Two longtime Mountain T.O.P. employees recently took the helm of Housing Hub, a local organization dedicated to building affordable homes on the South Cumberland Plateau.

Grundy County’s Julie Keel will serve as its executive director while Cody Jorstad will direct housing development.

“The Housing Hub Board is genuinely thrilled to have recruited two experienced and passionate individuals like Julie and Cody — the fact is that their combined experience and talents make the mission of Housing Hub possible,” said Board Member Lee Limbird.

In addition to building affordable homes on the Plateau, Housing Hub’s mission includes preparing future and current homeowners to buy and maintain homes and developing a sustainable local workforce in the construction trades.

Keel, who came to Mountain T.O.P 18 years ago as a logistics coordinator and most recently served as its interim executive director, had focused on housing development for the past five years and led the charge for Mountain T.O.P. and other local nonprofits to partner with Grundy County High School teacher Tim Tucker and his carpentry students to build Blessing House for a single mom and her son on donated land in Coalmont.

As Housing Hub began its shift from information clearinghouse to an agency that would actually build affordable houses in Grundy, Marion, and Franklin counties, it became clear that Keel was the one to head it up.

“I feel like my passion lies in community development,” said Keel, who holds an undergraduate degree in mechanical engineering from Mississippi State University and a doctorate of ministry in organizational leadership from Asbury Seminary in Wilmore, Ky. She’s also a certified USDA 502 loan processor.

Jorstad also has deep roots with Mountain T.O.P. — he first came with his church youth group as a 14-year-old camper.

A Georgia native, he grew up outside of Atlanta and graduated from Georgia Tech in 2017 with a degree in civil engineering.

“I started going to Mountain T.O.P. as a teenager, worked on their summer staff there, and then worked full-time on their staff from May of 2017 through the end of 2020,” he said.

As Mountain T.O.P.’s service area manager, Cody supervised construction projects done out in the community by teams of volunteers.

At the end of 2020, he became a construction manager for a large-production homebuilder, the Pulte Group, in Nashville while his wife worked on her master’s degree in theological studies at Vanderbilt.

“I wanted to build new homes,” he explained. “Working for Pulte gave me a lot of good experience in a short amount of time, but in the back of my mind I’ve always known I wanted to go back into affordable housing work — that’s something that’s extremely important.”

Jorstad will initially focus on finishing Blessing House.

“I’m going to be supervising the remainder of the construction of that project — a combination of working with volunteers and hiring out some jobs depending on what it is,” he said, noting that the house should be completed by the end of November.

Housing Hub’s office is located in Suite 230 upstairs at the Littell-Partin Center (old Grundy County High School) in Tracy City. For more information, visit its website at <www.housinghubtn.org>.