The story behind Flourish echoes the story behind Indwell. In 1974, a church community in Hamilton, Ontario recognized that the need for mental health supports integrated with housing was bigger than what one family in their community could offer out of their own home. They founded Indwell to pool their collective resources and buy a home from which more people could experience a community of health, wellness and belonging, who might otherwise have experienced homelessness. 

In the 2000s, Indwell’s vision of Hope and Homes for All compelled the organization to grow through the purchase of several apartment buildings and group homes in Hamilton and Woodstock. In the ten years that followed, the waiting list for Indwell’s housing continued to grow while real estate prices simultaneously increased and a need for new supportive affordable housing to be built became apparent. Indwell established its own organizational capacity to develop new apartment buildings, starting with the adaptive reuse of Hamilton’s Perkins Centre in 2011. At that time, Indwell’s board adopted an ambitious strategic plan to double the number of people housed at Indwell within five years, and by 2017, over 440 lived at Indwell. Today we are serving almost 800 people with supportive housing. As waiting lists continued to grow, Indwell continued to increase its capacity to meet our communities’ needs and we became one of the largest developers of new affordable housing in Ontario.

Ontario is experiencing an unprecedented housing crisis and many communities are finding themselves unprepared to take on the logistics of new affordable housing projects.

Indwell’s vision of hope and homes for all compels us to meet our community’s needs not just through our organization but also through contributing to growth across the entire community housing sector.

That’s why we’ve launched Flourish.

Flourish is a social purpose real estate development services company that deploys the experience of Indwell across the community housing sector. 

Flourish provides real estate development services to clients pursuing affordable and social-purpose housing projects. Flourish can support clients through the full range of development activities, including project site selection, planning and community engagement, funding strategies and program model design, and project management through design and construction.

Flourish shares Indwell’s vision of Hope and Homes for All. Flourish continues to primarily support Indwell by overseeing 400 future Indwell homes currently under construction, and another 530 in various stages of planning. At the same time, Flourish already supports several other community housing providers as they seek to provide hope and homes through new affordable housing developments.

Check out flourish.ca to learn more and meet the Flourish team.