UKIAH, CA., 6/22/26 — On May 1, a notice appeared at the State Street Community Garden in Ukiah that North Coast Opportunities was closing the garden.
Twenty-two days later, the water was shut off. Tomato, pepper, cucumber and melon plants that were weeks from ripening would have to be harvested early or left to die.The garden’s lease gave North Coast Opportunities the right to terminate with 90 days notice, but gardeners only got 22.
“It probably was shut off earlier than it should have been, looking back on it now,” NCO Chief Executive Daniel McIntire later acknowledged.
Far more than the garden
That garden closure is just one example of a larger shift as funding that nourished multiple local programs was cut off. Over the past two years, North Coast Opportunities has shut down or spun off seven programs:
- State Street Community Garden
- Caring Kitchen soup project
- Leadership Mendocino
- Farmers’ Convergence
- Food Policy Council
- Home Base, a home-visiting program
- a home-delivery food service for rural residents.
North Coast Opportunities is a longstanding community institution, founded in 1965 as part of Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty and for decades the backbone of social services in Mendocino and Lake counties. It still runs Head Start for hundreds of children, rural childcare, nutrition programs, job training and housing services. In a statement issued in recent weeks, the NCO board said: “We have solid funding for these programs and have no concerns about our ability to continue to provide these core services.”
The recent closures were characterized by NCO leadership as deliberate and unavoidable. “These changes are part of an ongoing review led by NCO’s executive leadership and board, focused on aligning our work with our core mission and ensuring long-term sustainability,” McIntire wrote via email. Programs are weighed on “how directly they advance that mission and whether they can be sustained responsibly over time,” he wrote. “When those factors don’t align, we make difficult decisions.”
The board acknowledged deficiencies in the way the decisions were handled. “In the stress of responding to these changes, we have not communicated our approaches and intentions as well as we would have liked,” it said in a press release.
(Katherine Rowlands/Bay City News)
The books
Some of the cuts appear to be the result of budget adjustments to correct an overstatement of unrestricted funds in previous years.
In January 2025, NCO filed its annual financial audit — required by the federal Office of Management and Budget of any organization that spends more than $750,000 in federal money in a year. The outside auditors were Armanino LLP of San Francisco, a firm that had not audited NCO in prior years.
Armanino gave the nonprofit a clean opinion — its financial statements were accurate.
But the same audit flagged a “material weakness,” the most serious category of internal-control problem, and one that hadn’t appeared in any of NCO’s previous six audits.
NCO had counted nearly $3 million in restricted money — donations and grants that can only be spent for the specific purposes they were given — as part of the funds it could spend freely.
Correcting the error forced NCO to restate its 2023 books, cutting its unrestricted net assets from $5.65 million to $2.69 million.
Top-line totals (audited):
- FY 2023-24: $35.9 million revenue / $35.4 million in expenses
- FY 2024-25: $39.1 million revenue / $39.6 million in expenses
The funding question
NCO has cited federal and state budget cuts as the primary driver of program closures.
The programs still running — Head Start, the rural child care network, WIC — are the ones most dependent on federal dollars. They are also among the programs the Trump administration has most aggressively targeted for cuts. The programs that closed — Caring Kitchen, the garden, Leadership Mendocino — ran primarily on locally sourced money: local nonprofit organization donations, community foundation grants and individual community donors.
“I can’t speak about what took place prior to November 1 2024,” McIntire wrote, citing the date he took over. “Under my watch, we applied for any grants that we qualified to apply for to try to keep the Caring Kitchen operating.”
The program was short more than $100,000, he said, and “taking small donations, knowing a large funding gap persisted, was not something I supported.”
McIntire listed the grants NCO pursued to keep the Caring Kitchen alive: a $558,429 California Department of Food and Agriculture application in February 2024, rejected that June; a Clif Foundation inquiry in February 2025, ruled out because NCO’s budget exceeded the grant’s $3 million ceiling; an Albertsons Foundation request for $15,000 and a state food-hub application for nearly $2 million, both rejected in April 2025. A Mendocino County block grant went unpursued because NCO’s administrative costs of 9.1 percent was above the grant’s 7 percent cap.
“Before making any decisions, we pursued local, foundation, and donor funding for these programs, including outreach to regional foundations, local donors, and partner organizations,” he wrote. “In some cases, we were not able to secure sufficient ongoing funding to sustain operations at the level required.”
The garden
Miles Gordon founded the NCO Gardens Project in 2007 and ran it for a decade. The garden at State Street operated on donated land, with water supplied by a neighboring business that donated half the cost. For the first 10 years of the garden’s life, Gordon said, the property owner provided both land and water at no cost to the program.
NCO’s closure sign said the ending came “at the request of the property owner.” The property owner, Dana O’Bergin, won’t comment.
McIntire’s written response offered an additional explanation. Rising operational costs such as water and staffing were also part of NCO’s own evaluation.
McIntire confirmed the lease included a 90-day termination provision, designed to protect growing crops — more than three times as long as the 22 days notice given.
“How it ended could have been handled differently,” Gordon said.
Third District Supervisor John Haschak and Second District Supervisor Maureen Mulheren both said they were not informed before the closures. “I was not made aware of this change before it happened,” Mulheren wrote in a statement. Haschak said the programs were shut down “without real community involvement” and questioned whether NCO “really pursued all of the funding avenues that they could have pursued.”
Shannon Kimbell-Auth, NCO’s Governing Board Chair, did not respond to multiple interview requests, but the board issued a general statement about program cuts: “We can’t always do everything we would like, and when we need to, or are forced to scale back services, we hope our communities will be understanding.”
What’s continuing
Several programs NCO stepped away from have continued under new management. Leadership Mendocino, the county’s long-running civic-training program, was paused by NCO in 2025 and is now being run by the Community Foundation of Mendocino County, with a new cohort planned for 2027. The Farmers’ Convergence and the Mendocino County Food Policy Council are now operated by the School of Adaptive Agriculture in Willits. Good Farm Fund, which NCO had fiscally sponsored for a decade, has a new fiscal sponsor and continues to operate.
The Caring Kitchen has no successor. The program served meals to people in cancer treatment. Its last day was April 30.
“Looking back, our communication could have been clearer,” McIntire wrote. “I take responsibility for these decisions and for communicating them clearly.”