Tom Collishaw has a photo from when he was in his college roommate’s wedding party, standing alongside a young man who would become the head of a major media conglomerate and another young man who would become one of the most powerful bankers in the world.
“I had a little fun with it, putting arrows with ‘CEO, NBC Universal,’ ‘CEO, JP Morgan Chase,’ and ‘CEO, Self-Help Enterprises (SHE),’” he says. “I hung out with the hoity toity, I guess.”
Studying English and history at Colgate University in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Collishaw was surrounded by high achievers headed for Wall Street, investment banks, and law school. “I knew by my second or third year in college that wasn’t going to be my path,” he says. “I was looking for something to do that sounded worthwhile and could help people.”
That search led him to become a Volunteers in Service to America intern, stationed with SHE, a nonprofit housing and community development organization in California’s San Joaquin Valley—a far cry, in every way, from suburban New Jersey where he had grown up. At SHE, he worked with people living in grinding, unimaginable poverty. And, he found his mission.
Collishaw wanted to help erase the inequity he witnessed, but was housing the way to do it? He still wasn’t certain.
He went back east to do grassroots advocacy with Ralph Nader’s Public Interest Research Group, then returned to SHE a year-and-a-half later. Three years into his tenure there, at age 28, he was thrust into running the firm’s most important legacy program, the Mutual Self-Help Housing program, in which families work together to build their own homes. He was tasked with overseeing a staff of 25 people—all older than him and many who didn’t speak English as a first language.
“They were looking at me like, who the hell is this kid?” Collishaw says. “And I realized I can lead these folks not by telling them what to do but telling them I’m here to learn from you and support you. That was my job, getting past some of those barriers with some pretty tough characters.”
Along the way, he says, “I realized we were doing really great things, and I could do them with great people and have fun and get meaning out of it—that this whole housing thing is pretty darn cool.”
Collishaw was deeply moved by the commitment of the farmworkers SHE served and their determination to improve life for their families. “I was just taken with the character of so many of the people who participate in our programs,” he says, “and that certainly helped seal it, too.”
Stepping in When Others Would Not
Forty-two years later, SHE has helped over 4,300 families build their own homes. As a member of the team that led SHE into affordable rental housing, Collishaw has contributed to the development, ownership, and operation of more than 3,000 rental units in 61 communities. By the time Collishaw became SHE’s president and CEO in 2014, he had worked in every one of the company’s business lines.
Under Collishaw’s leadership, SHE has secured a wide variety of financing and state resources that have allowed the organization to expand into senior and veterans housing, tribal housing partnerships, and permanent supportive housing. SHE’s balance sheet tripled between 2014 and 2024, from $76 million to $248 million in assets, propelled by a nearly $18 million internal loan fund to fund predevelopment activity. Revenue has grown sevenfold, from $10 million to $71 million.
SHE has evolved from its core mission of improving living conditions for farmworkers and their families to related endeavors such as creating an emergency services team that provides critical support to communities in crisis and a pioneering move into water management, developing groundwater sustainability strategies and securing clean drinking water access for drought-impacted communities. “Through Tom’s leadership, SHE has consistently stepped in where others would not,” says Housing Partnership Network president and CEO Robin Hughes.
Collishaw says water management is “the most unusual thing we do,” but SHE “came by it honestly because the rural communities where we wanted to build housing did not have infrastructure that could support housing at any scale.”
Most county officials didn’t see providing water as their responsibility, so his team learned how to organize communities and create water districts and mutual water companies.
“I talk about our work as having housing and water as the two pillars because there is no housing without infrastructure,” he says.
David Lipsetz, president and CEO of the Housing Assistance Council (HAC), which gave SHE its first housing development loan in 1972, says of the hundreds of organizations HAC works with across rural America, SHE “is unequivocally among the highest performing and arguably the most impactful community-based organization serving rural America today.” This is largely because of Collishaw, who “articulates the self-help housing model as transformational—not just about home building, but about empowerment, pride, and community building,” he says.
Collishaw’s commitment to affordable housing extends well beyond SHE. Whether advocating for an exemption from California’s prevailing wage for self-help housing and owner-occupied rehabilitation or for campaigns like the 2018 Veterans and Affordable Housing Bond Act that allocated approximately $9 billion in resources, Collishaw “has been a powerful advocate for housing policy at the state level,” says Housing California director Chione Flegal. “He is a trusted thought leader, mentor, and strategist whose innovations in financing, partnerships, and policy have become models for others across the country.”
Today, as he focuses on mentoring the next generation of SHE leadership that will take over when he retires in a few years, Collishaw is optimistic about the attention affordable housing is getting from the public and policymakers. “It is top of mind for virtually every component of our society,” he says.