‘Evolving in real time’: Kimberly Johnson announces nonprofit transitions 

Kimberly Johnson says what she’s learned from the last several years of running two local nonprofits is leading her forward into a new season. 

In an exclusive interview, the nonprofit director explained how her year-long, widely-lauded, but ultimately unsuccessful attempt to help launch the True North behavioral health campus in Shasta created insight for the transition of two organizations she’s been leading, along with the emergence of a third nonprofit.

Johnson is the founder of the Children’s Legacy Center, a local nonprofit which provides collaborative and trauma-informed victim and behavioral health services to children and families, including those impacted by human trafficking and other sexual crimes. Since founding the CLC in 2016, Johnson has also taken on the management of One Safe Place. It’s a Redding-based nonprofit that provides services for domestic violence victims. 

The organizations have always remained separate entities with distinct nonprofit boards. Johnson serves as the executive director of the CLC and the managing director of OSP, and the two nonprofits cooperate on administration and overhead logistics in ways that create efficiencies of scale, she said. 

That’s part of what she hopes to memorialize for use with other nonprofits across the region, as a third organization launches this month. Arch Collaborative, formerly just a legal title for the shared work of the CLC and OSP, is gaining nonprofit status and a new name, Arch Services. That title is descriptive of the work that lies ahead for the emerging entity. 

Meanwhile, both the CLC and OSP have begun the process of hiring new executive leadership as Johnson prepares to step away from those organizations in the coming months. She doesn’t yet have an official role at Arch Services but could take one on in the future.

Why form a new nonprofit? 

The idea for Arch Services developed in part due to learning from the True North project, a proposed behavioral health campus that Johnson worked to conceive of as part of her role in leadership at the CLC. The project was supported by numerous leaders across the state but never got off the ground after experiencing fierce political opposition followed by a lack of state funding. 

Despite the failure, Johnson said she and others learned a lot through the process about what’s needed for long-term success when it comes to solutions to regional problems in the rural North State. That’s one part of what led the CLC board to vote to spin off Arch Services as a stand-alone entity. 

“The True North project kind of unintentionally, in some ways, created this identity of an organization that was doing more kind of broader scale, regional, system-solutions type work,” Johnson explained. She said what she learned not only through that project, but also in her work over the last few years with OSP, convinced her of the need for more coordinated provision of services as one solution to the multi-pronged problems facing rural nonprofits and other service providers. 

Johnson was asked to lead OSP in 2023 as the organization faced significant challenges. The nonprofit is on stronger footing now, Johnson said.

“Really one of the most critical pieces that One Safe Place needed was administration,” she added. “It was fiscal. It was grant administration. It was strategy. It was policy and procedure.”

She said the domestic violence shelter wasn’t the only nonprofit she’s been contacted about over recent years, noting several other instances where individuals associated with local nonprofits or similar projects have reached out for help, something the CLC has usually not been in a position to offer.  

“So there’s been these kinds of behind-the-scenes asks,” Johnson said, from “small to mid-sized nonprofits that are really struggling. And I think the counties are too, and one of the biggest struggle areas is the admin stuff. It’s the stuff that nobody sees. It’s finance … It’s grant writing and grants administration.”

Johnson explained that the initial vision for Arch Services is to provide contracted administrative services for both the CLC and OSP as well as a newly grant-funded inter-county behavioral health pilot project being run by Rural County Representatives of California. 

With time, Johnson said, it’s likely that Arch Services could expand to provide similar administrative services for other small to mid-sized nonprofits across the North State region. 

“What started as a solution for the long-term sustainability of CLC and OSP has created a container that I hope can meet a much broader need across small and mid-sized nonprofits throughout the North State,” Johnson said. 

The organization could also potentially provide some of these same types of services through contracts with government agencies in future, though that will depend on decisions by the nonprofit’s board, and still-to-be-hired leaders. 

Johnson made clear that she currently has no formal role at Arch Services, but it’s likely she could be hired for a paid position of some kind later this year once she’s transitioned away from her duties with the CLC and OSP. 

“Whether I ultimately lead … remain in a founder and strategist role as I am leaning towards now, or find myself doing something entirely different is honestly still unfolding,” she explained. “For now my commitment is to landing the plane well at CLC and OSP.”

Why the change in roles? 

Johnson said her skills lie in building and piloting new projects, sharing that as one reason she’s stepping away from leadership of both the CLC and OSP.

But, she added, a very real component of the transition she’s in now has to do with how political hostility in Shasta has impacted both her and the organizations she served. Without going into many details, she said behind-the scenes politics that went beyond what occurred with the True North project have impacted her ability to successfully lead and grow the CLC. 

“Shasta County leaders haven’t been able to have a simple, open and collaborative relationship with anything I am tied to as a result of the local political dynamic for many years,” Johnson claimed. 

Her comments reference opposition that’s been publicly noted by other local leaders including Redding Council member and Shasta County Supervisor-elect Erin Resner, who until recently served on the CLC board. It’s come at times from Supervisor Kevin Crye, who led opposition to the True North project and who Resner defeated to win the county’s District 1 seat in June.

Johnson says Shasta’s turbulent political environment over recent years is also impacting others who are doing pivotal work across the county including those in county leadership positions.

“Increasingly, so much energy has been spent surviving politics, staffing shortages, leadership turnover, funding challenges, misinformation, and constant instability,” Johnson said.

Emphasizing the impact that such politics can have on vulnerable populations in the county, Johnson noted that elected and appointed Shasta County leaders have faced tremendous challenges, and will continue to do so as new complexities with federal funding emerge, making their work even more important to the well-being of those at risk.

“I hope our community extends both compassion and accountability” to those leaders, Johnson said. “Because the people they are serving are the voiceless, those who often have no platform to tell their own stories.”

---

Do you have a correction to share? Email us: editor@shastascout.org.