Sacramento’s La Familia building a $16M jobs hub and emergency shelter. Here’s what it offers
La Familia Counseling Center will break ground next year on what the nonprofit’s director hopes will become a “center of hope and opportunity” for thousands of residents living in a narrow swath of south Sacramento on either side of Franklin Boulevard.
Rachel Rios, who rose to the pinnacle of leadership in California’s juvenile justice system, has dedicated the second act of her career to ensuring that low-income families have the resources needed to flourish physically, mentally and financially.
She and La Familia’s board saw unmet needs particularly in neighborhoods bounded by Sacramento Executive Airport and Bing Maloney Golf Course to the west, Highway 99 on the east, Fruitridge Road to the north and Florin Road in the south.
So, in 2015, La Familia acquired the shuttered Maple Elementary School at 3301 37th Ave. to move resources closer to residents of South City Farms, Brentwood and Woodbine who were struggling with finding jobs, gaining the skills needed to increase pay, filling education gaps, managing life as a single parent, or getting help for mental illness or a teen pregnancy.
La Familia repurposed the school into the Maple Neighborhood Center where residents could:
▪ Work toward a high school equivalency diploma, or GED as they’re better known. And if they needed child care while attending classes, Maple offered it at no cost.
▪ Find assistance with obtaining housing, clothing or jobs.
▪ Get mental or physical health care.
▪ Connect with peers in youth and senior activities.
After getting those services up and running, Rios began dreaming of a space where La Familia could bring specialized employment training to the surrounding community. How could she bring in training in entry-level health care fields, jobs for the green economy or other industries to ensure residents could improve their potential earning power?
She saw an opportunity in a vacant property right across from the Maple Neighborhood Center on 37th Avenue, she said, and La Familia landed a $2 million grant from the city to acquire it.
A push for resiliency in Sacramento’s Franklin corridor
That acquisition put La Familia in a great position, Rios said, as government leaders at all levels began looking at preparedness for both severe weather events and future public health crises. They wanted community resilience centers that could be adapted to handle emergencies but that would offer civic, social, educational, and economic development programming year-round to strengthen local communities.
“In 2019, we started with this concept of expanding and creating a training center,” Rios said. “(That concept) evolved as a result of the needs and the gaps that we saw during the pandemic. Our Maple Neighborhood Center had to become the hub for everything that the community needed. We became a testing site. We became a vaccination site. We became a food distribution site.”
La Familia’s team realized that, in addition to the workforce training they wanted to add, they needed to create a satellite health clinic and offer support services, Rios said
“We needed to become a resiliency hub for the community, meaning that in times of crisis like health crises or climate-related events, we were the space where the community would come, whether it was a warming center, or helping people with emergency preparedness during the storm, or becoming a cooling center during extreme heat,” she said.
The California Department of Food and Agriculture awarded La Familia $5 million to establish a community resilience center where residents could get assistance during Sacramento’s extreme heat or winds, heavy winter rains, resulting power outages or other events.
Former state Sen. Richard Pan helped the nonprofit secure $2 million in state funds for the effort. The US Department of Housing and Urban Development awarded $750,000 to La Familia, and Sacramento County appropriated $1 million to establish the new center.
“There’s a few other elements that the resiliency center has,” Rios said, “and that includes having broadband access (and) having backup power, so in a climate-related event, being able to power the facility. That’ll include some solar.”
Other musts, she said, are facilities to store food, space to set up cots for emergency housing, showers and laundry facilities..
In total, Rios said, the nonprofit has brought in nearly $11 million of the $16 million needed to construct what La Familia is calling their Opportunity Center across the street from the Maple Neighborhood Center. She said she expects the facility to open by early 2025.
