Did you know you could already volunteer with us? Our Board of Directors needs help on many different projects. For example, we are preparing to participate in Silver City’s Give Grandly event on May 4th, 2023. We need help with set up, our activity for kids (building play-doh houses!) and fundraising.

We are hard at work behind the scenes looking for land, planning CEB production and designing a cabin for one of our community’s most sensitive team member.

We can always use help on communications, social media, podcasting and marketing.

Doing the “visioning” is quite a process, from researching land use and zoning regulations, to community education around safe housing and shared-equity models of affordable housing development, there’s a lot to participate in.

There is even a way for the very-sensitive population to contribute from home! We will be launching a “power of 8” zoom group that uses the focused power of intention. We have so many people rooting for our success in developing this new model of safe housing development, we just want to thank you for the love and support.

Go to our Volunteer Page to look at the options for how to join a team.

And if you’re local, don’t forget to stop by our table at the Give Grandly Event on May 4th from 9am to 2pm and say hello!

All the best to you and Happy Spring!

Crooked Forest Institute is looking for land. This newer non-profit based in Silver City is on a mission to create affordable housing using sustainable, local materials, like compressed earth blocks. The key to affordability, they say, is the vocational education and community building program attached to their housing development plan.

“Student and volunteer labor can lower the labor cost of each build,” Says Holly Noonan, the non-profit’s founder. “Our main role model is Community Rebuilds in Moab, Utah. After ten years in operation, Community Rebuilds is now clocking 30,000 hours in volunteer labor annually, while they are completing sixteen houses a year.”

Another key to Community Rebuild’s affordable housing plan is building housing on community-owned land. Their homes are built on a 40-acre Community Land Trust in Moab, which means the new homeowners don’t have to buy land, their mortgages are only for their homes, making it more affordable. Each homeowner does pay a “modest land use fee” (about $100 a month) for a 99 year lease on the parcel of land that their home sits on. This fee helps fund the operations for the community land trust.

“It’s not a new way to create affordable housing, it’s just new for Silver City,” said Noonan.

Crooked Forest Institute is a member of the Grounded Solutions Network, which promotes housing solutions that will stay affordable for generations to combat systemic inequity.

Before Crooked Forest Institute can fulfill its mission to create healthy, affordable housing for Grant County, it needs a home of its own. It has funds to buy a parcel of land and the six-person board of directors has been actively searching for land to house their operations.

They are looking for 20 to 60 acres of unrestricted land outside city limits, with a reliable water supply and a preference for bordering protected land. The intention for this land, they say, is to create their education campus, to build prototype housing for students and faculty out of compressed earth blocks that they manufacture themselves.

Their intention is to become a non-profit housing developer here in Grant County. Their houses will be small starter homes, 400 square feet, but designed to add onto as each family can afford it, so as not to rely only on debt. Each build will have a sweat-equity component so the owners can help build it and keep the debt load as low as possible. And if other community members want to lend a hand and learn how to build, the program will be set up for that.

Also, building out of compressed earth blocks means the small homes are designed to last for centuries, unlike manufactured housing, which often wears out before the mortgage is paid off. Compressed Earth Blocks are carbon-negative, fire-proof, mold-proof and chemical free, making them one of the healthiest and most sustainable building materials available.

Crooked Forest Institute will be at this year’s Give Grandly event on Saturday May 4th, from 9am to 2pm at the Main Street Plaza in Silver City. Community members that would like to reach out to Crooked Forest Institute may do so through their website at https://crookedforestinstitute.org/

See article on the Grant County Beat.

https://www.podbean.com/media/share/pb-3gqwv-1597d1f

Larry Roybal is a master adobe builder who has built and renovated more than 20 adobe homes in Silver City/Grant County since the early 1970s, when he moved down here from Northern New Mexico. Originally from Corrales, he built his first home there out of “terrones,” a sort of “living adobe brick” used by the Isleta Indians. Join us as Larry regales us with dozens of capitivating stories, like building an adobe in front of the HUD building in Washington DC, visiting the Ignacio de Roybal House, an adobe that was built in 1705 by his ancestor, building the pagoda in Silver City’s Gough Park, and looking back on the turbulent history of New Mexico through the unique lens of an artist with both Spanish and Indigenous ancestry.

SPECIAL BONUS: Don’t miss this online photo album featuring four of the houses that Larry Roybal built and one that he renovated.

Nora Ureste is a Building Biologist who, together with her husband, Chris, is creating a small retreat center outside of Austin, Texas that can host people who are chemically and environmentally sensitive. The project, called Flourish Here, is working towards completing the first of 6 hempcrete homes and will feature a 5 bedroom retreat house, a comprehensive water catchment system and wellness amenities that include a tadelakt sauna. I visited her project in December 2023 on the Rolemodel Roadtrip and am looking forward to following along in the development process.

Listen to the episode here.

https://nextcity.org/urbanist-news/the-lower-sioux-in-minnesota-need-homes-so-theyre-building-them-from-hemp

https://buildingbiologyinstitute.org/

Healthy Buildings For Sustainable Living

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!