_{Team TACOCAT, a collaboration between Rx Safe Del Norte and KFUG Community Radio, was one of the local programs that received Klamath Promise Neighborhood support. | Photo courtesy of KFUG Community Radio}

Editor’s Note: KFUG Community Radio and Redwood Voice Community News are recipients of Klamath Promise Neighborhood funding. Redwood Voice also has its origins through Building Healthy Communities.

Achieving Promise Neighborhood status for Klamath was a long shot in 2021.

Alison Ramsay and Kevin Malone had to find, and convince, a local agency to take the lead, get partners together to sign memorandums of understanding and write a proposal. 

Ramsay knew what she was getting into — she wrote two successful Promise Neighborhood grants in San Diego. Normally organizations get four to five months, she said. 

Two years after relocating to Del Norte at the invitation of Terry Supahan, executive director of True North Organizing Network, Ramsay and Malone said they noticed that the community lacked a comprehensive youth-serving organization. 

They submitted a proposal to the U.S. Department of Education for a five-year $30 million Klamath Promise Neighborhood grant, naming the Yurok Tribe as the lead agency six weeks ahead of the deadline.

“We won and we were not prepared for it,” Malone told Redwood Voice Community News on Thursday.

Five years after the tribe unveiled their goal to create a “cradle-to-career” pipeline for Del Norte County children, the implementation grant is at its end. The grant was expected to last through December 2026, Director Josh Norris said. However, according to a letter he sent to partner organizations on July 31, an overallocation of funds forced the tribe to either end or reduce its contract by Sept. 30.

According to the letter, going into 2025, KPN had about $10 million in “carryover” — funds that needed to be spent amid a U.S. Department of Education warning that it would withhold future funds. 

As presidential administrations transitioned and with the inception of the Department of Government Efficiency, KPN was advised to spend all of its carryover funding, according to Norris’s letter. KPN received grant funding for 2026, but was operating on a tight budget and was hit with “unanticipated costs” that left a shortfall of about $1.5 million, he wrote.

In an interview with Redwood Voice Community News on Sept. 10, Norris said he is searching for an extension grant. KPN is also interviewing its partners to find out what they used the grant for and if it was a benefit. While KPN isn’t going away, at the end of five years it can’t support its partner organizations in the same way, he said.

“The idea is that you have built up this coalition over this time and when the implementation (grant) is over, you continue with that programming and you continue working together and finding solutions,” Norris said. “Right now, we’re helping our partners with their sustainability plans and finding additional funding. I’m doing a lot of grant research now and forwarding grant opportunities to our different partners and that sort of thing. Yeah, the implementation grant ends in December, but we are going to continue on.”

According to Malone, the Promise Neighborhood initiative was inspired by the Harlem Children’s Zone in New York. Calling it a signature initiative of the Obama administration, Malone said the idea was to treat poverty and endemic violence as a public health issue, to draw a circle around it and intensely invest in that one area.

In Del Norte County, because it’s a geographically large rural area, Ramsay and Malone narrowed their proposal down to focus on eight schools — ‘O Me-Nok Learning Center; Smith River School, Bess Maxwell, Joe Hamilton and Pine Grove Elementary schools, Crescent Elk Middle School, Del Norte High School and Sunset High School.

Originally there were 12 partners named in the KPN grant application, according to Norris. Del Norte Unified School District and True North Organizing Network have the largest KPN contracts. Other original partners include Gateway Education and the Family Resource Center of the Redwoods.

Currently there are 14 funded partners, plus five inter-tribal departments that receive KPN dollars, Norris said. KPN has also supported more than 20 summer programs that aim to provide youth with healthy activities and to curb learning loss. 

Spending down the annual award of about $6 million, especially in the beginning, proved to be a challenge, Norris said. Del Norte has fewer resources, a smaller youth population and fewer partners to help implement the grant than a more urban community, he said.  Plus, he said, between the tribal government and the school district, the bureaucracy means things take time.
Now, with the grant closing out, Norris said KPN is planning a meeting in October to “check and see where folks are.” He said he expects to sit down and talk about what their plan will be now that the implementation grant is over and to “support in any way I can.”

For two organizations, Rx Safe Del Norte and Resilient Del Norte and Tribal Lands, being able to sustain their programs without the KPN grant will be a challenge. But it’s a challenge Del Norte has weathered before, Rx Safe Del Norte coordinator Jermaine Brubaker said.

“We get these big lumps of money that’s supposed to create lasting change,” she said. “But we don’t have any way to sustain it when it goes away.”

Brubaker has been involved with local nonprofits since Del Norte County was part of the Building Healthy Communities initiative. Funded by the California Endowment, the decades-long $1 billion campaign focused on increasing health equity in 14 communities statewide.

BHC came to Del Norte County in 2010 and lasted through 2020, “driven by the vision, leadership and advocacy of residents in Del Norte County and Tribal Lands,” said Gina Zottola, the Humboldt Area Foundation’s Vice President of Advancement & Philanthropic Innovation. Zottola led the Wild Rivers Community Foundation, which serves Del Norte and Curry counties, during the BHC initiative.

“Through this investment, the California Endowment contributed more than $18 million to the region,” she said Monday, “helping leverage millions of dollars to advance community priorities, strengthen local partnerships and create lasting improvements in health, opportunity and well-being.”

Rx Safe Del Norte, Resilient DNATL, the Community Food Council and the work True North Organizing Network has done were born out of BHC, which ended in 2020. The KPN grant was built on the back of Building Healthy Communities, Malone told Redwood Voice.

The community benefits from those large injections of funds, Brubaker said. Its local nonprofits work better together as a result. But it’s hard to find the resources, especially the workforce, to make lasting change, she said.

“We get these little boons and then we have to roll things back,” Brubaker said. “We keep hoping for this sustainability piece, but it’s so hard when you’re doing this kind of work that doesn’t make money.”

Rx Safe Del Norte, which began with Open Door in 2017, received $275,000 in KPN money. According to Brubaker, when Ramsay and Malone were working on the original application they found that it would get extra points for opioid prevention outreach. 

The contract was executed between the Yurok Tribe and Rx Safe Del Norte for KPN funding in May 2023, Brubaker said. The Yurok Tribal Council approved the contract in August 2023, she said.

Brubaker called the KPN grant the backbone money for her organization to do its work. Using those dollars, Rx Safe Del Norte partnered with KFUG Community Radio to create a youth-led program focusing on opioid education and overdose prevention — Teen Awareness Combatting Opioid Community Advocacy Training, or TACOCAT. 

The KPN funding also helped Rx Safe Del Norte continue to distribute Naloxone, which can stop an opioid overdose, Brubaker said. 

According to Brubaker, there were some challenges associated with receiving the grant. For one thing, she said, the budget she submitted to Norris for KPN was for five years. However, it took nearly a year for the contract to be executed, which meant delaying projects, she said. 

Now, Brubaker said she should have $80,000 left in her KPN contract, but it’s no longer available after September.

“We’re taking a step back as Rx Safe Del Norte,” she said. “We’re still maintaining the website and stuff like that, but I can’t show up like I used to… We’re having to really narrow it down as much as possible and look for another funding source to cover the things that the end of the grant was supposed to cover.”

Amber Wier, program director for Resilient DNATL, a coalition of partners focusing on adverse childhood experiences, or ACES, said she’s also having to scale back now that the KPN grant is ending early. 

Wier said she submitted a three-year plan to the Yurok Tribe for KPN funding in January 2024. The total contract, $826,593, was approved on Nov. 26, 2024, she said.

Once the grant funding came through, Wier hired Sarah Caron as Resilient DNATL’s project coordinator. The grant also paid for half of Kelly Borges’s salary as the organization’s media coordinator and analyst. 

With three staff members on board, Resilient DNATL began holding coalition meetings, focusing on the neuroscience behind ACES. They held neighborhood barbecues to build resiliency and conducted empathy interviews. Resilient DNATL and KFUG also produced a youth podcast called the Anchor Point Podcast. 

“Great things are coming out of it,” Wier said. “Now we’re just trying to find some other grant opportunities to carry on the work.”

With the KPN grant ending early, instead of being able to pay for three people, Wier said she’s only able to fund one part-time position using California Endowment money Resilient DNATL has left over. 

“It’ll be a reduction,” she said. “I’ve been applying for grants and we knew this was coming, so it’s not a big surprise. We just didn’t know it would be this soon.”

KPN’s partner organizations have been able to meet their goals, Malone said, but the artificial influx of funding from both BHC and KPN wasn’t going to be sustainable. The goal for him and Ramsay would have been to work on getting those organizations to be sustainable enough to function on roughly $1.5 million in funding instead of $6 million, he said.

A lot of Promise Neighborhoods were able to extend their funding, Malone said, but once the Trump administration took over the White House in 2025, the goal was spending the money before it could be clawed back.

“Finding money to fund collaboration is hard, it shouldn’t be, but it’s really hard,” Malone said. “And so had it not been for the Department of Education blowing up … we would have been counseling Josh to keep money back in order to keep collaborative staffing. But everything we were hearing was, ‘get it out the door — you gotta spend, spend, spend, so let’s do cool things with it.’”

Currently, KPN is planning its next phase of existence, Norris said. That includes determining the value of what the KPN was able to accomplish through its implementation grant. This includes collecting data and metrics to determine whether the grant made a difference to Del Norte’s partners.

Norris said there is a potential for an extension to the implementation grant that he may pursue. There is also other funding from other foundations that KPN is using. Despite the challenges, he said, one thing that has worked well is the collaboration with other organizations.

Norris pointed out that some examples of KPN’s success include the Community Food Council becoming an official nonprofit organization after being under the FRC’s umbrella for several years. The Food Council and the Yurok Tribe’s Food Sovereignty Program has been at ‘O Me-nok Learning Center doing gardening classes, ending the program with a feast and cooking demonstrations, he said.

Norris said he’s also proud of the work True North has done by recruiting parent navigators who have built relationships with other parents at Del Norte schools.

“It’s challenging right now not knowing what the future holds, but I think what we have built is permanent,” he said. “I think Building Healthy Communities started this whole process of community organizations coming together and collaborating and we sort of picked up where they left off.”

The $30 million grant laid the foundation, Norris said.

“The sixth year is when you start seeing results,” he said. “This collaboration piece, if we keep this up, we will definitely see lives improving.”