Ariel Kelley (right) celebrating with a mom at an early baby shower
Turning heart into action
Healdsburg has never been short on generosity. What it needed, Corazón’s founders realized early on, was a way to put that generosity to work for those who needed it most.
Long before Corazón Healdsburg officially opened its doors in 2016, founding board chair Ariel Kelley was already doing the behind-the-scenes work of turning a dream into an organization: drafting a theory of change, developing a sustainable budget, and bringing partners together to launch meaningful programs like adult English classes and GED classes in Spanish for our residents. She built a partnership with Alliance Medical Center to support its struggling prenatal education program with a community baby shower to celebrate Healdsburg’s newest residents.
“As a new mom myself, I recognized back then the challenges young parents were facing with ensuring they could provide a healthy foundation for their babies,” Ariel said. “But when you add the stress on a family living in poverty due to unsustainable low wages and housing instability, it can cause adverse childhood experiences that can last a lifetime.”
Then, exactly ten years ago, just days after Corazón’s first Día de Muertos, Donald Trump was elected on an agenda that villainized our immigrant communities. In a town where so many families include immigrants, Corazón’s work to build bridges became urgent overnight.
“Then everyone went from being on edge about the cost and lack of workforce housing to also worrying about keeping families together,” remembers Ariel. “Our work at Corazón became vital as a trusted organization in the community, we had to stand up for our neighbors and keep our community together.”
Less than a year later, in October 2017, more than a dozen wildfires broke out across the North Bay, ultimately destroying more than 5,300 homes in Sonoma County alone. Thousands of families fled with only the clothes on their backs and came home to nothing. Others waited for evacuation orders to lift and for the fires to be contained. Smoke hung over the region. And across our community, people kept asking the same question: How can I help?
Within days, Ariel, Corazón and a crew of volunteers had opened the Healdsburg Free Store, stocked with clothes, toiletries, diapers, toys and more for anyone affected by the fires. Everything was free, because everything had been donated.
“It was Healdsburg’s way of responding during a monumental crisis,” Ariel says. “It was really beautiful to see our community show up again for our neighbors in need.”
Families finding much-needed items at the Healdsburg Free Store in 2017
The Free Store required over a million dollars in donations to coordinate, thousands of volunteer shifts to schedule and needs that changed by the hour. Ariel was the right person for it: a say-yes-and-figure-it-out leader whose rapid-fire texts could get just about anyone to show up. She gave the town’s generosity somewhere to go.
Building an emergency response
Corazón’s Executive Director Marcy Flores demonstrating how to get tested for COVID-19 at an early pop-up testing site in Healdsburg
First one emergency, then another. And another. The Kincade Fire in 2019. A pandemic in 2020, with the Walbridge Fire on top of it. Floods, then drought. And through it all, rising costs, paychecks that stretched thinner every year and the constant threat of deportation.
“Each disaster was so economically devastating for those living on the margins,” Ariel says. And every crisis was a crash course in what comes after the headlines: Missed shifts and lost wages. A defrosted freezer full of spoiled food. A landlord whose house burned, moving into yours. A crowded multigenerational home that, during a pandemic, suddenly became dangerous.
Each time, Corazón jumped in and the organization improved its response year over year. Through a team of incredible volunteers, the team booked hotel rooms for evacuees and handed out gas cards so families could fill up before they left town. They partnered with agencies to replace lost groceries. They brought Healdsburg its first mass COVID testing so that our frontline workers could safely go to work and later they built a team of bilingual outreach specialists to get farmworkers and older adults signed up for vaccines.
Ariel was there for all of it. She started as board chair, then stepped off the board to join the staff and lead Corazón through those formative years. The systems she built and the people she rallied became the backbone of Corazón’s emergency response, including baby showers, English classes, and emergency preparedness workshops that continue today.
Connecting neighbors for a stronger community
Those tough years made something clear to Ariel. Healdsburg has extraordinary resources: generous neighbors, businesses with deep roots in the community, people who show up for each other. It also has real, persistent gaps. For some families, the next crisis is always just one bad week away: a car repair, a decline in work hours, an unexpected rent increase. For others, it never really ends.
“There was this huge appetite for people to help one another, a really genuine desire to embrace their neighbors,” Ariel says. “But there wasn’t one place to turn, a trusted source of information. The resources existed, and the need was clearly huge. Connecting those two worlds felt vital, and something we could actually do.”
That’s what Corazón has become over the last ten years. Since that first Día de Muertos in 2016, neighbors have shared $3.4 million in direct aid through Corazón, keeping local families fed, housed and stable through one crisis after another. Eighty-two Healdsburg High School students have become the first in their families to go to college. And our community has welcomed 174 babies with baby showers after their families completed our Mi Bebé y Yo prenatal workshop and support group series.
Life can still feel hard for so many of us, in ways both big and small. But our community still shows up for each other. And Corazón is still the place where neighbors who want to help find the neighbors who need it. Ariel helped lay the foundation. Now it’s up to all of us to build on it.
If, like Ariel, you want to help build a community where no family faces a crisis alone, we invite you to give today in honor of our tenth anniversary. Your gift keeps Corazón’s doors open and our community connected. Learn more here.
