Hurray for Give Grandly 2025!

The following is the text on our Give Grandly Fundraising Page.

In 2024, we purchased 52 acres in the Mimbres Valley without a bank loan. This will become our Education Campus over the next ten years. We will practice by building our designs on this land, and then move to building for the Grant County community, once a Community Land Trust (CLT) land has been established. CLT housing remains affordable generation after generation, it turns renters into owners and creates a much need safety net for our county’s low-income, elderly and disabled populations.

Our solution to the current housing crisis is to become a Non-Profit Housing Developer, with a Vocational Education component.  We will build whole neighborhoods of 400 square foot adobe homes in groups of ten, on shared “RV park” infrastructure. We will use the construction of these ten-house neighborhoods as our classroom, inviting owners, VocEd students and community volunteers to contribute their labor as we complete one home each month. 

We have visited our organizational role models, like Community Rebuilds in Moab, Utah and The School of Constructive Arts in Alpine, Texas to learn to develop building and education systems for ourselves that are already successfully working for them. We will make the compressed earth blocks and adobe bricks on our land, from local soil, and begin the process of creating a certified “CTE” program– Career and Technical Education Program– on our 52 acres in the Mimbres Valley.

We will then build up our capacity in order to build our neighborhoods on Community Land Trust (CLT) land, so that when Silver City and each of the surrounding communities eventually earmark acreage to go into a 501c3 Community Land Trust (CLT) entity, we will be ready. CLTs are a proven method of keeping housing affordable in perpetuity and there are currently 308 CLTs operating successfully in the Unites States.

Eventually, we will run two building teams at once; a skilled team of five builders that goes fast with finely tuned procedures, and a training team that runs alongside them on a separate building, learning as they build. As we train skilled builders, we will hire them and expand. We build the same three designs over and over, with refinements, but very little customization, getting faster and more efficient each time. We will collaborate with The Future Forge, the local non-profit makers-space that hosts a Vocational Education program, to create affordable plug-and-play solutions for kitchens and bathrooms, like steel sinks set into steel tables and kitchen islands. In this way, we create functional, beautiful, simple, affordable homes that offer dignity, safety and community.

Our project originates in the acute lack of housing options for people who are chemically sensitive. We have needed these homes ourselves. But our plan is to build homes for all demographics that have experienced economic disenfranchisement, and earmark 25% of them for people who cannot stay healthy in conventionally-built housing. 

We need to build small homes out of local, healthy soil, because that simply makes the healthiest possible house. It’s probiotic housing! And since our rafters, windows and doors are all metal, these homes are also fireproof. Adobe homes are the historic building style in this region because they work so well to keep cool in the summertime (with no AC) and absorb the sun’s heat in the wintertime, lowering utility costs dramatically when compared with manufactured housing. This offers financial freedom for low income residents.

It has been understood in the community of chemically-sensitive people for 40 years that adobe homes are the top choice for recovering from environmental hypersensitivity. However, most chemically sensitive people, who are already burdened with enormous costs from health issues, can’t afford to live in an adobe home. Adobes used to be for working people, and now they are almost only for wealthy people.  By centering the needs of the chemically-sensitive population within a regenerative economic model, we can create affordable homes that make everyone healthier.

We have been in the process of proposing an intelligent land use regulation update for work-force housing solutions for Grant County that are in line with other New Mexico counties (like Eddy County) which allow for small, permanent structures to be built at RV parks. (Our 400 sq ft homes are the size of the largest RVs, and can use the RV-Park district utility system, but without the need for RV chemicals.) We intend to create shared-infrastructure-neighborhood prototypes on our 52 acre Education Campus. 

Housing can be affordable when homeowners share expenses;

1. Homeowners can share district water and septic systems,
2. Homeowners can share a district electical system,
3. Homeowners can do long-term (99 year) lot leases instead of buying land.

Manufactured Housing Communities and RV Parks provide affordable housing options for New Mexicans– because they share infrastructure expenses– and they must be protected! 26% of housing units in Grant County are “Mobile Homes.” But we can learn from what is working in them and create a long-term solution for affordable housing that is fireproof, locally sourced and made from healthier, more durable building materials.

Crooked Forest Institute is now a member of the Grounded Solutions Network, an agency that helps communities establish Community Land Trusts in order to promote housing solutions that will stay affordable for generations, and to combat systemic inequities.

By teaching adobe building and incorporating regenerative farming methods on our campus, our educational program provides a well-rounded education in localized economic models of sustainable living. There will be an incubator module to encourage students to start their own business for a specialty building trade that is needed by the community, such as plastering, roofing, electrical/solar, agroforestry or plumbing and water catchment. As those businesses develop, we will use our graduates as subcontractors– or hire them– in the process of building new housing on the county CLT.

Whether our graduates get hired by us to build locally or start their own trades business, their experience will position them well as we scale up our model to other communities in New Mexico. Now is the time for innovation that will put home construction back into the hands of communities. 27% of our residential building supplies currently come from China, but they don’t need to. Healthier building materials are right here already, and when we build with earth, we keep our dollars circulating in our own local economy. So let’s build together!

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Unfortunately, we won’t be at the Give Grandly Event this year in person! We are so sorry to miss this event, as each year it has been a wonderful opportunity to connect with our community.

But this year, Holly will be in Chicago starting her Lincoln Vibrant Communities Fellowship, while Joe is still in South Africa, developing a sister project in the Regenerative Communities Network.

We look forward to showing you the progress we’ve been making on completing Jade’s Cabin– She’s moving in in May! So Stay tuned…

If you would like to donate, our Give Grandly donation page is live and we thank you deeply for your support!

If you would like to do a recurring monthly donation instead, you can set that up here.