Ukiah’s North Coast Opportunities is letting go of program after program

MENDOCINO CO., 6/10/26  — For half a century, North Coast Opportunities, based in Ukiah, has been part of the floor under Mendocino and Lake counties — the agency that fed people going through cancer treatment, trained the region’s civic leaders, ran food deliveries across two rural counties and kept a community garden growing on South State Street in Ukiah. Over the past two years, one program at a time, it has been letting that work go.

Roughly seven program lines have ended or moved out in 24 months. The Caring Kitchen, which cooked meals for people in cancer treatment, served its last on April 30. Leadership Mendocino, the county’s longtime civic-training program, was paused and handed to the Community Foundation of Mendocino County.

The Farmer’s Convergence and the Mendocino County Food Policy Council are now run out of the School of Adaptive Agriculture in Willits. MendoLake Food Hub cut back home delivery. Home Base, an Early Head Start program, ended in 2025. And on June 30, after nearly 20 years, the South State Street garden will close; its water was shut off May 23, mid-season, with crops still in the ground.

A pattern runs through that list. The programs North Coast Opportunities handed to another organization are, by most accounts, still running. The ones it closed have no successor.

And North Coast Opportunities has not explained — to the county, to the donors who funded the work or to the people who relied on it — why any of this is happening. The agency did not answer two written requests for comment, sent May 27 and June 3. 

“The whole shift in NCO has been so dramatic,” said John Haschak, the county supervisor whose District 3 covers Willits, Covelo and Laytonville. “And it just gets slowly leaked out — the Caring Kitchen’s closing, now the community garden’s closing. What’s the whole vision moving forward?”

Haschak, who said he has spoken with a former NCO employee, was less troubled by the cuts themselves than by how they were made. The programs were “shut down, transferred, downgraded, whatever, without real community involvement,” he said. “And the whole focus of these programs was community involvement.”

What he’s hearing, he said, is that it was “more or less done unilaterally without community input,” leaving “no opportunity for people to step forward to help out.”

He also questioned the money. “Were they really pursuing all of the funding avenues that they could have pursued?” he said. The garden, he noted, had run two decades with “only one closure in that whole time. What I’m hearing is maybe there wasn’t a real desire to keep them open.”

Miles Gordon knows the garden as well as anyone. He started the NCO Gardens Project in 2007 and ran it for a decade before leaving the agency in 2017. He now sits on the board of the School of Adaptive Agriculture, one of the groups that has absorbed North Coast Opportunities’ cast-off programs.

For at least 10 of the garden’s years, Gordon said, the property owner let the land be used for free and even paid the water bill. When gardeners paid anything, it was a $30 to $40 yearly plot fee for upkeep, and there was always a way to raise it if water costs climbed.

“How it ended could have been handled differently,” Gordon said.

The handoffs to other groups, he said, mostly happened without NCO’s help. “There was never any communication about handing things off to an allied organization, so that’s left a lot of things in this gap of coordination, management and communication,” he said.

The lesson he draws runs past any single plot: communities shouldn’t “rely on private property” for their food, he said, and should “invest in productive parks, productive ag land that’s community-based in our urban areas.”

Who feeds the cancer patients now?

Of everything North Coast Opportunities has let go, the Caring Kitchen leaves the biggest hole. For nine years it cooked free, organic meals — five a week, for up to 16 weeks — and delivered them to anyone in the Ukiah, Redwood Valley and Willits area going through a cancer diagnosis. There were no insurance or income tests, and often a teenage volunteer had the opportunity to learn to cook alongside the adults. That program served its last meals in April.

Nothing local has replaced it. NCO’s closure notice puts the loss on a would-be partner: the agency looked into a handoff to Ceres Community Project — the Sebastopol nonprofit whose model the Caring Kitchen had followed  — and the notice said, “Ceres Community Project will not be expanding services into Mendocino County.”

Ceres tells it differently. The nonprofit “worked with the team at NCO last year to try and find a way through for them to continue Caring Kitchen, but ultimately NCO chose to close the program,” said Cathryn Couch, Ceres chief executive.

Ceres now serves all of Sonoma and Marin counties and Medi-Cal members in Napa and Solano, Couch said, and has just finished moving into a new Santa Rosa headquarters and kitchen while, “like all nonprofits,” weathering federal funding cuts. She said Ceres is “hopeful” about reaching southern Mendocino and Lake County “over the next year,” but has no timeline.

No other group was able to step in. The Cancer Resource Centers of Mendocino County, the county’s main cancer nonprofit, does not cook meals — it offers navigation, rides, support groups and referrals, and for years it pointed hungry patients to the Caring Kitchen. Its website still does. Adventist Health Ukiah Valley’s cancer and infusion center, which had leaned on the Caring Kitchen to feed its sickest patients, runs no meal program of its own.

What’s left is an insurance benefit. Medi-Cal’s managed-care plan here, Partnership HealthPlan of California, covers medically tailored meals for patients with a qualifying diagnosis, cancer among them — but only by a doctor’s referral, for no more than 90 days, shipped by an out-of-area vendor. A patient on Medicare, on private insurance, or with no coverage at all does not qualify for these meals.

Even that is unsettled: Couch called California’s Medi-Cal meal coverage “quite complicated right now,” with the state budget unfinished and new guidance pending. The free kitchen that asked no questions is gone.

Nobody’s talking

In late May, after the garden closure surfaced, District 2 Supervisor Maureen Mulheren, who represents Ukiah, said she had been blindsided. “I was not made aware of this change before it happened,” she wrote. “I am trying to get in touch with someone at the NCO Gardens Project to better understand why this decision was made.”

North Coast Opportunities’ only on-record account is the one its chief community impact officer, Tiffany Gibson, gave in May, and it covers the garden alone: the lease ended at the landlord’s request, and the agency had no new plot to offer the gardeners it displaced. On the larger question — why a 50-year-old safety-net agency is shedding programs, and on whose call — it has said nothing.