CJ Rapp is a cooperative housing developer, environmental activist, and digital marketing innovator based near Traverse City, Michigan. In the early 1990s, he helped develop one of the first Built Green programs with the Home Builders Association of Metro Denver, work that became a foundation for the emerging sustainable building movement and later evolved into today’s Green Building Council and LEED programs. During that time, he helped rewrite portions of the Uniform Building Code to advance energy efficiency, indoor air quality, and construction waste recycling.

CJ later helped build affordable homes through the USDA Rural Development Self-Help Build Program in southwest Colorado. As founder of the Eco Village Co-op and the Human/Citizens Cooperative Network, he has spent decades developing community-owned solutions to housing and climate challenges, including an energy-efficient cohousing model. He also created Holistic Digital Marketing, which evolved into Digital Marketing Business Process Outsourcing (DMBPO). At 70, CJ continues to e-bike, organize, and help communities turn bold visions into practical, replicable projects.

IN THIS EPISODE YOU'LL LEARN:

  • How to turn housing, climate, and social crises into concrete, local action projects.
  • That starting with available skills, people, and resources is more powerful than waiting for perfect conditions.
  • How the quad-fourplex cohousing model supports students and elders in one shared, sustainable design.
  • Why designing housing around the most vulnerable creates safer, more affordable, community-centered solutions.
  • How shared governance and co-op structures transform individual housing ideas into scalable community systems.
  • That eco-villages and land trusts create replicable networks instead of isolated one-off housing projects.
  • How holistic digital marketing becomes infrastructure for organizing, funding, and growing community movements.
  • Why shifting from individual effort to collaborative systems accelerates real-world impact and resilience.
  • How to take first steps in 30–60 days to launch a co-op, eco-village, or housing initiative.
  • Why intergenerational living reframes aging and student life as shared support, stability, and opportunity.

about the show

Behind every working business, movement, or system that changes lives, there is a sequence of decisions most people never see. The early risks. The turning points. The practical work that does not make headlines.

Impact Makers is a documentary-style TV series built around those stories. It follows the people who are actively building, not just talking about ideas, but putting them into practice in business, technology, education, health, and community development.

Each episode focuses on what was built, why it matters, and how it actually works in the real world. Not as theory, but as lived experience.

The series brings together founders, operators, and leaders who are shaping outcomes in their own spaces, showing how ideas become systems, and how systems begin to influence people, industries, and communities.

This is a platform for builders who are in motion, creating impact that can be seen, measured, and followed.

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