Vermont Business Magazine Norwich University recently received a $20,000 grant from the TD Charitable Foundation, the charitable giving arm of TD Bank, to fund the development of the Affordable Shipping Container Homes Project. The Affordable Shipping Container Homes Project will design affordable housing units with recycled shipping containers.

Norwich students will develop a site plan with 8-10 cargo container units and a community building on a 10- acre site in Waitsfield, Vermont. Three completed shipping container homes will be located on this site, which is currently in the process of setting up an affordable housing community. Another home will be located in Shelburne, Vermont, and used as farm worker housing.

Housing need projections from the Vermont Office of Economic Opportunity and Vermont’s 2016 Point in Time Count determined that Vermont should add nearly 400 units of new supportive housing and an additional 1,250 new units of affordable housing targeted to households with incomes at or below 30% of the area median income.

In this project, the five schools in Norwich University’s College of Professional Schools--architecture, business, cybersecurity, engineering and nursing--join the Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Roger Williams University, the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and Yestermorrow to explore issues in affordable housing in a rural environment. Building on the success of Norwich’s previous housing prototypes, Norwich students and faculty continually pursue evolved solutions for community health, accessibility and adaptability.

“We continue to find and develop partnerships within the university and with outside organizations that align with our mission to conduct research to understand the relationship between buildings and occupant health and make refinements to a tiny house with regard to affordability, transportation, financing, mechanical systems design and community development,” Director of Norwich’s Design + Build Collaborative and School of Architecture + Art, Cara Armstrong. said.

"The innovative approaches that will result from this partnership to address the issue of affordable housing will be essential to both creating sustainable, inclusive communities across New England and empowering people to live with greater financial confidence," said Phil Daniels, Market President at TD Bank.

The Norwich affordable shipping container home will be designed and prototyped during the academic year with a completed build during a 2022 summer program at Yestermorrow, a design-build school in the Mad River Valley. The build portion includes four 40-foot-long cargo containers and a budget to outfit each of them. Each school will work on one of the containers and build it to net-zero standards.

The students will narrow the designs to one final design, which will also produce detailed construction drawings so that the final project may be replicated.

“A container home prototype and a container home community village design offers a solution to this crisis and a model that can be replicated to create an expanded portfolio of Vermont’s affordable housing,” Armstrong said. “We are so grateful for TD Charitable Foundation’s continued support of this important work.”

About the TD Charitable Foundation

The TD Charitable Foundation is the charitable giving arm of TD Bank, America’s Most Convenient Bank®, one of the 10 largest commercial banking organizations in the United States. Since its inception in 2002, the Foundation has distributed over $200 million and more than 19,400 grants through donations to local nonprofits from Maine to Florida. More information on the TD Charitable Foundation, including the online grant application, is available at TDBank.com.

Norwich University is a diversified academic institution that educates traditional-age students and adults in a Corps of Cadets and as civilians. Norwich offers a broad selection of traditional and distance-learning programs culminating in Baccalaureate and Graduate Degrees. Norwich University was founded in 1819 by Captain Alden Partridge of the U.S. Army and is the oldest private military college in the United States. Norwich is one of our nation's six senior military colleges and the birthplace of the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC). www.norwich.edu

Source: NORTHFIELD, Vt. – Norwich University 9.20.2021

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