Is there anything a mortgage lender can do to help head off a foreclosure?

According to an article in the Houston Chronicle written by Lingling Wei of Dow Jones Newswires, the answer is yes…and the answer happens to be, community groups.

The article highlights the East Side Organizing Project in Cleveland. It is a neighborhood organization founded more than 10 years ago to improve schools in the area.

But, the local group is now acting as a liaison between “financially strained borrowers ” and their mortgage lenders.

As one example, the article talks about the White family..they came very close to having to hand over their home to the lender. Enter, East Side Organizing Project.

The Project brokered a deal with another lender who agreed to give the Whites a $147,000 loan to pay off their existing $167,000 mortgage. Meantime, as part of the deal, the original lender waived the $20,000 difference.

With more and more mortgage delinquencies and defaults, the article says, community groups “are becoming increasingly valuable to financially stressed homeowners to battle against foreclosure.”