A mission to serve the most vulnerable

Christy Davila settles in as the executive director of West County Community Services

Christy Davila became the executive director of West County Community Services in July 2024. (Photo by Rollie Atkinson)

The Gravenstein Highway RV encampments and other ongoing encounters with homeless people in recent times have been the more visible faces of Sebastopol’s and West County’s poverty, unmet social needs and individual mental health struggles.

But it is the less visible faces of shut-in seniors, overwhelmed single mothers, chronic substance abusers, troubled young people, hungry households and “neighbors of neighbors” who have fallen between the cracks that keep the dozens of counselors, caregivers and administrators at West County Community Services (WCCS) busiest.

The West County social services nonprofit, founded in 1975, quietly serves thousands of “clients” along the Russian River, Sebastopol and throughout the West County with its Russian River Senior Center, Guerneville emergency shelter, permanent Sebastopol and Guerneville low-income housing units and numerous counseling, outreach and advocacy programs for local residents of all ages.

WCCS is led by a 10-member volunteer board of directors and is largely funded by county, state and federal grants with extra support raised from individual donations and fund raising campaigns. The nonprofit has a staff of 69 with an annual budget of $5.5 million. And, since last July, it has a new executive director, Christy Davila.

Davila, a licensed marriage and family therapist, was promoted to her executive director position after serving for 12 years as a director for WCCS’s multiple counseling and behavioral health programs. She accepted Her new position comes with an added burden of administrative duties, but she took the position, she said, because “I thought it was the best way to offer our organization and people some continuity.” She was recruited for the leadership role by the present WCCS board of directors, led by chair Debra Johnson, a Guerneville-based real estate agent.

Davila replaced Tim Miller who left for personal and family reasons. Miller has recently taken a new assignment with the U.S. Peace Corps in Africa.

“Christy is fantastic,” said Johnson. “She has an unbelievable skill set and we’re so fortunate she agreed to step up to these new tasks.” Johnson also praised her current “working” board of directors and the success of hiring new staff. She also thanked Miller for his recent years of leadership. “Tim took us far while he was here,” she said.

“We’re doing a better job these days,” she said. “It might be the same mission we’ve always had, but we’ve raised some extra funds, and we’re reaching more people that have been underserved. We try to keep people housed and provide the little things that might not matter to most of us, but mean the difference between and hardship and success for others.”

“I loved what we are doing and who we are serving,” said Davila, during a recent interview on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day, another day where she found herself on assignment and not on holiday. “The people we work with are great, and I felt they needed to keep being supported. I deeply care about this organization, and I looked at how we could continue to do our best. I want to provide our staff and clients with stability.”

Stability these days for Sonoma County nonprofits like WCCS includes securing timely reimbursements from the county government and meeting the challenges of hiring enough staff people following the workplace disruptions from COVID-19 pandemic in 2020-2021. Another unstable factor is that nonprofits like WCCS must operate year-to-year with no certainty that crucial government grants and funding will, or will not, be renewed.

Lots of time in Davila’s work days are filled with consortium meetings with other nonprofits and community partners about funding and directing staff to complete piles of paperwork to verify caseloads, client responses and filling in “check boxes” on contract fulfillment forms for the county. Davila admits these aren’t her favorite parts of her new job, and she recently testified to the county Board of Supervisors about it where she was joined by several other local nonprofit administrators with similar concerns.

“We believe we provide many essential needs to some of the people that need it the most,” said Davila. “I wish it weren’t true, but I don’t think we’ll be working our way out of our jobs anytime soon.” The WCCS client base numbers in the high thousands right now.

Davila, 47, lives in Cloverdale with her husband, Kjell, and 11-year-old daughter who she homeschools. Some of her daughter’s homeschooling is done in West County with other homeschooled students.

Davila is full of praise for her WCCS staff and the many other nonprofit partner organizations she works with. She recently singled out special praise for incoming Sebastopol Mayor Steven Zollman and Sebastopol’s interim police chief, Ron Nelson. “They really understand and are committed to what we are doing,” she said.

“West County Community Services is a valuable part of the Sebastopol community,” said Mayor Zollman. “They have been an important partner in the City’s efforts to address the complex issue of homelessness, and have always operated in a manner consistent with Sebastopol’s values of compassion and respect.”

WCCS and the city of Sebastopol are currently co-funding a homeless outreach coordinator, now staffed by Favi Ledezma. Zollman said Ledezma’s work has provided a “quicker, more effective response” to Sebastopol’s homeless cases and has assisted with the streamlining of sharing information and providing services.

Some of the counseling programs that Davila has led over the past decade have grown beyond West County. Davila has modeled a successful peer-to-peer counseling program where former clients with “real life experiences” are given training to mentor and team up with people seeking personal support, better coping skills, help with aid applications and other non-clinical support.

“It’s very rewarding to see former clients complete the training and become interns or volunteers or even new paid staff members,” said Davila. “It really says why we do all of this.”

West County Community Services is the local organization that has spearheaded several developments of low-income housing for former homeless people. One of those projects, Elderberry Commons, the former Sebastopol Inn, is welcoming 30-plus recently homeless people to new apartments this month.

Nearby is Park Village, a former private trailer park now owned and operated jointly by the city of Sebastopol and WCCS. The current population of Park Village is 85, which includes low-income individuals and families supported by housing subsidies. Burbank Housing, another local nonprofit, also provides property management at the two sites.

Besides roofs and shelter, WCCS staff also do outreach with the local homeless population, providing “navigational” support for individuals seeking various forms of governmental and other assistance. During the recent “evictions” of illegally parked RVs along Sebastopol’s North Gravenstein Highway, WCCS found a place for one of the trailers at its Park Village site.

WCCS is also part of a new countywide program called Keep People Housed that provides direct payments to individuals and families at risk of facing evictions or financial emergencies that might lead to homelessness. In turn, that program works with Sonoma County Legal Aid to resolve eviction notices where possible.

WCCS also operates a Rapid Rehousing Program as another source for short-term financial assistance and housing stabilization in Sebastopol, Forestville, Guerneville and other lower Russian river communities. The program goal is to avoid or reduce homeless periods for people so they can work to stabilize their lives following a lost job, medical emergency or disrupted family.

When construction is completed in two years at the former George’s Hideaway in Monte Rio, WCCS will provide on-site counseling and “navigational services” for another 30-plus formerly homeless and low-income people. The long-delayed project led by the county through the COVID-19 pandemic is being built by the nonprofit Burbank Housing Corp.

“We don’t have big donors, and there are limits to what we can do,” said Davila. “I tell our staff we have to be careful about ‘burning out’ and to keep our expectations and motivation alive.” The veteran LMFT counselor defined her organization’s primary job as “working with the people with the most needs in our community and making connections and building trust so we can support them and help them empower themselves.”

West County Community Services is always looking for new staff and volunteers. Currently there are job openings for outreach workers, an emergency shelter aid, a clinical program manager, an addiction peer specialist and a new site coordinator at Sebastopol’s Park Village. (Job information is at the WCCS website,

Volunteer senior peer counselors are always in demand, Davila said. After in-depth training, counselors do one-to-one home visits or lead small groups of local seniors that may be facing loneliness and isolation, grief and loss, chronic health conditions or family conflicts.

In Sebastopol, there is a grant-funded “mature” women’s group that meets at the Sebastopol Senior Center on High Street each week. (Signups required.) Like all the other counseling programs at WCCS, Davila said her staff do their best to do “outreach and bring people together and get them connected.”

“We aim to help people thrive and not just get by,” said Davila. “Our success comes when the people we work with know they are being seen and heard and not being judged.”

If you are homeless or in danger of becoming homeless or know someone who is, email WCCS at info@westcountyservices.org to be contacted or added to a housing program waiting list.