A month has sped by since our launch party. During this past month, in addition to continuing to meet local experts in natural building, water catchment, permaculture and architecture, we have officially welcomed Anita Budhraja and Jeff Goin onto our Advisory Council. Read more about them here.

Our Articles of Incorporation have been accepted by the New Mexico Secretary of State’s office, clearing the way for the 501(c)3 application to begin.

One of our board members broke ground on a prototype cob tiny house! This house has steel door frames, aluminum windows and a metal rafter structure. The custom woodstove is designed to be loaded from the outside. So cool! (I’m sore!)

Next up comes establishing a podcast where we get to interview all the amazing people we are meeting and thereby (re)create the space between the environmental illness community and the natural building community. This is, I am learning, an old alliance. As I deepen my learning in this direction, I keep meeting people who have been deeply inspired by legendary architect, Christopher Alexander.

Lest we be mistaken for refined academics, it’s important to remember regularly that it is the lived-experience of homelessness that has us working on this topic of clean, affordable housing. It is not just the possibility that a clean-housing community may come into being, it is the mandatory nature of the increasing need that we can see developing year by year. We must create this so that people can survive…and then thrive.

The next learning curve will be about financial structures and how Community Land Trusts become funded and established. What is the process? What are the obstacles? How can we succeed? How have others failed?

I continue to seek out vicarious lessons so that our learning can build on the life lessons of others. Feel free to reach out to tell us what you know, what to look out for and who to look up.

Onward!

Holly

This has been a super fun month, meeting with natural building folks, ecovillagers, board members and advisors.

We filed the Articles of Incorporation with the State of New Mexico! Tonight we are having a launch party to just celebrate the evolution of affordable housing in the state of New Mexico and raise money to file for the 501c3 (which is Federal tax-exempt status of a charitable and educational organization.)

Right now we are hoping to find the land and funding to do a Pilot Project 10-dome “Clean Pod” within the city limits of Silver City, making our fair city an affordable housing role model like Moab, Utah.

A beautiful, elegantly designed Clean Pod would attract visitors to Silver City to tour the Pilot Project! As a training center, this Pilot Pod would provide housing not for sensitive people, but for Allies who want to come for a residential training program on how to design, build, maintain, farm and optimize Clean Pods, so that they can build them EVERYWHERE.

I envision Municipal and County and State governments all around the United States becoming interested in replicating this design. They are aware of the desperate state of affairs with homelessness and the affordable housing crisis in this country and the inability of the current supply chain to meet the demand for safe, affordable housing. Low-income people are living in 50 year old trailers that are making them sick.

Local governments everywhere are also becoming aware of the segment of their population that become homeless because they are sick. They find women, men, whole families, living out of their vehicles in empty parking lots because they got sick, lost their job and job-based health insurance, and/or they had to leave their homes because the homes were what made them sick.

I’ve recently gotten to meet some of the AMAZING natural builders in our town. These are people who know how to create safe, long-lasting and affordable homes out of earth. Many of these homes have rain-water catchment water systems and permaculture landscaping that promote biodiversity and food sovereignty by cultivating food forests– even here in the high desert.

We have to do something different as a country. The free market has now become predatory. Community Land Trusts are a way to preserve land from developers and make the clean, safe housing on it affordable for generations to come.

Let’s Do This!!

Holly

What a week. I have had some dazzling conversations about this project and how it might fit into a larger aspiration to manifest an sustainable-building affordable-housing neighborhood here in our fair city of Silver City? Would efforts to that end be a diversion? Decidedly not, if it results in more housing options for sensitive people.

Turns out Moab, Utah has an amazing 12 year old program called www.communityrebuilds.org/ Check it out! These are beautiful, sustainably built earthen homes that are being built on a community land trust.

I just put together a Patreon page so that people can follow along for this incredible journey. https://www.patreon.com/crookedforestinstitute

Although I genuinely loathe being “content” myself, I believe so much in this project that I don’t care. So stay tuned.

I got some guidance this week on how best to file the articles of incorporation for our 501c3 process. We’re moving that right along. Our board meets to sign the articles tomorrow so I can get them in the mail to the New Mexico Secretary of State’s office for filing.

Onward!