Author: Emily Stewart Recently, a national publication published an article titled “What happens when investment firms acquire trailer parks?” While the article does a good job outlining the increasing interest by investment firms in buying manufactured home communities, it was amazing to me that still, in 2021, a national publication is using terms like ‘trailer parks’ and ‘mobile-homes.’ As Marjory…

Manufactured housing communities (MHCs) have long been a crucial source of affordable housing for over 21 million largely low-income Americans. However, in recent years, private equity and hedge funds have increasingly targeted this market.

Northcountry Cooperative Foundation will be joining the Twin Cities Film Fest at their screening of the award-winning documentary “A Decent Home” on October 24th.

The staff at Northcountry Cooperative Foundation (NCF) continues to expand! We are happy to welcome Ellery Wealot to the team.

Julie Fliflet joined NCF in mid-April as our Controller, a newly created role designed to strengthen NCF’s internal financial management. Julie will lead all financial operations, including reporting, record-keeping, analysis, budgeting, and the development of fiscal policies. Her expertise will be instrumental as we bring these critical functions in-house for the first time.

Alexa Hancock joins NCF as a full-time Office Coordinator.

The homeowners of Bois de Sioux Mobile Estates, the only manufactured home park in Breckenridge, MN, recently purchased their 75-site manufactured home community and formed Bois de Sioux Cooperative, Minnesota’s thirteenth resident-owned manufactured housing cooperative and the 16th within Northcountry Cooperative Foundation’s service area.

NCF is excited to launch the Tom Guettler Cooperative Leaders Fund to honor the legacy of a long-time employee and to support cooperative leaders in their continuing education pursuits.

NCF is excited to welcome its newest team member, Dave Berglund. Dave joins the ever-expanding NCF team as its new Real Estate Development Director.

The homeowners of Viking City Mobile Home Park recently purchased their 42-site manufactured home community in Alexandria, MN, renaming their community Emerald Pines and becoming Minnesota’s twelfth resident-owned manufactured housing cooperative.

In an exciting development for affordable homeownership in the Upper Midwest, NCF has formed a partnership with New York-based Urban Homesteading Assistance Board (UHAB). This collaboration is poised to launch NCF into the limited-equity cooperative multifamily housing space, in turn empowering historically underserved communities through cooperative homeownership.

NCF is pleased to announce its newest addition to the team, Ed Hilbrich, as Housing Program Associate. Ed’s hiring brings NCF’s staff to 10, a doubling of the organization’s personnel in a year. The added capacity will allow NCF to further its work in providing technical assistance to resident-owned manufactured housing cooperatives and expanding their presence across the Upper Midwest.

Last week, Northcountry Cooperative Foundation’s (NCF) Associate Director, Emily Stewart, participated as a panelist in the first of a series of United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) Rural Development hosted meetings that focus on connecting a diverse array of private sector cooperatives with government partners to increase collaboration and effectiveness. Focusing on housing cooperatives, the event was a part of the Interagency Working Group on Cooperative Development’s efforts, established by US Congress, to “foster cooperative development and ensure coordination with federal agencies and cooperative organizations.”

As the 2023 Minnesota legislative session wrapped up this week, many are calling it one for the history books. From universal free school lunch and breakfast to legalizing recreational marijuana, legislators moved at breakneck speed to pass a comprehensive budget and several major policy changes.

NCF was recently named a semi-finalist in the national 2023 Housing Affordability Breakthrough Challenge. Led by Enterprise Community Partners and the Wells Fargo Foundation, this $20 million grant competition seeks to “identify and propel implementation-ready innovations that transform current practices and reimagine access to affordable homes.” Organizations competing in this challenge are eligible to receive individual grants of $1 million,…

Last month, the homeowners of Gaylord Mobile Home Park purchased their 31-site manufactured (“mobile”) home community to become Minnesota’s eleventh resident-owned manufactured-home cooperative. The residents, almost entirely Spanish speaking, named their new cooperative community El Nuevo Amanecer (The New Dawn).

One of the most difficult obstacles facing manufactured home communities is the continued cost of maintaining and preserving their privately owned infrastructure, such as roads, sewer, and water systems. While individual states such as Minnesota have created infrastructure grant programs specifically to help communities improve their aging infrastructure, the federal government had no such funding available.

NCF has a foundational mission of “transforming lives and communities through cooperative enterprise.” That mission is often carried out through educating and providing technical assistance to those living in manufactured housing communities as they organize and run their own resident-owned cooperatives. However, NCF has consistently seen an additional need to be an advocate for those in manufactured housing cooperatives through involvement in public policy.

While cooperative board members are naturally leaders in their own communities, often their roles expand into advocating for all manufactured housing residents. Such is the case with Woodlawn Terrace Cooperative Board President Bev Adrian. With a storied history of manufactured housing advocacy work, Bev joined NCF Executive Director Victoria Clark-West to testify in support of Minnesota HF 814, a bill that provides $65 million in state funding for preserving and expanding manufactured housing. Bev and Victoria explained to the members of the Minnesota House Housing Committee that the legislation is not only necessary to help preserve the most affordable form of homeownership, but also expand cooperative ownership across the state.

NCF recently received Charities Review Council’s Meets Standards® seal, a visual marker on nonprofit strength. Nonprofit organizations such as NCF earn the Meets Standards® seal by voluntarily participating in Charities Review Council’s Accountability Wizard® review process.

Minnesota Housing and the Minnesota legislature invested over $9.5 million in the MHCR program in 2022, the single largest funding cycle in the program’s history. The 14 projects that received grants will improve 742 home lots in manufactured home communities located in six different regions of the state. NCF-supported resident-owned communities received the vast majority of the funding in 2022, totaling nearly $6 million in infrastructure and acquisition projects. The two largest grants were given to resident-owned cooperatives.

Natividad Seefeld is the President of Park Plaza Cooperative in Fridley, Minnesota. But she’s so much more than that. She’s a mother, grandmother, great-grandmother, a former business owner, a problem solver, a cancer surviver, a mover, a shaker, and part of the glue that holds together a vibrant, thriving, diverse, urban community. 

We hear lots of myths about cooperatives, and thought it was time to set the record straight. This post is part of our annual campaign — the theme this year is “myths and legends.”

Myth #1 – Cooperatives are nonprofits

Co-ops are businesses, plain and simple. They have to make money to function and are not eligible for most grants. Co-ops face the same challenges as other businesses! 

A Decent Home, the feature length documentary about the vulnerability of manufactured homeowners amid rampant speculation by investor groups, is released today and is available on Amazon.

Every year in October, cooperators everywhere celebrate National Co-op Month. I love Co-op Month because it reminds me to stop and reflect on all the ways that cooperation nourishes our spirits and strengthens our communities. I had fun putting together this list of ways to celebrate Co-op Month and hope you have fun getting out there and cooperating!

On December 28th, 2020 the residents of Madelia Mobile Village in Madelia, Minnesota were notified that they were the recipients of a $700,000 grant from Minnesota Housing’s Manufactured Housing Community Redevelopment Program to complete the much needed renovation of two water and sewer lines within their community. 

Each year Northcountry Cooperative Foundation brings together leaders from resident owned manufactured home communities across Minnesota and Wisconsin for an exciting educational event called Common Ground. It is an essential opportunity for residents to connect, network, and learn together in a shared community.

We are pleased to announce that Northcountry Cooperative Foundation has been awarded the Community Development Financial Institution (CDFI) Fund Technical Assistance (TA) Grant.

The TA Grant will allow NCF to make important investments in its burgeoning lending program.

NCF has been nominated for a 2022 Nonprofit Mission Award from the Minnesota Council of Nonprofits (MCN). The organization is now one of three finalists in the Innovation category, along with Springboard for the Arts and Just the Pill.

NCF is honored to be considered for a 2022 Nonprofit Mission Award, which includes a professional video highlighting each recipient’s work, a cash award, and other recognition raising awareness of our mission among Minnesota’s community of nonprofit professionals.

NCF is excited to announce two new additions to the team: Kathleen Richert as the Education and Outreach Coordinator and Dan Gordon as Housing Program Associate.

NCF is excited to announce the addition of three new directors to the NCF board, bringing the board roster to 10 members. The new directors all come from nonprofit lending and finance backgrounds, proficiencies that will guide NCF’s strategic direction as we work to develop a loan program designed to meet the unique capital needs of housing cooperatives.

Residents of manufactured home cooperatives that are fortunate enough to have a storm shelter understand how essential these structures are, both for ensuring community safety in the event of severe weather but also as an important community gathering space.

NCF is pleased to announce that we are the recipients of the Clean Energy Resource Teams (CERTs) Seed grants for the Metro, Northwest, Southeast and Southwest regions of Minnesota.

NCF will use the grant to improve the energy efficiency of manufactured homes within the resident owned communities we support and develop a tailored rehab loan product that homeowners can use to complete home rehab projects.

In October 2020, NCF received an email from Morning Bell Coffee Roasters inquiring about using an NCF-authored brochure called “Small Business Ownership Succession; The Cooperative Solution.” The brochure was created by NCF a number of years ago and intended as an overview on the tax benefits of becoming a worker cooperative. The owner of Morning Bell, Nadav Mer, reached out because he was in the process of developing a feasibility assessment on whether his company could convert to being worker owned and he came across our work. As a cooperative development organization, we jumped at the chance to assist – about taxes and beyond!

Soren Stevenson joined NCF in May as the organization’s Real Estate Development Officer. Samuel Estes joined the organization in October as a Housing Program Associate. Soren and Samuel are both graduates of the University of Minnesota’s Humphrey School of Public Affairs and were drawn to NCF’s mission of empowering underserved communities through the cooperative ownership model.

Legislators gathered for a tour of Park Plaza Cooperative on September 21, 2021. Pictured left to right: Senator Lindsey Port, Rep. Sandra Feist, Rep. Steve Elkins, Sen. Mary Kunesh, Victoria Clark (NCF), Rep. Connie Bernardy, Natividad Seefeld (Board President, Park Plaza Co-op), Sen. Mark Koran, Soren Stevenson (NCF), Trevor Nelson (APAC Board President), Rep. Tony Jurgens. NCF co-hosted a Minnesota…

NCF Cooperative Housing Manager, Julie Martinez, discusses project details with Sungold’s engineer consultant, WSB. A little after two years since becoming Minnesota’s 9th resident-owned community, Sungold Heights is nearly finished with a $2.6 million infrastructure project. The project replaces the property’s aging water and sewer systems and reconstructs the roads throughout the community. The project, which is slated to be…

We at Northcountry Cooperative Foundation are happy to report that Common Ground 2021 was another “virtual” success. Every year, NCF hosts a conference for leaders of resident owned communities (ROCs) across Minnesota and Wisconsin about perineal issues facing ROCs. This year, Common Ground featured seven remote sessions over the course of two weeks that covered a myriad of topics including…

NCF is excited to announce the addition of four new directors to the NCF board. The new directors, three from Wisconsin and one from Greater MN, reflect NCF’s commitment to better reflecting the geographies served by the organization. The new board recruits come from diverse personal and professional backgrounds. Among the new directors include Brian Dahlk, a Madison, WI-based accountant…

Conference attendees collaborate in a World Cafe exercise at Common Ground 2018. Author: Emily Stewart The Common Ground Conference is an annual event NCF hosts for housing co-op leaders across Minnesota and Wisconsin. The conference is about coming together, building new relationships and learning from each other. The conference ensures the ongoing success of the housing cooperatives we support as…

Last September, NCF was awarded $90,000 from the USDA Rural Development Office through its Socially Disadvantaged Group Grant (SDGG) program. These funds will support community improvement projects in NCF’s client cooperatives in Minnesota and Wisconsin. The grant focuses on three of the most chronic challenges facing NCF’s client co-ops: stormwater management, storm shelters, and vacant lot infill. “The award will…

Zumbro Ridge’s original playground, fall 2018. Photo credit: Tom Guettler. Soon after joining the Zumbro Ridge Estates (ZRE) board of directors as Operations Manager in June 2018, Allie Lechner decided that building a new children’s playground would be key to keeping existing families and attracting new families to the community.  Zumbro Ridge’s new playground and basketball court, August 2020. Photo…

NCF staff snap a screenshot of one of the Common Ground virtual panel discussions. In September, NCF hosted its first entirely virtual conference, Common Ground. With the help of countless community members, seven outside guest speakers and the dedicated staff of NCF, Common Ground was a success. Co-op leaders gathered over seven sessions to learn about and discuss important topics…

…I envisioned a resource that would be both accessible and practical for those interested in the cooperative model, a resource that would provide a holistic picture of entrepreneurship and insight into both the “hard” skills of starting cooperatives (e.g. how to make a budget) but also the more nuanced work of keeping a group together and functional during the ups and downs of starting an organization. And so, “Collecting Ourselves” was born.

Some read NPR reporter Daniel Zwerdling’s recent investigative story as an indictment of investor-ownership. We do not. Mr. Zwerdling’s story importantly highlighted an extreme situation in Idaho. In our experience, the majority of community owners provide good and critically needed workforce housing opportunities in their land-lease communities. 

Like most consumers, residents of manufactured housing communities tend to have little control over their energy, with the high cost of energy bills being a major cost burden. That’s why NCF has partnered with Cooperative Energy Futures (CEF), an energy cooperative based in South Minneapolis, to bring cooperatively-owned community solar to Hillcrest Community Cooperative in Clarks Grove, MN. The 1 Megawatt community solar garden will be located 2 miles northwest of the Hillcrest community.

Earlier this month, our Executive Director, Warren Kramer, shared the following in an email to our friends  and supporters.  Dear friends and supporters of NCF’s co-op conversion work here in the Midwest: Here are two stories we thought you might find interesting.  First, Al Jazeera America recently did a story featuring one of the nation’s largest community owners (Frank Rolfe)…

Please join us on Saturday, November 7, 2015 for Small and Strong: Securing Your Food Co-op’s Future, a one-day networking and training event for staff and board members of small and startup food co-ops (<$3M in annual sales) in the Upper Midwest

On October 26-28, CFED will host its 11th annual I’M HOME Conference in Minneapolis, MN.

The Minneapolis-based Carolyn Foundation recently announced the award of $25,000 in grant resources to support new initiatives by Northcountry Cooperative Foundation (NCF) to pursue community solar projects in partnership with interested manufactured housing cooperative clients.  

When I first arrived at NCF in the midst of the MHPP program running full-swing, there was one home left that had not yet started its 18-month occupancy requirement: C6 in Madelia Mobile Village.

CONCORD, N.H. — In less than seven years, ROC USA® has built on a proven strategy of resident ownership in New Hampshire manufactured home communities and scaled it across the country, transforming communities and building a network of 10,000 secure and affordable homes with partners in 14 states.

Over several chilly days in late March, NCF staff joined staff from seven other ROC USA Network Certified Technical Assistance Providers (CTAP)s—nonprofit organizations from around the country supporting resident ownership of manufactured housing communities nationwide—in  Wilmington, Delaware to celebrate the closeout of a year-long market development initiative designed to widen the scale of resident ownership of manufactured housing nationwide.

With seven manufactured housing cooperatives (and more on the way), consistent with our strategic plan, NCF is moving to explore initiatives that will further build on the asset-building potential of its client cooperatives. 

Time and work in Stevens Point was very illuminating and included a visit to an artists’ cooperative, the largest rural Polish diaspora, a not-so-cooperative youth-run lemonade stands, & more. Hanging out in north-central Wisconsin also provided me the opportunity to spend time and talk with Margaret Bau, a seasoned and insightful cooperative developer of many years.