Annie Humphrey Hemp House - Housing Sovereignty
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Annie Humphrey and her family live on Leech Lake Reservation in northern Minnesota, where they are learning the processes to build with hemp construction products. Their ultimate goal is to grow the movement for sustainable housing security for all people living in rural communities. Hemp houses like the one pictured here will be an integral strategy for housing all of our relatives.
$5000 raised here will be used to hire a contractor from Leech Lake to move the house from the Leech Lake Tribal College to Annie's land about 40 miles down the road. They have already gotten quotes from the contractors and the footings in place on their land. All they need is the money and time to move the house in time before winter sets in! That's where we come in...
Why Hemp?
An acre of hemp sequesters more carbon out of the air than an acre of trees, and the hemp grows up in about 70 days as compared to approximately three decades required to grow trees to harvest for lumber.
2.5 acres of hemp could build something like a 15,000 square foot home.
The "hemp hurd" is a by-product from industrial hemp. It can be combined with water & lime to create "hemp-crete" which is used to build walls. The hemp-crete has a very high R-value, meaning a 12-inch thick wall (like the ones shown here) will insulate a home more efficiently than our mainstream modern materials which are bad for the environment and the atmosphere, anyways.
In Canada, 286,000 homes are built each year. If we were to build each of these homes using modern materials, that would release about 20 million tons of CO2 or carbon into the atmosphere. If Canada were to build 200,000 new homes, 700 tons of carbon would be taken out of the atmosphere thru the growth of the hemp alone. Reducing our carbon footprint by using sustainable materials like hemp-crete would be the equivalent of taking approximately 10 million cars off the road for one year (and then some!)
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Housing Sovereignty
Building smaller, lower impact, truly affordable homes is part of Annie's strategic approach to manifesting our thriving futures here on planet Earth. With rising costs across the board, raising a family & building or owning a home is an unreachable goal for many young people. Annie’s mission to build this hemp house and move it to her land is a first sovereign step towards housing security for her family and her people that will ripple outwards.
The house is an investment for Annie’s future because she wants to move into it when she gets older and can’t manage going up and down the stairs in her log home. In the immediate future, Annie’s daughter and grandson will move into the house. They are excited to teach others how to build with hemp and get the house moved to their property before snow flies this year.
This winter, Annie and her family will use a thermal leak detector to measure the effectiveness of the two different styles of hemp-crete she’s using to build the insulating walls of the house. They need to raise $5000 to move the house to their land in plenty of time before winter so her daughter and grandson can move in.
In the future, they hope to share their knowledge within and outside of their communities, so that more people can learn the skills required to build more cost efficient, energy efficient, sustainable housing. Your donation is an investment in indigenous housing security and housing sovereignty. An investment we know will benefit an ecosystem and community of people and ripple outwards into our world. Miigwech for sharing your resources!
Thank you.
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Statistical References:
Organizer
Jacob White
Organizer
Ely, MN