACORN speaking out for others who have suffered similar injustices at the hands of greedy mortgage brokers. Al testified before his Attorney General and a Senate committee and had a personal meeting with U.S. Senator Chris Dodd. In November 2007, Al told his story to the St. Thomas School of Law.

"Throughout all of this I was a spokesman for ACORN," says Al. "And now that I got my loan workout, I’m not going to stop. I’m going to continue speaking on behalf of ACORN and ACORN members."

"I used to be one of those guys who stayed under the radar and didn't make any waves," Al continues. "ACORN has taught me to speak out so others can benefit."

East Oakland, California

In the summer of 2007, Dorothy Hicks began receiving foreclosure notices on the home she had lived in for 39 years. She had been lied to about refinancing by a predatory lender and was stuck with a monthly payment she couldn't afford. Repeated calls to her mortgage servicer resulted in nothing but frustration.

Luckily Dorothy soon met an ACORN member, who introduced her to the organizers at the ACORN office in Oakland. Before the summer was out, Dorothy and three other ACORN members with high interest home loans went to the state senate to explain their situation to the senators and ask them for help.

"Many people who are in financial trouble don’t want to talk about it," says Dorothy. "But I said I would go to the Senate because so many people are going through the same thing I am going through." Dorothy also wrote a letter to her state senators, and sent copies to banks, lending companies, and President Bush.

Two senators expressed interest in helping Dorothy and the many others caught up in the subprime mortgage crisis. In December 2007, she and other Oakland ACORN members organized a Foreclosure Solutions Forum which drew senators, congressmen, the mayor and other city and state officials and more than 250 residents of the community.

Later that month, the California State Senate announced the introduction of a foreclosure relief bill written to help people like Dorothy. The announcement, by Senate President Pro Tem Don Perata in front of two other senators, other city and state officials, and 15 ACORN members, was made in front of Dorothy Hicks' house.

Speaking of that day, Dorothy says, "It was really a joy. We knew that our officials wanted to work with ACORN members because they wanted to do something for their constituents. At last we were getting help.

"If there’s something that's not right, ACORN will be there for you. If there's something wrong, let's change it. That’s what ACORN does."

Burien, Washington

Testimonial at Announcement of ACORN/Countrywide Agreement, Feb. 2008

My name is Theresa DiMartino and I am a proud ACORN member from Burien. I work for the King County Health Department, where I have been employed for the past 17 years.

Well, ACORN did it! My organization, ACORN, did it. Now let me be clear, there isn’t a magic wand in a situation like mine. I do, however, qualify for a loan workout under this agreement. I have a few more steps to go, but it looks like my 8.99 interest rate ARM, that would have caused me to lose my home, we changed into a 5.2 interest fixed rate mortgage over the next 30 years! Thank goodness!
 
I love my home. I love watching my six-year old son play in the yard. I love having room for pets. And I love having a place for my washer and dryer.
 
This is the first home I have ever owned. When we bought this house in 2003, I had no idea that I might someday end up homeless. But when my Countrywide sub-prime adjustable rate mortgage went from $1442 to $2,390, I found that I could no longer keep up my payments.
 
Like a lot of ACORN members I am facing foreclosure as a single mother. My son’s father has left our home.

Because I cannot make my mortgage payments, I’ve destroyed my credit rating and I’m finding that no one will rent to me. I had far too many sleepless nights. I have had months of stress. I have been forced to put my home up for sale. But I have had no offers. I felt like I had no control over my future.

But because of ACORN, I feel like I might have a good chance to get out of this mess. I’m the first person in the state of Washington to get assistance from ACORN’s HELP program and qualify…I found out this past Friday!

I look forward to the few next steps and my future in my house so that I can continue raising my child in a good and decent environment. If you are facing foreclosure don’t give up call 206-723-5845 for an appointment with an ACORN intake associate.
 
Because my story is all too common we need lending reform. I urge everyone listening to my voice to call 1-800-562-6000 and tell your elected rep. to pass Mortgage lending reform and tell them ACORN day says FAIR LENDING NOW!

Like John said before me, I know that billboards and bus ads won’t move people to get help. The message of help must come from a trusted messenger, like a neighborhood leader or a co-worker. Some of the 1.5 million that was passed last week and the 180 million that our Senator worked on must be used for direct outreach for borrows in trouble.

I know that I’m not the only one facing this horrendous situation. There are thousands of people out there now who have either lost their homes or are facing foreclosure. Thank you very much for taking the time to come and listen to my problem. I hope that everyone having this trouble will be as lucky as me to have so many people who care and an organization fighting daily for change.

Thank you.

Bridgeport, Connecticut

"Without this organization, my life would not be the way that it is right now, and to be very honest about it, my life is really great right now.

"When I came home from work one particular day, there was a knock at my door. There were two young people, young white people, standing in my doorway, asking me if I want to renew the playground, fix it up. At that time I was living in a project area, low-rise buildings, and it was pretty nice there. And I said, fix the playground up? And I said, wow, yeah.

"Working in the community was something that I was, to be honest about it, trained to do. I was brought up in a parochial school. At that time, the Catholics in our area were, as they still are, very social people. You learn to work in the community with them. And I said, holy mackerel, here's somebody asking me to work in the community? And I said yes, I'd like to see the playground fixed up. This was in the late '70s. I've now been with ACORN 29 years.

"I moved to Connecticut because I had a very difficult marriage. I had four children when I moved here, and I felt like my life was in shambles. I wasn't able to finish school the way I wanted to. My whole life changed when I moved here. I got involved with ACORN, I started going to meetings. I started living. I went back to school. Just being around the organizers made me feel like, gee, there is a chance for me to still grab a hold to some of the things that I may be good at.

"At the time my children were growing up, so they were gone, and I moved to Chicago. And I became an organizer there. My daughter called me, the youngest one, and asked me to help her. She was in Massachusetts. I left Chicago and moved to Massachusetts to help her out, and I worked with ACORN after she went back to Connecticut, I worked with ACORN there. It was a deep and emotional time in my life because I was alone, and I really just wanted to find myself, to find out what I was worth, what kind of person I am. And I did, just by working with the organizers. They didn't play. They gave me a chance to go and work on a lot of different campaigns. And you grow up.

"One thing that I was good at was listening and taking advice, and I did. There were some things that annoyed me, there were people that didn't think I was going to succeed at anything, and I kept hearing that. I ignored it, finally, and I learned to step out and stand up and be proud. And as I said, if it had not been for this organization, I don't know where I would have been.

"My knowledge has been broadened, but I know for a fact that organizations are based and they come out of the community. Whenever organizations are in the community, that help the people, people should feel like they can join that organization, and continue to help make their community better. The better part about it is that I am who I am. I have not changed. I grew up in a low-income community, I am still in a low-income community, and I do believe that I would like to stay there and see it get better. See the housing get better, see the schools get better, jobs come in. That's what I really want to see.

"Anyone that's coming up without their parents, as I did, don't be afraid. There's organizations out there that understand that a lot of people do not have their parents, but we do have a chance. Our society hasn't accepted a lot of things, certain characteristics that we have, and they're still kind of hung up on color, but hang in there, and believe in yourself, and I think that you'll come out alright."