ALUMNI PROFILE: OLIN COHAN

F Rom Newman To Nicaragua

A member of the Peace Corps in Nicaragua two decades ago, Olin Cohan, ‘94, saw up close the ravages of deforestation in Central America. As a building contractor and native of Occidental, he is all too familiar with California’s affordable housing crisis. For those two problems, Cohan and his business partner, Aram Terry offer one elegant solution. They recently founded Masaya Homes, which designs and builds prefabricated houses, offices and studios using teak grown on reclaimed, reforested cattle pastures in Nicaragua.

While in Nicaragua, Cohan played shortstop for a local baseball team. “His teammates would show up on horseback,” recalled his father Ken Cohan, who visited his son in Central America. Before games began, cow pies had to be removed from the outfield.

The small houses he is now building are the result, arguably, of his giant passion for baseball. Cohan, who is now 45, played third base at CN and then went on to play at St. Mary’s College in Moraga. After college, he played baseball in the Netherlands. While it did not pay especially well, he did acquire a taste for international travel. Upon returning to Sonoma County in 2001, his baseball career over, Cohan applied to the Peace Corps, and ended up in Padre Ramos, a fishing village in northwest Nicaragua.

Cohan taught grade school classes and, along with his Peace Corps partner Terry, led environmentally-focused teacher workshops, always evangelizing for conservation. Nicaragua had a “major problem” with deforestation. In developing countries, it was more profitable for the campesinos to clear-cut forests — often discarding or burning the trees — to create grasslands for cattle. “We would talk about not cutting the forest down, and planting trees, but people need to eat,” said Cohan. “So what we’re doing is trying to make forests profitable for the community. Part of that is turning wood into finished, valuable products.” Founding the company was a continuation of their work in Nicaragua, where the pair had launched UniversitÁrea Protegida, a nonprofit designed to train the country’s future environmental leaders. That program, run with assistance from the San Francisco-based Earth Island Institute, placed university students in outlying rural areas to conduct environmental thesis research.

Cohan, with business partner Terry, launched several successful business ventures in the country, including a coffee farm and a small, community-run hostel. Having a construction background, they started a company building homes on the beaches of northwest Nicaragua. They specialized in using reclaimed wood from “old haciendas” to build custom homes and surf camps. Cohan had been in the country a year or so when he met Ofelia Arteaga, who was researching the area’s birds for her thesis. The two clicked and started dating. Married in 2006, their first daughter was born a year later. A second daughter arrived in 2015. Cohan is quick to emphasize the crucial roles Ofelia played in running the hostel, doing landscape design for the construction company and serving as a co-director of the nonprofit.

In 2017, they moved to Sonoma County and he began working as director of operations for Snyder Construction, owned by Newman friend Tom Snyder. Cohan and Terry had long discussed the possibility of expanding into prefab units. With demand for such units rising and the pace of fire rebuilds slowing in Sonoma County, they decided “to take the next step,” said Cohan. While starting a new company felt like a little bit of a gamble, it also felt like exactly the right thing to do: binding together his background in construction, his passion for conservation, and his love for Nicaragua and its people. “To be honest,” he said, “there’s nothing in my life I’d rather do.”