Curley School Artisan Lofts

ISSUE AREA: PLACE

City: Ajo, AZ
Arts - Housing - Rural

Contact:
Tracy Taft
Executive Director
International Sonoran Desert Alliance (ISDA)
400 Vananda Ave/PO Box 687
Ajo, AZ 85321
(520) 387-6823
alianza@tabletoptelephone.com

Date Published: October 2006

The Curley School redevelopment project is an initiative designed at renovating the abandoned Curley School in Ajo, Arizona for the creation of affordable artist housing. The renovation will allow Ajo to define itself as a community that directly supports the arts. Aside from providing housing for artistic individuals, the Curley School’s eight buildings, covering a seven-acre area, will offer 114,000 square feet of such amenities as classrooms, auditoriums, computer centers, community workshop areas and a gymnasium. The project is designed to foster a year round artists’ community through the redevelopment of an abandoned area. The project began in the spring of 2006 and is scheduled to be completed by February in 2007.

The renovation project is an initiative of the International Sonoran Desert Alliance (ISDA). The ISDA is a non-profit organization which believes that the inclusion of all inhabitants of the Mexico-U.S. border region are needed in collaboration to deal with the unique and diverse social and economic development issues of the region. The ISDA consists of residents, business leaders, federal and state administrators of natural resources, civic organizations and scientists from Mexico, the United States and the O'odham American Indian Nations. In creating the Curley School redevelopment project, the ISDA recognized the need to involve individuals from the various and sometimes conflicting backgrounds of the Ajo community. Additionally, the project has been seen as an attempt to permanently attract individuals into a community that has largely been considered a temporary vacation destination.

While the project is still in its infancy, it has been successful in securing the needed funding and in gaining community support. The 7.9 million dollar project receives its funding from a number of public and private sources for the. The ISDA initially was able to gain funding for the project through a grant from the National Trust Preservation Fund. Working in collaboration with the artist housing development organization, ArtWorks, the ISDA was able to gain HUD and CDBG funding. Aside from these two major sources of funding, the Curley School redevelopment project receives support from sixteen other private and public organizations including: the O’odham Nation, the Christensen Fund, and a number of private banks.

Resources:

www.curleyschool.com
www.planeta.com/ecotravel/mexico/sonoran/0895isda.html