It’s an unseasonably warm and sunny December day in North San Juan, and the Family Resource Center is a hive of activity, distributing food to a long line of cars snaking down the access road. Just down the hill, Roo Cantada, founder and executive director of the San Juan Ridge Community Library, perches on a bench outside the library next to her scooter, which she has been using all morning to run library-related errands as she troubleshoots the downed internet connection.
The library, like many community projects on the San Juan Ridge, has been a labor of love for Cantada. “I worked for free for four years, and sold burritos to fundraise,” she said. In recent years, the library has received some funding from Nevada County, but it is not an official branch of the Nevada County library, so it still depends on funding from other sources, including the nonprofit Friends of the Library.
Inside, books take up every nook and cranny except the coveted kid cupboard in the children’s room – a tiny, safe space for kids who want to just get away and read. The old card catalog has been repurposed as a seed library. Five years ago Cantada received some funding to add an annex, which is used for meetings and community events. The annex is home to arts and crafts workshops, Spanish, ukulele, qi gong, and karate classes, and a monthly “Health and Happiness” clinic, which is supported by a rotating group of nonprofit service providers and county staff. She dreams of an even larger space to accommodate more books, classes, and events. It’s all planned out in her head.
“It’s like a big family,” said Cantada. “We are a hub for everybody. We have community, food, fun. Everyone is welcome. Everything is free. We don’t charge for anything, ever. I need to keep it that way so people keep coming. Resources are scarce here.”
The library recently received a $20,000 grant from the Community Foundation of Nevada County, which will help pay for Cantada’s degree in library science. Although she has worked as a librarian for 26 years, she has never received formal training. The degree will help Cantada optimize all of the work she is already doing, including data collection, program assessment, and finding solutions for the daily challenges of running a rural library.
Up the road, at the North San Juan Community Center, NSJ Community Center co-chair Lynda Heinz winds her way through tidy, labeled racks of gently used clothing, shoes, sleeping bags, tents, and brand-new socks and underwear in the Free Store, which is just one of the many services the Community Center provides to residents of the San Juan Ridge. The center also hosts weekly Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, a radical zine gathering, a free Thanksgiving meal, and the annual Cherry Festival fundraiser, which has been held on the Ridge for 130 years.
“The Community Center fills gaps in services and community socializing that do not exist in other places,” said Heinz. These gaps include health care (Harmony Health now sends a mobile health van to the center once a week to provide primary care health services), veterinary services (the SNIP van, sent by Nevada County, spayed and neutered 85 dogs and cats on their last visit), and emergency sheltering (the center has contracts with the county and with PG&E to open during power outages and provide a place to get warm, get a meal, charge phones, and pick up free, rechargeable batteries).
Filling these gaps has helped residents of the San Juan Ridge see the Community Center as a trusted community hub. “People come here in emergencies, just out of habit,” said Raichael Stewart, a Community Center board member. “We are the heart of town.”
The Community Center also addresses a very important and growing gap on the Ridge – food insecurity. The Free Store offers a pantry of food staples and now a food distribution provides 1,000 pounds of food every week on Free Food Friday. Previously, community members only had access to food once a month at the drive-through food bank at the Family Resource Center. When a larger need became clear, the Community Center found a volunteer to run a weekly food distribution. A few Fridays ago, 152 individuals from 76 families visited the Community Center for Free Food Friday.
Stewart recounts a story about a mother who visited the Community Center after hearing about their annual back to school event. The event is a partnership between the San Juan Ridge Community Coalition and the NSJ Community Center that distributes backpacks full of school supplies each August along with a free meal and the opportunity to shop the Free Store for back to school clothes. A number of different service providers are there to let shoppers know about different resources that are available to them during the school year. The mother was looking for school clothes for her two children, and for a neighbor’s child. “She got a week’s worth of clothing for all three kids,” said Stewart. “This kind of thing happens every day the free store is open. We see new people all the time.”
The NSJ Community Center also received a $20,000 grant from the Community Foundation of Nevada County, which it will use to train its new board. “With some training, we will have a better understanding of everyone’s roles and how to work as a team,” said Stewart. “We’ll have more confidence to fully step into our roles, which will give grantors more confidence to give grants. Without the stability that comes from this knowledge, we cannot grow and be effective.”
The Community Center board has its own dreams: offering one or two meals a week, more programs (especially for seniors), more space, major repairs for the playground. Living where they do, far from stores and essential services, the board is accustomed to figuring out what needs to happen, making do with few resources, and meeting community members where they are, which requires a special skillset in a community of fiercely independent people. Cantada sums it up simply: “We do a lot with very little. Our goal is to do more with more.”