Fellow Profile

Ophelia Wilkins

“The goal of my fellowship is to re-brand affordable housing in southwest Colorado as attractive, high-performance housing which residents take as much pride in as their rivers and mountains. ”

— Ophelia Wilkins

Fellowship Host:
Colorado Housing Inc
Pagosa Springs, CO

Ophelia Wilkins’ charge at Colorado Housing Inc. (CHI) is to align the organization’s practices with their goals of quality design, green building and efficient production with the ultimate purpose of designing and building affordable housing with net-zero environmental impact. Piece by piece, Ophelia and CHI will work to identify, understand and overcome the constraints that make people believe this goal to be impossible.

“In southwest Colorado,” says Ophelia, “I found a region, with a passion for sustainable, affordable communities but a struggle with implementation. This synergy led to the design and pending construction of one net-zero energy affordable home and the undertaking of integrating these practices into all future CHI homes.”

Prior to her fellowship, Ophelia contributed to design and hands-on construction of straw-bale homes on American Indian reservations from Arizona to North Dakota, as well as long-term space planning for the BART light rail system and a campaign to preserve an historic copra crane in San Francisco. Ophelia holds a master’s in architecture from MIT and became LEED accrdited in 2008.

Enterprise Community Partners