Our Founders
Sherman Blanchard
Sherman grew up on job sites. His father built across Albuquerque, and Sherman learned the trades from the ground up — apprenticing with electricians, working road crews, absorbing every phase of how a building actually comes together. He went on to a career in project management at Blanchard Construction, and recently completed a single-family build in Colorado himself, from land acquisition through certificate of occupancy.
He also knows this city. Decades of relationships across Albuquerque’s development, real estate, and business communities mean Adobe Pathway starts conversations with people already at the table.
What made this personal came during the COVID years, when homelessness surged around the neighborhood where he worked. Sherman organized a partnership with the Barrett House, a nonprofit serving women and children without stable housing — collecting donations, running employee drives, and showing up with his family to cook for residents. General awareness became a specific commitment.
At Adobe Pathway, Sherman leads the organization and oversees operations and project management.
Andrew Johannsen
Andrew has been building in New Mexico for nearly thirty years. He started as a framer before college, earned a degree in construction and business management from Northern Arizona University, and worked his way through quality control, superintendent, and project manager roles at a large homebuilder before founding Signature Homes & Remodeling in 2006.
For two decades, Signature Homes has taken on complex residential work across New Mexico and Colorado and built a reputation on doing it right and keeping clients for the long haul. Andrew knows the business from every angle — the craft, the contracts, the subcontractors, and the economics that decide whether a project works or doesn’t. He knows what things cost, what goes wrong, and how to get from a set of plans to a certificate of occupancy.
His reason for co-founding Adobe Pathway is direct: after three decades of building homes that working people struggle to afford, he wanted to build homes within reach.
At Adobe Pathway, Andrew directs construction.
Mohan Karulkar, PhD
Mohan is an engineer and manager in the national security sector, who has spent his career on both sides of the funding table — writing proposals, running budgets, and managing an R&D funding portfolio where he reviews, ranks, and awards them. He knows what makes a case to a funder credible, because he has spent years deciding which cases were.
He and his wife have lived in Albuquerque for nearly a decade and are rooted here through their church’s outreach work and years of service in the neighborhoods they call home.
His interest in housing was formed earlier, during ten years in Detroit. He saw what it looks like when housing can’t keep up: abandoned blocks, collapsing property values, and families living in homes that should have been uninhabitable but weren’t, because there was nowhere else to go. Detroit and Albuquerque have more in common than people assume — deep culture, resilient communities, and a housing problem that responds to people who decide to work on it.
At Adobe Pathway, Mohan leads funding development, communications, and organizational logistics.