45-701 South Monroe St.
Suite G, Plaza 1 Indio, California 92201

Phone: (760) 347-3157
Fax: (760) 342-6466
john.mealey@cvhc.org www.cvhc.org/index.html

Counties Served: Riverside

Incorporated: 1982

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In 1982, a group of local community activists, business leaders, and concerned residents decided to address the lack of safe, decent, affordable housing for migrant farmworkers and other low-income residents in California’s Coachella Valley. With an initial $10,000 grant from the Riverside County Department of Community Action, the Coachella Valley Housing Coalition (CVHC) was formed. Its mission was then, and remains today, to help low-income people improve their living conditions through advocacy, research, construction, and operation of housing and community development projects.

Four years later, the organization had completed its first project, Pueblo Nuevo, a 50-unit apartment complex for farmworkers and their families. More than 800 people applied to live there. In 1987, CVHC began its Self-Help Housing program, through which low-income families work together to build their own homes and use their "sweat equity" as the down payment. In 1993, the organization extended its services beyond housing and completed a water delivery system that now supplies more than 200 households with safe drinking water.

Today, CVHC provides specialized homes for farmworkers, low-income families, senior citizens, people with special needs, and people living with HIV/AIDS and other chronic illnesses. It also sponsors child care centers, after-school tutoring programs, a medical clinic, a job training office and various community service programs.