February Mimbres Messenger Column

Greetings Mimbres Valley!

The Board of Directors at Crooked Forest Institute would like to invite you to come for a walk with us on the 52 acres that the nonprofit purchased in October of 2024. Join us for a walk around the property on Saturday, March 22nd at 10am. It is located on the west side of Hwy 35. (on the left going north) and the entrance is an orange gate approximately across the road from the Frost Brothers billboard. (Just south of the transfer station.)

Looking at the current challenges that are facing our community, everyone can see that we need more housing, better health and more economic stability.

Crooked Forest Institute has been envisioning win-win solutions that contribute to all of these.

In a nutshell, we are working on creating a local-economy hub that will include:

→ A co-operative adobe brickyard– to make a locally sourced, healthy building commodity. Members can get bricks for cost.

→ A Vocational Education program where teens 15-19 can learn to make adobe bricks, and to build and repair fireproof adobe homes.

→ A drylands food innovation hub, where we experiment with how to grow the most amount of food with the least amount of water.

→ A native species propagation nursery for bioregional ecological restoration.

→ Some short term rentals so that people can experience our small home designs first hand.

→ A small subdivision of 12 homes on 8 acres (on our 52) in our Community Land Trust pilot program.

→ An education building that can double as an event center.

We want to support our local economy to provide more of our housing and food. When local independent businesses receive $100 from you, they put most of it back into the local economy and it multiplies. When you spend $100 at chain restaurants or big box stores, it mostly leaves town for good.

As a nonprofit housing developer, we are working to provide housing solutions for those who need it most– low-income, elderly and disabled local residents. Creating a Community Land Trust is a proven strategy for protecting land in perpetuity for the benefit of the community. It creates a safety net for the most vulnerable among us and it is designed by you, to become what you want.

Please Note: We are planning on eventually building homes on a Community Land Trust in or near Silver City that does not actually exist yet.

We are not planning on building housing in the Mimbres Valley. (If the Mimbres Valley eventually creates its own Community Land Trust, we would reconsider this.)

The 52 acres that our nonprofit purchased is to be used as an Education Campus, not as a housing development. There will be some housing on it, so we can practice building our designs, but it will not be high density. We would like this Education Campus to become a community resource for the whole valley.

Ultimately, we aim to prove that it is possible to design and build human settlements that improve the surrounding ecosystem, not injure it.

We are focused on innovating a new system of building, but it’s actually just recreating the traditional, historical way of building. It’s common sense to make bricks out of local soil and teach our kids to build safe, healthy, fireproof homes. We want them to start trades businesses to keep our dollars local!

We want to hear from you! Are you concerned about our plans? Are you excited? Join us on March 22nd! Please write to us at crookedforestinstitute@gmail.com. Sign up for our mailing list at https://crookedforestinstitute.org/.