Corazón Healdsburg CEO spearheads free store for Kincade fire survivors

No press release heralded the opening of the Healdsburg Free Store earlier this month. Corazón Healdsburg, the nonprofit that launched it, made mention of the store on Facebook, but otherwise relied on word of mouth.

Why the quiet grand opening?

“We don’t want a Black Friday-at-Walmart situation,” said Ariel Kelley, the CEO of Corazón Healdsburg and the driving force behind the Free Store, a building stocked with thousands of items - from clothing to strollers to flashlights, diapers and toiletries, all free of charge - for those whose lives were disrupted by the Kincade fire.

Too bad. By the time the doors opened at 10 a.m. on Nov. 15, a line of needy shoppers snaked halfway around the building that formerly housed Di Vine Pizza.

Greeting customers at the door, Kelley chatted in Spanish with several “shoppers” who arrived after noon. They’d just left adult education classes offered by Corazón - one of the many programs offered by this award-winning nonprofit devoted to bridging the racial and economic divide in northern Sonoma County.

After waving to a woman across the parking lot, Kelley said, with pride, “Lourdes has one more exam to pass” to get her high school equivalency diploma.

Kelley is a highly effective, if somewhat unlikely, community organizer.

“I always thought I was going to work in sports,”’ said the 37-year-old mother of two. A native of Eugene, Oregon, she majored in business administration, with a concentration in sports marketing, at the University of Oregon, where she also was a cheerleader.

After college she moved to San Francisco, earning her law degree and master’s degree in business administration at Golden Gate University. “Because what’s more fun than law school? Going to business school at the same time.”

In 2011, she was hired by the America’s Cup yacht race, which was coming to San Francisco, to do community outreach - “a perfect role for her,” recalled Stephanie Martin, her boss at the America’s Cup. “She was whip smart, had tremendous energy and passion for the job. She’s like a life force. She could be working on five things at once and somehow give each of them her full attention.”

Kelley’s pivot to community service came as no surprise to Martin, who said, “At her core, Ariel’s always had this internal drive to be helping as many people as she can.”

Values like voluntarism, and the importance of being engaged in the broader community, were stressed by Kelley’s parents, who taught her the Jewish concept of Tikkun Olam: acts performed “to help repair the world,” she said. “That’s part of who I am on kind of a cellular level.”

During law school she interned for the board of supervisors in San Francisco. Doing legal research, attending public hearings, Kelley fell in love “with the potential of good government,” and with “helping people navigate complicated government situations that felt really overwhelming for them.”

She also fell hard for Sonoma County, which became a weekend destination and “happy place” for Kelley and her then-boyfriend, Tim, who first declared his love for her on the banks of the Russian River. They were married in 2012.

When the young couple moved to Healdsburg a year later, Kelley began working with local restaurateurs Ari Rosen and DawnElise Regnery to form the resource center that was launched in 2016 as Corazón Healdsburg. In its early days, recalled Kelley, the nonprofit occupied an office next door to a tattoo parlor.

“All day,” she said, “you could hear the buzz of the tattoo machine and people screaming in pain.”

The barriers between Healdsburg’s needy and the services that might help them can be mystifying and impenetrable - “like a corn maze,” said Kelley, who sees one of Corazón’s roles as a kind of harvester that “mows down” some of the corn, removing or at least “demystifying” those obstacles.

Despite its reputation as an affluent community, she said, “the reality is we have the second-highest rate of Medi-Cal births in Sonoma County,” second to Santa Rosa. Medi-Cal is the state’s health insurance program for low-income residents.

Much of Corazón’s focus is on children younger than 5. The first program it launched was Moms to Moms, a series of prenatal classes offered to expecting mothers, conducted in partnership with Healdsburg’s Alliance Medical Center. Graduates are treated to a “baby shower.”

Alliance conducts the classes, “and we come in and throw the party,” Kelley said.

Corazón’s devotion to infants and toddlers is also apparent during a tour of the Free Store, whose hallways are 9-foot-tall canyons of Huggies cartons.

The Free Store earned Kelley and four other women an invitation to a special taping of “The Ellen Show” in early 2018. Host Ellen DeGeneres was launching a campaign called “One Million Acts of Good.” Kelley, Elena Halvorsen, Lisa Meisner, Stephanie Coventry and Emily Peterson were in the audience that day as DeGeneres chatted with a constellation of stars including former first lady Michelle Obama.

But the highlight of that episode came when audience members were instructed to look under their seats. Cheerios was giving away $1 million to the audience that day. The Healdsburg contingent won a hefty sum none of them can disclose - having signed nondisclosure agreements.

They were perfectly welcome to pocket that cash, as a reward for their virtue.

Coventry and Peterson, kindergarten teachers whose wildly successful sock and underwear drive helped stock the Free Store, had a different vision. They wanted to start a college scholarship fund for graduating high school students.

Kelley loved the idea, but tweaked it. Three weeks later, they unveiled a program called Kinder2College, which opened a $250 college savings account for every kindergarten student from Healdsburg Elementary School and Healdsburg Charter School.

As it happened, Gov. Gavin Newsom is exceedingly enthusiastic about these so-called “promise programs” - Kinder2College is one of nine in California - and last January announced a $2.9 million grant to fund more of them. Kinder2College was given an additional $110,000, allowing it to expand to five schools in northern Sonoma County.

And Newsom was just getting warmed up: In 2020, California will distribute an additional $15 million to these programs. Kelley and Kinder2College are excited to be working with “a number of organizations across Sonoma County,” she said, to help them apply for chunks of that grant.

Yes, they jump-start college savings accounts. But promise programs also serve as “a behavior shifting model,” said Kelley, who speaks of them with great passion, and at great length.

“They encourage parents to think of their child as someone who’s going somewhere,” she said.

Like much of what she does, they help repair the world.