Santa Rosa’s Roseland neighborhood set for brand new $17 million Boys & Girls Club

In a large dirt field across the street from Roseland Elementary School on Sebastopol Road, a dusty, orange Kubota mini excavator was digging holes and trenches Tuesday for the foundation of what will be the first Boys & Girls Club to be constructed in Santa Rosa in decades.

Painted orange, white and green lines on the dirt describe the footprint of the roughly 25,000-square-foot, $17 million building. It will feature a full-size gym, a commercial kitchen, an art and science/technology lab, dance studio, teen center and more.

David Bowman, a member of the board of directors of umbrella organization Boys & Girls Clubs of Sonoma-Marin, said the project was a long time coming for a community that has largely been neglected for many years.

“This is a real testament to a community that deserves something,” Bowman said. “It’s something that’s sorely lacking — shame on all of us for not getting something like this in this community far sooner.”

The organization has four other sites in Santa Rosa’s Roseland neighborhood, all of them on school campuses. It used to have a fifth site in a nearby structure that has been hosting COVID-19 testing and vaccinations and was the former site of the Roseland Library.

The new Boys & Girls Clubs site is just west of the planned Tierra de Rosas development, a long-awaited 7.4-acre neighborhood center that will feature affordable and market-rate housing, a public plaza, a community center, and a market hall and eatery business incubator.

Completion of that project is still several years off. Bowman said he hopes the new Roseland Boys & Girls Club will also serve as a community hub and gathering place for local residents, who are predominantly Latino. While the main focus will be free youth services, the club’s facilities will be open to people of all ages, he said.

Maria Peñoloza, a mother of three girls — two fourth graders and a first grader — said she relies on the Boys & Girls Club at Sheppard Elementary to watch her kids after school while she’s at work, cleaning homes and offices. She said her kids have been enrolled in the program for four years and the staff often help them with their schoolwork.

“I don’t know what I would do if I didn’t have that club,” she said, speaking in Spanish. “I guess I’d have to figure out how to pick up my kids after school, maybe rely on other people while I’m at work. At the club, they’re safe. I have nothing but good things to say about their staff.”

Boys & Girls Clubs of Sonoma-Marin has 40 sites in Sonoma County, with two dozen in Santa Rosa, serving some 3,000 kids a day and about 10,000 total kids annually. That’s a significant increase from the 300 kids the organization used to serve at three locations in the county 14 years ago, said Jennifer Weiss, the group’s CEO.

On Tuesday, Weiss surveyed the dirt lot, pointing to where the various building facilities would soon materialize. “This is the entrance, and that’s the dance studio over on our left,” she said. “That truck is sitting on the art room.”

The full-size gym will likely operate day and night, and the commercial kitchen will not only serve meals to children, but also will have enough space to be used as a learning center for nutrition programs, Weiss said.

“There are so many kids to serve, we’re just trying to keep up,” she said.

Weiss said the club must raise $10 million to complete construction. The project was launched just before the pandemic in 2019 with a $1,450,000 grant from Sonoma County Vintners, the local trade group.

The property was purchased with a $1 million donation from Cindy and Bill Gallaher, whose construction company designed the project and will build it.

The couple also donated another $1 million toward the project, and their building company shaved $1.65 million off the cost of construction, Weiss said.

The Gallahers, major donors to the Boys & Girls Club, in 2021 backed away from a previous pledge to pay the full project cost, about $16 million at the time.

To raise the $10 million needed for construction, the club has five years — the period for the 1.5% interest loan the organization obtained through Santa Rosa-based Poppy Bank, where Bill Gallaher is founder and board chairman.

The bank also contributed $100,000 to the project, Weiss said.

Bowman said programs run by the Roseland-based club serve 900 kids. Once completed, the new club will help serve 2,500 kids in the area.

“This is an undertaking that has been talked about for years,” he said. “Communities like this yearn for things that other communities have.”

The Boys & Girls Clubs of Sonoma-Marin, with annual revenues of about $10 million, receives 75% of its funding from federal and state grants supporting out-of-school services. The other quarter comes from charitable gifts and donations, Weiss said.

Weiss said it will be a challenge to both raise the funds needed to pay off the construction loan and to continue club operations at 40 sites in the county. Doing so will largely depend on the local community, she said.

Many of the club’s families have been hit hard by the pandemic, including enduring disproportionate rates of illness and death in local Latino households, as well as severe economic hardship.

“There’s a lot that the adults of the community need to do to try to restore the emotional wellness of the kids that we serve,” she said.

You can reach Staff Writer Martin Espinoza at 707-521-5213 or martin.espinoza@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @pressreno.