What We Do
Shelter
Self Reliance
Sustainability
Community
Tijuana/Border Region
4 Walls International’s goal is to promote sustainable community development around the globe. We provide clean drinking water, food access, and safe shelter while addressing infrastructure inadequacies, pollution, urban sprawl stressors, and economic growth opportunities, with one solution. These issues are interrelated, mutually enhancing, and require immediate action on all levels. Inspired by the work of green building inventor Michael Reynolds, we are currently focused on bringing the principles of sustainable development to the US-Mexico Border Region, specifically in our home town of San Diego-Tijuana.
What We Do
4 Walls International’s goal is to promote sustainable community development around the globe. We provide clean drinking water, food access, and safe shelter while addressing infrastructure inadequacies, pollution, urban sprawl stressors, and economic growth opportunities, with one solution. These issues are interrelated, mutually enhancing, and require immediate action on all levels. Currently, we are focused on the US-Mexico Border Region, specifically in Tijuana.
The 4 Walls mission starts at the community’s heart and involves its local leaders, NGO’s (non-government organizations), government agencies, and educational institutions that have a presence in the area. Upon organizing, we share resources, knowledge, and ideas of how to sustainably develop, the area. We repurpose post consumer waste products found in the surrounding community’s environment. Most of these materials, such as tires and plastics, are pulled from the local environments rivers, valleys and streets. These waste-products would otherwise pollute communities, find their way in to our oceans, or add to over-burdened land fills. Additionally we incorporate different styles of natural building techniques depending on local conditions and resource availability. This creates a cheaper, more environmentally friendly, and culturally appropriate building in the community.
There are a lot of housing non-profits (NPOs) out there, but they build houses that are relatively expensive for the benefactors. They use traditional building materials and require a utility infrastructure creating future financial burdens. 4Walls homes do more than just house occupants; they lessen the cost of daily survival stressors. Specifically providing clean drinking water, grey-water re-use, thermoregulation, on-site sewage treatment and agricultural production. This frees valuable time and money to allow citizens to become more active in their community and foster economic development.
By unifying communities with environmentally conscious building practices that simultaneously improve quality of life and environmental quality, we create a sense of environmental stewardship. Upon completion, participating community members will have gained the knowledge and confidence to address their inevitable development needs on a local level and in a sustainable fashion.
There is tremendous power and impact in helping communities build lasting homes for themselves. 4Walls excels at this by focusing on four areas: shelter, self-reliance, sustainability and community.
Shelter
The homes of 4Walls are designed to provide for a family’s basic biological needs beyond just shelter. These green, efficient, and sustainable homes are designed to heat and cool naturally, grow food, provide clean drinking water, and treat human waste. For example, the roof can harvest water, which can be used for cooking and cleaning. That water is then channeled through a grey-water system that can either be used to cultivate local plant-species or irrigate for agricultural production. The walls of each home are engineered to provide a comfortable, safe, permanent, and structurally sound shelter while utilizing a minimum of new building materials (doors, windows and some lumber). The technology and engineering deployed in these homes is scalable, affordable and readily available, and can be built with or without a public infrastructure of water, sewage and electric.
Self Reliance
There are millions of people who work tirelessly just to survive. They spend the majority of their daily wages on food and water, sometimes up to 90% and higher. How can you improve your family’s quality of life when all of your efforts are expended to solely survive? Because 4Walls homes are engineered to be self-sustaining (i.e. not requiring public infrastructure), we can serve the people who need the most help in the most environmentally degraded areas. A home that can provide shelter, food, water and energy is a home that can free up time and resources of its inhabitants; creating more space for ingenuity, industry, family-time, and education. This fundamentally reduces the stress of daily survival.
Sustainability
4Walls repurposes manmade products that pollute, clog our landfills, and will never biodegrade into building materials. These unnatural resources like used tires, plastics, and other post-consumer products are free and readily available in most places around the world. We also utilize natural building methods such as adobe, hay-bail, and rammed earth-bag building when appropriate. By repurposing alternative materials and using natural methods, we reduce our building costs tremendously and reduce landfill waste. Our eco-friendly home-building technology and design also minimizes environmental impact, benefiting the entire community.
Community
In order to empower impoverished communities to adequately plan for their future, we initiate an intensive process aimed at identifying culturally sensitive needs. 4 Walls contacts community leaders, and under their guidance, establishes a plan of action. We also help them to organize into an efficient network, by which people of all genders, ages and skill levels contribute with what they can based on their talents, strengths and interests. This human effort is key to the success of 4Walls. By cultivating leadership, 4Walls harnesses local expertise in pricing materials and developing a local system of accountability. Families who participate in 4Walls building efforts are accountable to each other, not to 4Walls. This creates ownership and pride in our projects for our benefactors.
Tijuana/Border Region
4Walls is currently addressing the needs of the Tijuana-San Diego region. The high-density urbanized canyons of Tijuana are filled with people who are struggling every day for food and water; piecing together temporary structures that wash away with the rain. As a result of these unsafe building practices, run-off consisting of tires, trash, and human waste is threatening the environmental vitality of the Tijuana River Valley Estuary. This polluted run-off is destroying the environments of Tijuana and San Diego, causing everything from beach closures to destroyed wildlife habitats. We have recently completed a live-work facility for the Las Hormiguitas
native plant nursery in Tijuana. It will be used to showcase the various sustainable building methods incorporated in the structure. Leaders in the community will be invited to experience these innovations first-hand and given the opportunity to bring this method of building to their community. We are currently planning cross-border volunteer building events as well as developing future plans for consistent funding.