FACE is an interfaith organization that encompasses Christian, Buddhist and Jewish membership, along with support from labor. Members from church congregations gathered at the meeting from all parts of the island.
One of those attending was Rev. Tasha Kama, a founding member of FACE, who is part of the FACE Clergy Caucus and a senior pastor at the Christian Ministry Church in Wailuku.
“Being here tonight means we get to live out our faith in action,” she said. “It’s taking hold of things that keep us awake at night. It gives us an opportunity to deal with what those issues are and to actually come up with resolutions for some of these things.”
Among the issues Kama highlighted and on the meeting’s agenda for discussion were affordable housing, immigration, jobs and the economy, and vulnerable groups.
The annual meeting was also a time of celebration for FACE, which played a key role in advocating for passage of Hawai‘i’s new mortgage foreclosure law.
Thelma Akita-Kealoha of Catholic Charities presented FACE awards to Maui legislators who actively pushed for the passage of the law.
Citing their work, Akita-Kealoha said, “Because of the support of our legislators, we have the nation’s strongest foreclosure law.”
State Reps. George Fontaine, Gilbert Keith-Agaran and Angus McKelvey (who was unable to attend) each received a gold painted bat as their “Going to Bat for Maui’s Families Award.” Sen. Rosalyn Baker received the FACE Champion Award for her critical leadership on the foreclosure issue in the Hawai‘i Senate.
FACE announced a campaign to support implementation of the foreclosure law and to oppose efforts by Fannie Mae to flood Hawai‘i’s courts by changing all of their non-judicial foreclosures to judicial foreclosures, clogging the courts and possibly forcing changes in the new law to speed up the foreclosure process.
Hawai‘i allows foreclosures to be either judicial (overseen by a court) or non-judicial (initiated by a lender with little oversight). Most of the reported abuses have occurred in non-judicial foreclosures.
Fannie Mae is the government-sponsored, quasi-independent organization that historically, along with its smaller sibling agency, Freddie Mac, has underwritten most of the mortgage loans made nationwide. They do so by purchasing mortgage-backed securities, freeing up money to return to the lending pool of funds to make more loans.
Now in a taxpayer-financed public ownership due to purchasing toxic securities and encouraging an unsustainable increase in homeownership, Fannie Mae is in opposition to the mortgage reform law and is taking action to undermine it, according to FACE State Director Drew Astolfi.
“Fannie Mae is the number one driver of foreclosures,” he said. “With our new law, the large national banks have backed off to a large extent what they have been doing in Hawai‘i, but Fannie Mae is the shadow investor in over 40 percent of the loans in the whole State of Hawai‘i.
“And they are really threatening to destroy our judicial system’s ability to handle it [the new law] and we’re not going to tolerate it,” Astolfi added.
In addition to affordable housing, those in attendance also heard presentations on the need for immigration reform nationally and on Maui; the struggle for decent jobs in a recession-wracked economy and support for vulnerable groups such as adults with developmental disabilities; and the efforts of the nonprofit group Lokelani ‘Ohana to create housing and a supportive environment for this unique population.
The combined Tongan choirs from Ala Lani, Kīhei, Lahaina and Honolua United Methodist Churches and St. Theresa Catholic Church in Kīhei provided music for the meeting, closing the night with a rousing version of Handel’s Hallelujah Chorus sung in the Tongan language, which brought the crowd to its feet.
For more information on FACE, visit www.FaceHawaii.org.
(Editors note: Since the FACE meeting, Freddie Mac has announced a similar effort to convert all of its pending non-judicial foreclosures to judicial foreclosures, following the lead of Fannie Mae.)
