A Year Like No Other
A letter of Gratitude
Friends:
As we approach the holiday season and the end of 2021, I want to express my appreciation to Archway’s many supporters and partners.
While 2021 was a most challenging year, we had set goals for Archway beyond just surviving the year and the pandemic. Our areas of focus were: 1) Raise $1M in funds to support our services work 2) Strengthen our property operations, and 3) Expand our pipeline of new projects.
I am pleased to say we made great strides in all three of these areas and in many others as well. Our fundraising (primarily to support our resident services) has grown from less than $50,000 in 2019 to over $700,000 so far this year. Our property operations team has improved the time and lowered the cost of re-leasing vacant units and our response time for maintenance orders continues to improve. Finally, at this time last year we had exactly zero new units in our pipeline. Today we are working on adding 369 units to the Archway portfolio. This will bring Archway’s portfolio to over 1,000 units in the next 24 months or so. Scale is important in our business because it helps to fund our operating costs, improves our financial strength and, most importantly, expands our impact.
None of this would have been possible without the ongoing support and engagement of our Board, in particular Robb Lapp and David Nestor, our founding board members who continue to serve these many years later. Jody Huntington and Paul Herskowitz deserve special mention as they have been critical to the leadership transition that Archway underwent as well as navigating the unprecedented challenges of the pandemic. Jody served for four and a half years and Paul has served for nine years. Both are stepping down at the end of this calendar year. THANK YOU!
Our projects would simply not be possible without the support of Colorado’s two statewide housing agencies: CHFA (Colorado Housing and Finance Agency) and DOH (Division of Housing). The leadership and staff support of these agencies has been critical to our efforts to finance new projects. We simply could not deliver more housing without them. While we always want more funding support – faster and with fewer strings, please! – we recognize these agencies must address and balance the needs of their many stakeholders, and we are truly grateful to have their confidence and support. Their work during the past two years has helped thousands of residents with rental support and helped to grow Colorado’s affordable housing inventory.
The Archway team continues to impress and surprise me in ways both big and small every day. I am particularly grateful to our on-site staff: our Service Coordinators, Property Managers and Maintenance Technicians, who are there every day to both support our residents and hold them accountable for being positive members of the community when that is needed. Additionally, Archway’s leadership team has been an incredible force for the betterment of our operations. This includes George Kelly, CFO, Julie Stern, Director of Real Estate, Michael Reis, Senior Developer, Mark Holmes, Director of Property Operations, Georgeanne Barrett, Director of Philanthropy, Sheri Replane, Director of Communications, Maria Brown, Director of Services and Donna Carrasquillo, Operations Manager. We simply could not succeed without the individual and collective efforts of this team. THANK YOU ALL!
Archway has many partners who help us serve our communities. I’d like to mention and thank the St. Francis Center for their partnership at our Cornerstone Community where together we serve 50 formerly homeless residents. The Urban Land Conservancy (ULC) has also been an important partner to us this year, and we expect for many years to come. ULC orchestrated the acquisition of the former Johnson & Wales campus in Denver and has entrusted Archway with the job of repurposing four former dormitory buildings into affordable family housing. ULC is a force to be reckoned with in their capital raising and acquisition strategy, all with the purpose of creating and preserving affordable housing and other community oriented assets. We are excited and grateful to be collaborating with both the St. Francis Center and ULC!
Our consultants and advisors have also done important work to help Archway. This includes people like Tom Currell, who helped us with the refinancing of five projects this year, Ben Doyle and his team at Bryan Cave as well as Kate Craigmile at Nixon Shefrin for their legal support; Novogradac & Co., for their auditing and accounting work for us; Steve Urban and the RiderFlex team of recruiters; Laura Clark and her team who have so ably guided us through the funding processes with CHFA and DOH; and Anne Modler for her grant writing success in helping us reach our fundraising goals. You have all contributed to our success and we are most grateful!
Finally, I want to thank those of you who have so generously committed your time and money to our efforts. You make the lives of our residents better by supporting our work to enrich our communities with services. Whether you contributed $20 or $2,000, 15 minutes or 15 hours, we appreciate your commitment to our work and your trust in us. We work every day to maintain that trust and support. We could not succeed without you.
I wish you all a wonderful holiday season and look forward to working with you all to continue to make Archway better in 2022 and beyond.
Sebastian Corradino
CEO
