Spirit of Wetzel Award 2024: Jade Weymouth

For Jade Weymouth, commitment to community is a family value and a longstanding practice. Many years before becoming executive director of La Familia Sana—where her farsighted commitment to health equity and social justice have helped make Cloverdale’s grassroots nonprofit a trusted and essential partner to Latine residents—seven-year-old Jade was selling raffle tickets to fundraise for a Latina college fund. 

“I grew up in a community-minded family,” she tells us, in a recent conversation. “My great-grandfather and my grandma organized with the United Farm Workers and the Community Rural Legal Association in Watsonville, Salinas, Gilroy, and Central California. I have so many memories of marching for farmworker rights during the table grape, lettuce, and Safeway boycotts. My grandma started a nonprofit organization called the Latina Coalition in Gilroy.”

Jade also recalls her mother starting up transitional housing (“across the street from where we lived”) for young mothers aging out of the foster system, and her grandmother strategizing with her peers, “planning and organizing in the community to create systems change in the school district and at the city level.” Given this family legacy and her own subsequent career, it comes as no surprise when Jade notes, “this work has seeped into my DNA.”

“My own nonprofit experience started at Community Overcoming Relationship Abuse (CORA), as an Americorps member providing assessments for children up to 5-years-old who have survived in-home violence,” she relates. “That was extremely traumatizing work, but it set the foundation of many of my personal and professional values working within community. 

“For the past decade, my focus has been on serving the Cloverdale community, its families, and ensuring access to high-quality resources and services.”

For her significant and ongoing contribution to community health and wellbeing through La Familia Sana, and the lifetime of service and advocacy it builds on, the Healthcare Foundation is thrilled to recognize Jade Weymouth with the 2024 Spirit of Wetzel Award.

How would you describe your connection to northern Sonoma County?

My mom and dad met in the ’80s at Souverain Winery (before it became Coppola). My mom was a waitress and my dad was a chef there. I lived in Santa Rosa until about second grade when I got very sick and my mom moved me down to Gilroy to be closer to my grandparents, family and friends. I spent summers in Sonoma County and visited my father who has continuously lived here. I moved to Sonoma County after graduate school. After a brief stint in Santa Rosa, I moved to Cloverdale while working in Healdsburg. I’ve lived here for almost a decade now. It reminds me a lot of Gilroy when I was young: A small community, beautiful fields, and everyone knows each other. It feels safe and it’s a good place to raise my daughter.

Can you describe your role at La Familia Sana?

I am now the Executive Director, but I started as a volunteer consultant to help align mission, vision and values. After a few months, the Board asked me to join as the executive director. I formally started in September 2021, three months after giving birth to my daughter Cecilia. In these three years I have learned so much about organizational development, fundraising, grants management, operations, systems and human resources.

How has La Familia Sana evolved in your time there?

La Familia Sana has changed a lot in the past three years. We have grown from a scrappy organization that made magic from limited resources to a better-staffed scrappy organization that still makes magic happen with limited resources! All joking aside, we have more tools and funding to do our jobs better and comply with grants and data tracking. This past year, I have been working extremely hard to ensure we have a solid team of employees who can meet the needs of our community. We are also working on implementing CalAIM so that La Familia Sana can bill for our Housing work and, eventually, for the work of our promotoras de salud. And, finally, we are incredibly close to securing a new space for our organization and partners that can fit our dreams of a Community Center that serves all of Cloverdale.

What are Cloverdale’s strengths as you see it?

We are a resilient community. I have watched us come together in ways you could only dream of. During COVID and the wildfires, I remember Papa’s Pizza and the Trading Post distributing sponsored meals when the power was out for several days. Farm + Flour were sharing fresh vegetables and fruit for those in need. More recently, the support of our new bilingual and bicultural mural that represents the dreams of our Latine youth was widely accepted and appreciated. People who didn’t know we existed were excited to see more diverse representation in our community, and others were excited to see themselves woven into the fabric of downtown. This is our strength. 

“People who didn’t know we existed were excited to see more diverse representation in our community, and others were excited to see themselves woven into the fabric of downtown. This is our strength.”

Jade Weymouth

What are the main challenges for the community as you see it?

The challenges have always stemmed from Cloverdale being seen as an outsider in Sonoma County as a whole—this affects services, resources and access. We have to remind everyone we are here. I know there are other marginalized communities in Sonoma County who feel the same way—west county, Sonoma Valley, and the coastal areas, for example. At the same time, we have an opportunity to educate and bring people together. There remain small subgroups of community members who see an organization with a name in Spanish as exclusionary. My vision is for people to look past that and understand that when we are serving the most vulnerable in the community, the whole community rises together. La Familia Sana has identified low-income, fixed income seniors who are undocumented and don’t qualify for SSI or need support to apply for programs that address basic human needs. While we have a special focus on this population, we still continue to serve all who need us.

What do you like to do in your free time?

There is a lot to do in northern Sonoma County—the new tandem bikes at Cloverdale train depot, the great hiking at Yorty Creek or Lake Sonoma, the amazing food and wine in the Geyserville and Cloverdale areas, and the access to a beautiful, clean river. You can usually find me and my daughter at [Cloverdale Arts Alliance’s] Friday Night Live [at Cloverdale Plaza], the Tuesday farmers market, the Cloverdale Nursery, or socializing at Plank [Coffee & Roastery] on any given day. 

What are some of your dreams for Cloverdale and the region?

I dream of and support the movement for more affordable housing, affordable childcare, and language access in local government and decision-making bodies. I would also like to see an inRESPONSE Mental Health Support Team that can be called upon during a mental health crisis for north county residents; liveable wages and steady employment that allow families to thrive in Sonoma County; the SMART Train and other forms of transportation for our seniors, youth and rural community members; and more activities for our youth that are affordable for all families. I look ahead to the good things that will come with the opening of Alexander Valley Healthcare’s new Health & Wellness Center. And, not least, I dream of La Familia Sana having a community center that can serve the whole community.

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Join us on Thursday, November 7, 2024, from 8:30 to 10:00 am, at Dry Creek Kitchen in Healdsburg for a celebratory breakfast event honoring this year’s Wetzel Community Leadership Award recipient Deborah Howell, CEO of Alexander Valley Healthcare, and Spirit of Wetzel Award recipient Jade Weymouth, Executive Director of La Familia Sana. Longstanding champions of our region’s health and wellbeing, both Deborah and Jade demonstrate extraordinary community leadership and service in both their professional roles and across years of volunteer service. We couldn’t be more excited to be honoring these two remarkable women!

Thank you to our sponsors! (Full list here)

If you or your business would like to sponsor the Wetzel Awards, please contact Mary Ott, Development Director at
mott@healthcarefoundation.net or 707-473-0583.

More information about sponsorships here