Out of this effort came an 18 person Steering Committee, and later a 13 member Board of Directors which, in two years of organizing, planning, and fund raising led to the building of our first house in Florence, Colorado at 212 Arrowhead Drive.

Play houses were built using all volunteer labor, and raffled to raise money for construction materials. These play houses were decorated as floats and pulled through the Canon City Christmas Parades in 1998,1999,2000,& 2002 to increase public awareness of the new Habitat program in this county. In the year 2001,the play house was discontinued in favor of a Gazebo built by Federal Prison labor which was pulled through several local parades prior to it's raffling in late December of that year.

Another major fund raising program was initiated in the year 2000, and has become an annual fundraising event. This project is a food tasting event called "The Gourmet Sampler", and has been our top fund raising activity. It was held for the fifth year in April of 2004.

We purchased our first building lot in Florence, Colo-the site of our first house which was completed and occupied by a well qualified family in May of 2001. The site of our second house completed in the Spring of 2002, was a lot in Penrose, Colo. donated by the Kirkwood Memorial Presbyterian Church in that town. Earlier in our short history, a 4 lot plot of ground in Canon city was donated to us by the Fremont County government; however, the cost of infrastructure work was too high to consider building there in our early formative days.

It was planned that our third, fourth, fifth, and sixth Habitat houses would be built on this plot when sufficient funds were obtained to complete the subdivision engineering and remaining infrastructure work. Beginning work was started in the Fall of 2002 with the objective of building 2 houses in a parallel time frame.

In the Spring of 2002, we closed on our 2^nd house in Penrose, held a public "walk through", and conducted a Christian dedication.

Starting late in November of 2002, we held a ground braking ceremony and dug foundations for our 3rd and 4th houses. They were built in the ensuing 9 months, and were completed in Sept, 2003. The experience proved challenging and too much for our financial resources making it necessary to apply for a short term bank loan to pay final bills.

Although we had two remaining lots in the Habitat for Humanity Estates Subdivision to build on, it was Summer of 2004 before we had the resources to start building house #5. That house has now been built by the local Firemans Union thus saving us a lot of time and energy, and was occupied in early February, 2005 leaving one more lot to build on before aquiring and developing land elsewhere for continued building of affordable Habitat housing.

Since that time, we have completed house #6-the last lot in Habitat Estates-, and have built house #7 at 617 Elm Street, in Canon city. As of April 6, 2008, there were no plans to build another house until finances allowd. We then had the good fortune to be named as a benefactor of an estate, and were then able to plan for our 8th house on which work was started in November of 2008 by a group of High School students whose teacher agreed to have his home construction class build a Habitat house for our affiliate. In addition as part of our inheritance, we became the owner of a four bedroom frame house previously occupied by the Clark family who named us in their Will. The current plan is to rehabilitate that house so it can serve as a Habitat House for a qualified family who could properly occupy and financially support a four bedroom house.