2025 in Review & What’s ahead

Hi all! This is Holly Noonan, Crooked Forest’s Executive Director. As we look back on what we accomplished in 2025, I wanted to process the year we had as a way to mentally prepare for what is coming next, and to share that with you.

January: Joe Kennedy and I were invited into our local radio station 89. 1 KURU-FM for an interview with Roger Tree about our mission. We also began working with Prospera Partners–our social enterprise consultants– to get all our our ducks in a row so that we can be ready to scale. (The time is coming…)

February: We published our most-listened-to podcast with Coaki William Wildcat, a Syntropic Agroforestry educator, about Ecorestoration and Indigenous Agroecology Traditions. (We are happy that our 52 acres has now had more than a year to just rest. We had a good monsoon and all of the plants went to seed. Biodiversity explosion.)

March: In March, we published an open letter to the Mimbres Valley and invited the community to come walk around our newly-purchased 52 acres, and to give feedback on what the community would and would not like to see as we develop the education campus over the next 10 years.

April: I flew to Chicago for the kickoff of my Lincoln Vibrant Communities 2025 Fellowship. This fellowship went from April 1st through October 2025 and focused on Research, Strategic Communication and Leadership as it pertains to housing policy.

May: Filmmaker Escher Bowers captured the process of building our first prototype– the Thrival Cabin– and spliced in the audio from the January KURU interview to create the 11 minute video that is now on our home page. Thank you Escher!

Summer: In our summer newsletter, we published a podcast about our wonderful experience working with Vicki Pozzebon and Eileen Everett at Prospera Partners, who described us as “the most organized start-up they’ve ever worked with.”

September: We launched our app! This app created a more interactive space where we can hash out ideas for each of our upcoming projects. If you would like to join us in the room, scroll down to the bottom of this page to download our app, and come on in! (We also attended the New Mexico Housing Summit in Albuquerque.)

October: We finalized our three home designs and put them all in one place here. We are serious about building prototype clusters of each of these designs on the 52 acres, and are looking for funding for engineering and feasibility now. Two of the clusters will be for our team members and two of them will be for visitors. (Permanently affordable neighborhoods for Grant County will come later on a Community Land Trust.)

November: We connected with our crackerjack grant writing team, and we got approved for a Preliminary Engineering Report (PER) to examine the feasibility for connecting with our local mutual domestic water utility.

December: We finished our 94 page business plan. (We are getting feedback before we publish it. If you would like to give us feedback, email me and I’ll send it to you.) I also presented our project at the Accelerated Community Investment Lab in Sante Fe (sponsored by the Lincoln Institute for Land Policy) and later travelled up to Las Vegas, NM to see the Adobe Model Home unveiling at Luna Community College.

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“Real change moves at the speed of trust, not the speed of technology or urgency. Trust is the foundation for progress that lasts.”

Jenn Hoos Rothberg

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As we enter our fourth year as a nonprofit, we are meeting mentors, civic leaders, policymakers, funders, adobe builders and kindred spirits in Grant County, in New Mexico and across the country. This gives us hope that the moment is now for our formula for creating community-driven, sustainable, fireproof and healthy housing. Our solutions can make a meaningful impact on health and housing scarcity all across New Mexico, as well as invigorate our local economy in Grant County and bring students from all over the world to learn our innovative model.

Our model calls for clusters of small, non-toxic adobe homes with shared utilities to be built with locally-made bricks on Community Land Trust land with Vocational Education students and other volunteers. These durable homes will be affordable because the homeowner does not bear the cost burden alone for the well, septic, power poles and land, and of course the student and volunteer hours lower labor costs.

This model is based on more than 346 other communities in the US (and 627 globally) that are now using Community Land Trusts to create perpetually affordable neighborhoods for lower-income residents. Our work begins in 2026 by engaging local civic leaders in a deeper discussion about how this model can benefit both buyers and renters here, right now, in Grant County.

As we enter 2026, we will be starting the New Year by introducing you to our first employee, Alice Mancilla, a business and marketing major at WNMU who is also a welder. Yay Alice!! She’ll be helping us assemble steel brick forms first.

Also in 2026, we will start hosting RVs to boondock on our land (in exchange for a donation) while we set about making adobe bricks. In 2026, we will be building prototype #2: the 600 square foot model. Can’t wait!

As we get our cash-flow engine started, we are looking ahead to building seven projects on our land over the next ten years, starting with the adobe brick manufacturing space. Soon, we will be taking a tour up to northern NM of several brick yards to get advice. Our intention is to start small, and then make ours into a co-operative brick yard.

We have focused on designing our solutions to protect land in perpetuity for the benefit of the community, to restore the ecosystems, to retain and recirculate the local dollar and to invest in the social determinants of health for the local population.

Of course, everything depends on funding. But we have spent the last 3.5 years–especially 2025–establishing a solid foundation on which to scale this vision. This year we applied for 6 grants and had conversations about our plan with both Housing NM and the New Mexico Finance Authority. We worked with a CDFI to complete the business plan and have several investors giving us feedback. We now have a grant writing team that has a 96% win rate. We WILL find funding.

Thank you for being part of our posse and breathing life into this vision of affordable, healthy AND sustainable housing for low-income communities in New Mexico.

With gratitude, determination and optimism,

Yours Truly,

Holly

PS– We are now welcoming new members for our Board of Directors! Skills in community development, engineering, finance, law and of course building are all highly valued. Email me if you would like to hear more!

PPS– If you are considering an end-of-year or monthly donation, here is where to go. (and thank you!!)