3Keys Staff and Tapestry Development Complete Georgia Supportive Housing Institute’s 2025-2026 Cohort for Development of Affordable Housing
Pictured above: Scott Walker, (President/CEO), Diane Hughes (Director of Supportive Services), Jon Toppen (Co-Founder and President of Tapestry Development Group), Mariah Dumas (Property Manager at Rosalynn Apartments), Gerry Richardson (Asset Manager), Britni Grimes (with Tapestry), and Khadijah Irving (Support Service Specialist at Welcome House).
From September 2025 to January 2026, several staff from 3Keys and Tapestry Development group participated in a specialized program through Georgia Department of Community Affairs (DCA) and CSH (Corporation for Supportive Housing). A small number of teams were selected from a competitive pool of applicants to participate in the Georgia Supportive Housing Institute, a highly-focused training and technical assistance course designed to expand affordable supportive housing across the state.*
The goal is to more efficiently seek and obtain funding for projects by improving the planning, development, and initial project implementation. The five-month program provides hands-on training to development teams focused on creating high-quality, service-enriched housing for people who face complex housing barriers. Participants include housing developers and owners, homeless service and healthcare providers, property managers and other organizations serving high-needs populations, such as individuals with serious mental illness, veterans, survivors of domestic violence and foster youth exiting care.
Our 3Keys and Tapestry team applied jointly with the request to develop a more robust plan for funding the rehab of Welcome House. 3Keys is the co-owner, co-developer, property manager and service provider/coordinator for Welcome House while Tapestry is the lead developer. We chose this development as the focus since the apartment building presents a wide variety of unique challenges. While Welcome House has served as an affordable housing complex for more than 30 years, it has become programmatically and physically obsolete. This required reimagining new concepts to better serve our residents long-term.
Points of discussion centered around physical limitations of the site and included:
- Help in identifying and accessing financing across a variety of federal, state, city, and philanthropic programs.
- Gaining additional information about relocating and re-housing existing residents as the project includes demolition and a reduction of units.
- Continued talks with the Georgia Department of Community Affairs to revise the existing land use restrictions to allow for this development to move forward.
- Working through additional other existing restrictions, including the ground lease with the City of Atlanta.
Participants from The 3Keys and Tapestry Development Group included:
- Scott Walker, President/CEO
- Mariah Dumas, Property Manager of Welcome House
- Keith Dutton, Director of Operations
- Diane Hughes, Director of Supportive Services
- Khadijah Irving, Supportive Housing Specialist
- Gerry Richardson, Asset Manager
- Jon Toppen, Co-Founder and President of Tapestry Development Group
The in-person and virtual sessions, led by local and national experts, included topics such as project design, service integration, financing, property operations and trauma-informed services. The curriculum is grounded in evidence-based best practices which emphasize immediate access to permanent housing without preconditions such as sobriety or service participation.
Six teams, including The 3Keys team in the bottom left, completed the Georgia Supportive Housing Institute course in January 2026.
Participants who completed the Institute received:
- A detailed, funder-ready housing plan with service and operations strategy
- Post-Institute technical assistance from CSH
- Access to project initiation and predevelopment lending through CSH
- Competitive points in DCA’s 2026 Supportive Housing Notice of Funding Opportunity
- Eligibility for CSH’s Predevelopment Quality Endorsement
Deliverables included capital and operating budgets, a memorandum of understanding among team members, service plans, and early feasibility assessments for housing sites.
As a testament to the power of the program, last year’s cohort focused on the development of 688 proposed new housing units statewide, 257 of which were supportive housing.
More info can be found in these press releases:
- DCA, CSH relaunch Georgia Supportive Housing Institute following strong first year
- CSH and Georgia DCA launch 2025-2026 class of Supportive Housing Institute
* Supportive housing (SH) is defined as “a proven solution to ending homelessness that combines affordable housing that has no time limit on residency assigned to it, with services which help people who face the most complex challenges and are often those most likely to be historically marginalized, to live with stability, autonomy and dignity.”