ParentsCAN knows that children can’t thrive at school until their families have stability at home. Flexible funding helped ensure they never had to choose between today’s needs and tomorrow’s.
A nine-year-old was getting into trouble at school — constant, escalating trouble — until a ParentsCAN advocate sat down with the family and learned the real story: they were couch-surfing, moving from home to home, each with its own rules. “The first thing we need to do is get you a place that’s your own,” the advocate told them. Once they had it, Development and Marketing Director Christine Roth remembers, “most of those behavior problems disappeared, and the child was able to focus in class.”
That’s the through-line at ParentsCAN. The organization’s roots are in helping families raising children with disabilities navigate special education — but you can’t be present at a meeting about your child’s education, as Executive Director Marlena Garcia puts it, “if the day-to-day stability isn’t there — if you’re worried about your job, or food on the table, or childcare.” So ParentsCAN evolved into a broader family resource center, a trusted first door for families juggling far more than any one system was built to handle.
This year, those families arrived with more — more need, more complexity, more systems to manage at once — in a county Garcia describes as a “service desert” for many specialists. And at the same time, ParentsCAN’s own funding wobbled. A federal Department of Education grant the team had counted on was delayed. Long-stable government contracts stayed flat as costs climbed.
Thanks to a grant from NVCF’s Elaine Jones Safety Net Fund — $100,000 for general operating support and $40,000 for capacity building — ParentsCAN was able to keep every one of its programs whole through a year of financial whack-a-mole, and to start building toward a more sustainable business model.
The Fund’s general operating support is helping keep their programs running without interruption. It even allowed ParentsCAN to bring on a new Intake Coordinator, so families got timely help from their very first call. The funding, Garcia says, meant not having to “lay people off or cut programs… it gives us both the stability to continue what we’re doing and the breathing room to say, okay, in light of these changes, what do we need to do?”
That breathing room is where the capacity building grant comes in. ParentsCAN is using it to lay the groundwork for a fee-for-service model — billing Medi-Cal and partnering as a vendor with larger agencies — that would turn services it already provides into a steadier, ongoing source of revenue. It’s a complicated process, and the team has taken its time to map it carefully rather than rush. “The capacity building allows us to think about, okay, we know we want to be over here,” Garcia says — “instead of just spinning our wheels on the day-to-day.”
One change they’ve had to weather: the small Napa-based nonprofit now has to keep one eye on Washington. Twenty years ago, no one on staff needed to be a federal policy expert. Today, shifting decisions — including plans to move special education oversight from one federal department to another — ripple straight down to the families in their waiting room, bringing uncertainty and, almost certainly, another round of adapting. Through all of it, ParentsCAN stays what it has always been: the trusted messenger families turn to when they don’t know where else to go. “We don’t have a magic wand,” says Program Director Dr. Lisa Colarusso. “But they know they can trust us, and that we’re in it with them.”
Why the Elaine Jones Safety Net Fund Matters
The Elaine Jones Safety Net Fund was created by Napa Valley Community Foundation to help Napa County nonprofits continue providing essential services during a period of rising demand, increasing costs, and uncertain public funding.
In its first year, the Fund invested $1.65 million in 15 local organizations through a combination of flexible operating support and capacity-building grants – helping nonprofits serve today’s needs while preparing for tomorrow’s challenges.
Learn more or support the Fund at napavalleycf.org/safetynet.