In October of 2024, Crooked Forest Institute purchased 52 acres on Highway 35 in the Mimbres Valley to become our education campus.
Our strategy is a suite of interlocking solutions that will become a local, sustainable economic engine for the Mimbres Valley and Grant County over the next 10 years.
We are pairing a Vocational Education program with a nonprofit housing developer program to build clusters of small adobe homes on district utilities and on a community land trust.
Part of our training program will be the making of adobe bricks and compressed earth blocks, as well fabricating modular elements for our window bucks, kitchens and bathrooms.
We hope to develop this into a CTE (career and technical education) program that also offers hospitality training and food production. We want to support our graduates to either start their own trade businesses, or get hired to build these homes on a community land trust. (AI proof jobs.)
Our homes are architect-designed and built with local resources, using local labor. They will have passive solar design and water catchment systems, both standard, and they are completely fireproof, as no wood is used in the construction.
There will be several prototype housing clusters (we have 3 house designs) on our education campus.
Another innovation is that our education curriculum focuses on soft skills as well as hard skills.
That means we won't just teach construction, we will use best practices for effective communication skills building, including cross cultural communication, active listening, mediation, conflict resolution, and restorative justice.
While each of the elements in our system may be humble, the innovation is the pairing of mutually-reinforcing, common sense solutions that allow New Mexico communities to become more self-sufficient.
www.CrookedForestInstitute.org
A New Twist on Affordable Housing
