In 1976, women in the lower Russian River towns were going back to work and couldn’t find anyone to watch their children. What they started was a referral service — a way to find childcare. When it turned out there weren’t enough childcare providers to refer anyone to, they helped parents open programs in their own homes. Their efforts evolved into River to Coast Children’s Services (RCCS), which is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year.
On Tuesday, the Sonoma County Board of Supervisors adopted a resolution recognizing their 50 years of serving the community. At the meeting, RCCS Executive Director Soledad Figueroa said, “RCCS has been in this community for 50 years, serving families with children in West County,” Figueroa told the board. “We are very excited about the history, but also very excited about the work to come to serve families for many, many more years.”
Supervisor Lynda Hopkins, who represents the district, said the agency provides “unparalleled bilingual bicultural services” to the lower river and the wider West County. “You just strike me as so West County,” she said, “because whatever the need is, you step up and meet it.”
Childcare central
River to Coast is now the childcare subsidy agency for western Sonoma County — the part of the county not covered by 4Cs, the larger Santa Rosa nonprofit that handles the rest of the county. River to Coast runs on about $4.1 million a year. In the fiscal year that ended in June 2025, it reported $4,140,298 in revenue against $4,020,305 in expenses, according to its most recent federal tax filing. Ten years earlier, the same filings show revenue of just $1,791,229.
Almost all of that 2024-25 revenue comes from somewhere other than the families it serves. Of the $4.14 million, $3,907,699 came from contracts with the California Department of Social Services (CDSS)—and about a third of that was funneled through the state from the federal government. Donations and private grants added $187,779. Program fees brought in $1,205. In the chart below, there were no fees in 2020 and 2021 thanks to COVID funds.
Most of the funding, Figueroa said, goes to reimburse licensed home providers directly. RCCS also trains those providers, visits their homes and supplies them. Newer money is starting to fill the gaps, staff said, from Measure I — the quarter-cent sales tax county voters passed in November 2024, administered by First 5 Sonoma County. River to Coast is applying for more of those funds and other grants from the county and private foundations.
The money is steadier than it once was. “It used to be very, very rough, especially when the governor will not sign the budget by 7-1,” Figueroa said, meaning July 1, the start of the fiscal year. “And then we were in a very big struggle just paying providers and receiving funding.” Now, she said, the budget gets signed by July 1, and that fight is over.
Federal cuts haven’t reached the agency so far, Figueroa said.
River to Coast serves children from birth to 13, and under 21 with exceptional needs, in Guerneville, Forestville, Monte Rio, Occidental, Sebastopol, Bodega and Bodega Bay. It puts the number of children it reaches at roughly 600.
The biggest change in 50 years isn’t the budget. It’s the language. “It is now the premier Spanish-speaking agency,” said Donna Roper, the agency’s child development program director, of the shift she has watched over two decades on staff. “Ninety percent of the staff [is bilingual]— I think I’m the only one that doesn’t speak Spanish.” The client base, she said, runs about half and half.
The first program is the one that’s still running
Kindergym started in 1976 and still meets twice a week — Tuesdays at Monte Rio Elementary School and Thursdays at the Forestville United Methodist Church, 10 am to noon, for children 5 and under with an adult. The Monte Rio site opened in January.
It looks like children playing on a floor. What it is, is a licensed child development specialist watching those children play and talking to their parents at the same time — catching the hearing that isn’t quite right, the two-year-old who isn’t walking yet, the milestone a first-time parent has no way to measure against anything.
The other half is the parents themselves. In towns where a family can live up a road in Cazadero and go weeks without meeting another parent, Kindergym is where they compare notes and where friendships start. It has run long enough that grandparents now bring grandchildren to it.
The part that isn’t child care
The office on First Street keeps food, diapers, formula and basic medications, and hands them out from 9 am to 5 pm, Monday through Friday, to anyone with a child. On Thursdays, it signs up 30 families and sends someone to Costco for milk, tortillas, cheese, bread and protein to add to what the food bank delivers.
What it does not do is ask. “They don’t make you jump through hoops,” Roper said. “If you’re hungry and you’ve got a kid, you can get what you want. You don’t have to fill out 16 forms.”
There’s no county referral, and the agency deliberately stays out of the shared tracking system the food banks use, so walking in doesn’t put anyone in a countywide database.
That policy matters more than it used to. When federal SNAP cuts landed, local nonprofits pooled what they had.
But the harder problem now is who doesn’t come through the door—thanks to the federal immigration crackdown.
“A lot of families will not come, even though the need is great,” Figueroa said. “We know a lot of children are home without food, because parents are afraid to come and get it.”
Asked whether hunger in the river towns was getting better or worse, she said it had been getting better for a while, “And now it’s getting worse again.”
Immigration enforcement hasn’t arrived in the river towns in force yet. Childcare providers are required to keep a plan anyway, Figueroa said, for the day nobody comes at pickup — where the children go, how anyone reaches a parent, what happens if the phones are down.
Not every program the agency has run over the years has been successful. River to Coast has twice tried running preschool directly — a program called Mountain River Child Care, and the Stark Preschool for a couple of years — and doesn’t anymore. Childcare is hard to run out here: it takes volume, and it takes a building, and even the public schools have struggled to keep preschools open. So River to Coast pays other people to do it and helps them do it well.
One gap Figueroa names without prompting is children with disabilities. “We don’t have a lot of providers that are willing to take special needs children, and that’s probably one of the challenges — not here only, but the whole Sonoma County.”
What’s next?
The plan is to stop being only a childcare agency and start being a “front door.” Figueroa wants RCCS to be a hub other agencies come to — to help people applying for WIC, child support, immigration questions, transportation — and to run occasional service days out in Occidental and Bodega Bay, loading a van with what a family might need and driving it to them.
“Not necessarily having families go to Santa Rosa or somewhere else to receive the services,” she said, “but bring the services here.”
The obstacle is the one everybody out there names: distance. Edgar Zavala, the agency’s community relations coordinator, said families tell him they can’t make a 30-minute drive to the next town and 30 minutes back for emergency diapers, however much they need them.
The other obstacle is being heard at all. “This area, very isolated and not easy to reach, is one of them,” Figueroa said of the agency’s problems. The other is that there’s no local press left in the Russian River area. “We have no newspaper anymore to let families know what’s going on.”
What’s left is Facebook, Instagram, the agency’s website and word of mouth. “It’s always a challenge,” she said, “and it’s not going to stop us. We just have to work harder on that.”
River to Coast marks the anniversary with a gala from 4 to 8 p.m. Saturday, Aug. 29, at the El Sabor Mexicano farmhouse at 16790 Armstrong Woods Road, on chef Jorge Saldana’s organic farm next to Armstrong Redwoods. Saldana is cooking a farm-to-table dinner. Get tickets through Eventbrite or by calling the agency at 707-869-3613.
