Point Arena nonprofit Action Network to close

POINT ARENA, CA., 5/19/26 — After 24 years of serving the south coast Mendocino area, Point Arena nonprofit Action Network will close in June. The organization fell on hard times after losing major funding sources they had come to rely on.

The nonprofit began as a coordinating entity to help connect the rural communities it serves to social and medical services. It then expanded into providing its own, mostly behavioral, health-related services. Action Network was active in the local schools, running weekly classes on social and emotional learning, focusing on positive youth development and substance-use prevention.

The organization’s work stretched from the south coast inland, connecting with Indigenous youth from the Kashia and Point Arena rancherias as well. Their prevention programs reached an estimated 400 individuals in 2025, accounting for 26% of prevention and early intervention services in Mendocino County. 

The network also stood as a family resource, helping families with services such as CalFresh or immigration advocacy. In June, these services and the jobs that employed 12 people, will cease.

The greatest blow to the organization came when Action Network failed to secure funding from California’s Mental Health Services Act, now refigured as the Behavioral Health Services Act.

Passed in 2004, the Mental Health Services Act was designed to expand public mental health services in California by imposing a 1% tax on personal incomes above $1 million. The money from the act is distributed along county-approved plans to local medical and social service nonprofit organizations.

Action Network depended on this funding, having reliably received its grants for about a decade. Then, priorities and the language changed with the passage of bond measure Proposition 1 in March 2024. The new law, the Behavioral Health Services Act, goes into effect this July. Mendocino County, which allocates such funds through the Behavioral Health Board, did not award Action Network funding for 2026.

“We’ve created and had participation and support to do an amazing cutting-edge program and just got our funding pulled out from under us,” said Miles Clark, the behavioral health coordinator at Action Network.

Proposition 1 narrowly passed in California. The reform renamed the MHSA to the Behavioral Health Services Act and updated it with new spending requirements.

These new standards require counties to spend 30% of their funds towards housing support for people with a serious mental illness or substance use disorder and 35% of their funds on full service partnerships, programs that focus on treating adults with severe mental illness. The remaining 35% of funding falls under a general umbrella of behavioral health services and supports. This allocation could go to a variety of services on the stipulation that a minimum of 51% of these dollars must be directed towards early intervention support for Californians who are 25 years and younger.

With an increased focus on acute mental illness treatment and housing, organizations that focus on prevention, like Action Network, were made vulnerable to funding cuts.

“County behavioral health care must now focus on helping the most seriously ill and unhoused, and counties will have increased accountability for achieving results. Change to the status quo can be hard; some local services may see funding decrease or shift to another source,” wrote the state Department of Health Care Services on its website.

Shifting towards population centers

These new distribution guidelines carry geographic implications, as mental health clinics that provide acute mental illness treatments tend to be based in areas with a higher density of people. Mendocino’s adult wellness and recovery centers are in Ukiah, Willits and Fort Bragg — the three largest cities in the county. With more money funneling towards the health services these large clinic models provide, smaller rural areas might be left behind.

“I believe that Fort Bragg and Ukiah are going to benefit from this at the expense of isolated rural, outlying communities. So, larger city centers that already have way more services than us are going to get that money,” said Clark.

It is still unclear exactly why Mendocino County did not award Action Network grant money, which prevention organizations did receive money, and what the department’s new funding criteria might be. The Mendocino County Behavioral Health and Recovery Services’ office never responded to the Mendocino Voice’s multiple requests for comment.

Clark thinks it’s a mistake for California to focus on treatment rather than prevention, saying the decision was like managing an unhealthy heart only after a heart attack.

“I will probably keep coming back to this very basic and well-researched and commonsense concept. That it is far more cost-effective…to do prevention or early intervention versus treatment,” said Clark.

Clark explained that early intervention education consists of teaching important yet untraditional subjects, like communication, self-advocacy, problem-solving and critical thinking.

“That’s kind of getting to the underlying core of why I’m such a prevention, early intervention fanatic. Because if you’re reaching the entire student body with these things, it’s going to help everybody. It changes the whole culture on a fundamental level,” he said.

Though Action Network is closing, Clark and two other employees were hired directly by the Point Arena Unified School District to continue their social and emotional learning program at the schools. All other services will cease. Clark would prefer that Action Network’s building be absorbed by another agency with a similar mission, but details have yet to be ironed out. He stays hopeful that Action Network, or an organization like it, might serve the south coast of Mendocino once again.

“How do you dissolve an organization like this that’s been around for 25 years and keep the mission alive as much as possible? That’s another part of the story,” said Clark.

“If I’m keeping the faith, I believe that you know science and data and evidence and common sense will eventually win out, and the funding will shift back towards prevention.”