Joseph Kunkel

Joseph Kunkel

Executive Director of the Sustainable Native Communities Collaborative, Speaker

Joseph Kunkel is a Northern Cheyenne Tribal Member. He is a community designer and educator working on building capacity in Indian Country. As an Enterprise Rose Architectural Fellow, Joseph worked directly with the Sustainable Native Communities Collaborative (SNCC), and the Santo Domingo Tribal Housing Authority (SDTHA). His most recent work with SNCC has been to research and share exemplary Native American Indian housing projects and processes nationwide and build and develop emerging best practices, which has lead to the development of an online Health Homes Road Map for affordable housing development in Indian Country, all funded by HUD’s Policy, Development, and Research Office. His professional career has centered on community-based design, ranging from material research and fabrication, to community-based planning, design and development. At the SDTHA Joseph assisted with the planning and development of a 41 unit Low-Income-Housing-Tax-Credit development, along with leading the housing comprehensive master plan, which started with an Our Town grant funded by the National Endowments for the Arts, and has led to an ArtPlace America grant award. This award will fund multiple arts project tying together two new affordable housing developments on the Santo Domingo Pueblo.

Core Practices: Culturally appropriate design, community engagement, healthy housing design, design thinking, capacity building, urban mapping and wayfinding design, native-to-place architecture, master and comprehensive planning.