https://www.podbean.com/media/share/pb-idzwu-1535465

 

Listen in as Holly hits the road on a road trip to visit three of the organizations that are inspiring us to believe that our dream is not just possible, but already succeeding in different places around the country. In this episode, she visits an agrihood, a hempcrete retreat center in development and a community land trust in the borderlands.

See you at the Commons at 5pm! There will be pizza! 🍕 😋

Hey Crooked Foresters,

Have a listen to the newest podcast where I got to interview Leah Olson, the Community Outreach Coordinator for Community Rebuilds in Moab, Utah. Community Rebuilds is a visionary affordable housing program that pairs natural building with a community land trust and finishes 12 to 16 houses a year using volunteers, interns and home-owners to keep workforce housing affordable in a crazy market. Their inclusionary education model was just celebrated by Patagonia, and as Leah will tell you, it’s the people that make the magic in this amazing role-model program.

Community Rebuilds is Getting Things Done!

See how they pulled off creating the first affordable home to meet the Living Building Challenge by focusing on carbon-negative, locally sourced materials, passive solar design, water catchment and an almost zero-waste build site. Learn more about their process in this 24 minute video:

Hey guys! We had planned to spark up the horno to make pizza for today’s meet-up but the intense heat index makes that plan seem insane. We had hoped the rains would start by now. In fact, as it looks, the skies might finally open up TODAY, so this plan is now weather dependent, since we meet outside. We’ll see you there if it’s not pouring at 5pm! At the Commons on 501 E 13th St, Silver City, NM 88061.

https://www.podbean.com/media/share/pb-xfb58-144ea22

Join us for an hour of conversation about the origin story of Crooked Forest Institute, beginning the health saga of getting sick in America, a hero’s journey and then the crystal clarity that the world would be better with one hundred more tiny adobes.

Hey all!

Just a reminder to join us tomorrow for the first Monthly Natural Building Meet-up at 5pm at the Commons Center for Food Security and Sustainability, located at 501 E 13th St, Silver City, NM 88061.

Weather permitting, we’ll meet outside in the garden. Bring snacks and drinks if you want them. We’re just getting together to talk about earth building! What have you built? What do you love? What did you learn? What’s your dream house? We’ll also keep an ear to the ground on local projects in case anyone wants to get their hands muddy. And we’d love to put together a walking-tour-map of historical adobes to see in Silver City.

Don’t worry if you can’t make this one. We’ll do it each month on the second Wednesday at 5pm. See you there!

Hi all! Just a quick note to invite you to join us at the Tranquill Buzz in Silver City on Friday June 9th, from 2pm to 4pm. We’ll be hosting an interactive discussion about Affordable Housing and how we think adobe construction can be a good choice if we focus on small-footprint, high-efficiency design. Join Us!

Also, tune in to GMCR.org today at 10am (or anytime online here.) to hear Kristen Lundgren interview Holly Noonan on her radio show Interconnect about the origins of the Crooked Forest project and why it is gaining momentum.

Then again, Candice Burke will interview Holly for her radio show Community Spotlight with Candice Burke which will air at 10:30 on Thursday, June 15th. Again, you can listen to it online anytime.

Join us!

Hi All!
We are participating in our local Community Foundation’s annual fundraiser called Give Grandly. We’re excited! We’ll have a table at the live event at the Maker’s Market off Bullard Street in Downtown Silver City. Stop by if you’re local! Saturday May 6th from 9am to 2pm.

And Visit our Give Grandly Page to make a donation, if you can. The first $500 unlocks a matching grant!

Our mission is big. We are aiming for the most efficiently built, affordable adobe home possible. The motivation comes from a deep well of understanding the suffering of environmental refugees. We’ve been there. We won’t stop working until this vision becomes a reality.

Step One: Open a Compressed Earth Block Factory in Grant County, NM

Step Two: Build out our education campus and create a vocational program.

Step Three: Our Graduates build out many Affordable Housing neighborhoods on a Community Land Trust.

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Kelly Hart just posted on his Natural Building Blog about us! (We didn’t build the house in the photo, fyi.)

Thanks so much for being a part of our team!

Holly

Hi Crooked Foresters!

There’s so much happening, that I need to slow down long enough to write it down. Here’s an update that comes with an open invitation to Get Involved with any of these projects that might interest you. Because we need some help to make all this happen.

1. Starting a local building training program:
   We have reached out to Finance New Mexico and the New Mexico Manufacturing Extension Program (NMMEP) to explore funding and financing options for these priorities (and we’ll do whichever is the path of least resistance first!) We need funding first.
   
   • Starting an Adobe Construction training program here in Grant County based on the one at Sante Fe Community College and jumpstarting with Adobe in Action’s Online Education Courses. We would like to optimize this course for people who are transitioning their careers and want something more local that would MAKE OUR COMMUNITY MORE AWESOME! A school that makes homes!
     
   • We would like to explore kick starting a compressed Earth block program as part of the above and based on this program started by Adobe in Action’s founder with municipal or county partners that understand the utility of a locally sourced building material that could have a rapid impact on homelessness by creating sleeping pods and tiny houses like in this amazing program in Oregon.
     
   • Joe Kennedy, natural building architect, is working on our 4 house designs and 3 Community building designs. Our plan is to have them all green-lighted for our prototype campus in 2023.
     
2. Liaising with Local Government
   
   • So far I have had brief initial meetings with the Council of Governments (CoG), the Community Development Dept and the County Government to simply introduce the idea of Community Land Trusts as a powerful instrument to meet their needs of community security, cleanliness, function and dignity as available to ALL residents in our community.
     
   • Explore the creation of a Grant County based Community Development Corporation. So far as I can tell, the nearest one is in Deming, NM. Check out this role model organization from Tempe, AZ that is a combined Community Development Corporation AND Community Land Trust (CDC/CLT.) We need this here in Grant County, along with an Earthen Building Training Program.
     
   • We need government partners who are visionary enough to see how solutions that are working well in other cities can be implemented right here for our communities future. Contact us if you’d like to help with this!
     
3. Organizing a Natural Building Slam (Need Help!)
   
   • A SLAM is 10 speakers, 10 slides each and 10 minutes each. This is an example SLAM. This event will bring together the awesome array of natural builders in New Mexico and film them talking about what makes them excited about the skills and materials they work with. We’d like this to become an annual event and kick off the first one in 2023. Contact us if you’d like to help with this!
     
   • This annual event will highlight traditional building skills that we cannot forget because our economic, water and food sovereignty will absolutely depend on them in the coming era. We are already seeing how unreliable our supply chains are becoming for delivering building materials, machines, parts, food, etc, and we need to be forward thinking in designing for the future infrastructure needs now.
     
   • Why Natural Building? It’s just like having clean water. Because it’s the healthiest way to live. People with complex-chronic illnesses almost always need extremely clean places to heal. “Clean,” in this case, doesn’t mean “sterile,” it means “populated by an old and intact microbial ecosystem and almost no chemicals,” like in a wilderness setting. If it works for sensitive people, it works to help everybody thrive. Plus the resource is everywhere.
     
4. I have been working behind the scenes on getting our podcast recording equipment studio set up so we can really hit our stride! I’ve also been getting our social media accounts integrated with this website to get our broadcast out there seamlessly. Deep Thanks to one special donor ❤ who gifted us with enough to set up our studio!!
   

Lastly, our last post told you about our prototype tiny house for a sensitive person. While the design needs refinement, I am thrilled to report that the owner was able to move right in and is thriving! She is warm, sleeping in a real bed for the first time in 30 years and her dog is happy! We couldn’t be happier.

LET’S BUILD 100 MORE.

Let’s get from community survival mode to community THRIVING mode.

https://crookedforestinstitute.org/

https://www.podbean.com/media/share/pb-xdjup-131efb3

Joe is an author, educator, architect and artist and our newest Board member! He has thirty years of architectural experience with a focus on ecological design, green building and sustainable community design. Join us as we discuss our Neighborhood design.