This Sacramento group united an affordable housing complex. How? By empowering its children

How a community rallied around their children

The GreenHouse became a sought-after program in this North Sacramento subsidized housing community. Here are some insights about it:

• Its central location within an affordable housing community makes it safe for children to walk there on their own after school.

• Nearly 100% of teens that complete the program earn a high school diploma. About 83% of residents 25 and older in the census tract surrounding the development have high school diplomas.

• People have asked the GreenHouse to expand its programming to other affordable housing communities in Sacramento, but the executive director has declined because it’s place-based.

• The program was started by people living outside the community but the program has become deeply rooted in the residents' lives. Graduates often return as staff or volunteers to support the generations that follow.

As a child, Isela Muniz thought financial struggle was just a part of life.

Her parents, both first-generation Americans whose families immigrated from Mexico, worked hard to make life feel normal for their five children — the family often spent nights together watching movies or having dance parties.

But in the background, Muniz knew her parents struggled to make ends meet. As the oldest of her siblings, she frequently felt pressure to be a “little adult” and fix the issues that caused her mom and dad stress. She translated for her parents, helped them navigate health appointments and also cared for her younger siblings. She still remembers the few days when the family lost power because they couldn’t afford the electric bill.

“For lack of better words, I just thought I was always going to be poor,” she said.

Muniz, now 32, grew up in what was, and continues to be, a Sacramento neighborhood with one of the highest concentrations of children. Many families who call the block home live in low-cost apartments and townhomes, where residents must earn less than 55% of the area’s median income to qualify — about $59,000 for a family of four.

But those children are also a source of hope for the community’s leaders.

An organization that seeks to empower and nurture the neighborhood’s young people took root 20 years ago in the block’s abandoned clubhouse. The GreenHouse, as it’s known, was founded by people from outside the neighborhood rather than residents on the block. But the program, which provides a mix of homework help, social time and spiritual study, has become as much a part of the community as the children who live there. And the bonds built within The GreenHouse are so strong that graduates often return as staff or volunteers to support the generations that follow.

Muniz was 14 when she discovered The GreenHouse. At that point in her life, she knew she had hopes of one day becoming a pastry chef or an interior designer, or maybe even a physician assistant. But as a young person surrounded by financial stress, those goals largely felt out of reach.

“I was very insecure as a child,” Muniz said. “I was always scared to take leaps, because I didn’t want to mess up and make things worse.”

A safety net of support for youth and families

The GreenHouse completely changed Muniz’s outlook on life.

Participants and families say the program empowers young people on the block, such as Muniz, and gives them the support they need to excel academically and eventually land good jobs. But for The GreenHouse staff, the relationships and support network are the most important part of what they provide.

“There’s just really a sense of connection and belonging over the whole span of your growing up,” said Rena Crocker, the program’s executive director. “It’s really a community of people — kids and youth, staff and parents — that’s here to walk alongside you for the long term.”

The GreenHouse sits in the center of the block surrounded by Northview Drive, Northfield Drive and the Garden Highway in the River Gardens neighborhood of South Natomas. One half of the block consists of income-restricted apartments, run by the nonprofit Mutual Housing, and a subsidized townhome complex known as American River Village makes up the other half.

Muniz discovered The GreenHouse soon after her family moved to the neighborhood. She and her friends were bored after school one day, so they decided to check out the after-school program that met each week in the community center. They had heard the staff put on fun activities and, most importantly, provided snacks.

At The GreenHouse, the friends found a sense of belonging. They could hang out on the plush couches with other children and teens from the block. Teenage and adult volunteers, known as “study buddies,” helped them understand their homework assignments and encouraged them to think about higher education. Staff members led weekly Bible studies and prepared group dinners.

Muniz enjoyed the program so much that she eventually became the friend who would rally the rest of the group to go each week. There, she felt less expectation to solve all her family’s worries and instead had the freedom to focus on herself.

“Going to The GreenHouse was, like, a release,” she said, “being able to be a kid and just forget about everything else that was going on outside of that building.”

Muniz’s family was one of many in the neighborhood who came to California from other countries (in its case, Mexico). While immigrants from Russia and Ukraine made up a large portion of the block in the 1990s and early 2000s, many families living there today trace their roots to Mexico and Afghanistan. Many GreenHouse alumni have described the clubhouse as a safe haven where they can take time to prioritize themselves, as Muniz did.

During the school year, the bulk of The GreenHouse’s programming consists of after-school tutoring and mentoring for elementary, middle and high school students. Most groups meet two or three times a week, and often the students will stick around to socialize after their work is done. Because The GreenHouse has its roots in the Christian faith, youth also have the choice to opt-in to once-a-week evening sessions where they can explore and strengthen their spirituality.

Teens come less often than younger kids because they’re busy juggling school, friends, work and after-school activities. But they will drop by once a week or so to talk with the teen staff, or ask for a letter of recommendation or a practice interview for a job. Sometimes they will want someone to talk to and help them process a difficult life experience.

High school students also have the opportunity to take on leadership roles within The GreenHouse by working internships in areas such as web design, culinary arts, photography and digital communication.

For The GreenHouse staff, the most important thing it provides is an environment for youth to feel seen and known individually for who they are and what they have to offer.

“A lot of young people spend all of their time in the group settings,” Crocker said, pointing to large classes, sports teams and big families as examples. “We really work at The GreenHouse to be a place where youth are really known personally.”

The GreenHouse became Muniz’s window into the world. She took field trips outside her neighborhood, including college campuses such as UC Davis and Sacramento State.

“My family never had the opportunity to take us places really,” she said. “We didn’t have the money for the gas, or to buy us lunch.”

Those tours opened Muniz’s eyes to the possibility of going to college. She can’t say for sure what her life would have looked like without The GreenHouse, but she knows she probably wouldn’t have had the courage to go to American River College and pursue her degree in health care interpretation.

“I would have never had that little speck of positive outlook that things would get better,” she said.

How The GreenHouse changed a neighborhood

Before The GreenHouse, the neighborhood lacked a central hub for community.

Longtime neighbor Charles Pierson first moved to the block nearly 40 years ago with his six children. Over time, thanks to his steady presence, he earned the moniker of “neighborhood grandfather.”

“Mr. Pierson,” as many call him, has watched and felt the neighborhood evolve from a place that once felt — in his words — “unsafe” and “full of crime” into a vibrant community where neighbors support one another and children safely play in the streets and park.

He credits the GreenHouse with ushering in a new era for the block.

“It was not only good for the kids, it was also good for the parents,” Pierson said of the program. “It made the neighborhood good.”

While The GreenHouse has grown to be a hub of activity deeply embedded in the neighborhood, it was started by outsiders — Christians who wanted to found a church in Sacramento. One of them was Kacie Stratton, who would eventually lead The GreenHouse as its first director.

Stratton and her husband, along with a pastor friend from college and a group of other local Christians, wanted their new church to help support children growing up in low-income communities. They had zeroed in on South Natomas as the preferred location, even though none of them lived in the area at the time. Still, they didn’t know exactly where they wanted to plant their ministry.

That changed in early 2001. Stratton saw a front-page story in The Sacramento Bee about a neighborhood in South Natomas — Pierson’s block — where children outnumbered adults. The block had 567 children under the age of 18, or 58% of the population, which was the most children per capita of any urbanized census block in the six-county metro area.

Stratton opened the paper, and as she read, she felt more and more confident that this was an area where her group could make a difference.

“I felt like my heart was just, like, on fire by the end of the article,” Stratton said. “I was like, ‘God, is this where you want us to focus our efforts?’”

The next week, Stratton and the rest of the group launched what they called the Niños Park ministry. Every third Saturday for nearly a year, Stratton and the team would host barbecues and children’s activities in the park. They would knock on neighbors’ doors on Friday evening, introduce themselves and invite families to join them the next day.

But after a year, Stratton felt uneasy about parachuting into the neighborhood once every three weeks and then retreating to her everyday life (she and her husband were renting an apartment near the UC Davis Medical Center). She wanted to give the children a consistent place to go for academic support, social time or even just a listening ear.

The way Stratton remembers it, God gave her the vision for a community center — a place rooted in the neighborhood where children could find support every day. She went to a Borders Bookstore, bought a book called “How to Start a Nonprofit Organization,” and set out to start the program that would become The GreenHouse.

The building they would eventually occupy was, at the time, an abandoned community clubhouse on the condominiums’ side of the property. Stratton remembers on her first visit seeing broken windows, graffiti on the walls and drug paraphernalia scattered on the floor. The homeowners’ association said they had stopped using the space after rambunctious party-goers took over. Stratton and her team were more than welcome to fix it up and use it for The GreenHouse.

Pierson said he first learned that The GreenHouse was moving in when he saw Stratton and her team walking into and around the abandoned clubhouse.

“I was pretty much nosy,” he said. “I pretty much know about everything.”

Once he learned they planned to establish a permanent youth program on the block, Pierson became one of The GreenHouse’s first and most fervent advocates. Stratton and the staff would frequently knock on doors in the neighborhood to spread the word about the program. Neighbors and new residents asked Pierson about The GreenHouse, and he told them to enroll their kids.

“I’ve seen some children that come through here with really bad behaviors,” Pierson said. “And I’ve seen a lot of kids that did something with their life,” he added. “It was all because they went through The GreenHouse.”

Trusting relationships grow from deep community roots

Several factors set The GreenHouse apart from other programs that seek to accomplish the same mission.

Its central location within an affordable housing community makes it safe for children to walk there on their own after school. Its permanency means youth and families can seek support every day. Many of the staff members live on the block or just a few minutes away. A handful of them even grew up going to GreenHouse.

Most importantly, though, all those factors combined to help The GreenHouse cultivate the community’s trust and establish itself as a reliable fixture on the block.

Today, word-of-mouth is still the most common way that residents find out about The GreenHouse, Crocker said. When new folks move in, they quickly learn about the program from neighbors and then ask how to sign up.

Many of The GreenHouse’s staff members live in the area, including Crocker and previously Stratton. Some are graduates of the program. Brenda Martinez, who leads the teen program, grew up on the block and first learned about The GreenHouse at 8 years old when a staff member knocked on her family’s door to spread the word. She stayed involved throughout her childhood and as an alum before finally returning to join the staff five years ago.

Martinez’s best friend, Johanna Ledesma, has been involved with The GreenHouse since those first picnics in Niños Park almost 20 years ago. Ledesma also works on staff as director of parent and family engagement.

Crocker estimates The GreenHouse serves around 100 young people each year. Over the last 20 years, she estimates more than 1,000 different children and teens have participated in The GreenHouse’s programs.

Not all of those students stuck with the program all through their middle and high school years, but nearly every teen who stays involved with the program through high school earns their diploma. For context, only about 83% of residents 25 and older in the census tract surrounding River Gardens have a high school diploma (compared to 88% county-wide). Three out of four GreenHouse graduates also pursue college or vocational school at some point after graduating.

One of the strengths of the program is providing individualized attention for kids, but that also means the program isn’t as easily expandable. The GreenHouse currently doesn’t have enough space or staff to serve all the youth and families in its community who want to participate. The block still has one of the highest concentrations of youth in the area, with 350 children comprising 42% of the neighborhood’s population. And as word has spread about the program over the years, more and more families want to sign their children up, particularly elementary-aged kids so they have somewhere to go after school.

The GreenHouse’s one-room clubhouse can fit only about 40 kids at a time, which means it must cap enrollment, particularly for summer programs. It almost always has a waitlist for elementary school programs, which sometimes runs as long as 25 spots.

“It’s hard to be on the waitlist,” Crocker said. “It’s hard for the kids and it makes us sad.”

The program even started a “waitlist club” that provides limited programming options for kids who weren’t able to enroll. They meet with a GreenHouse staff member once a week for an academic check-up, and then a few times a year (often during school breaks) they’re invited to a “waitlist club hangout” day.

Staff works with families to explore other options for after-school support, such as the nearby Stanford Settlement Neighborhood Center and school-sponsored programs. And it encourages parents to turn in their sign-up forms early when the next round of registration opens (parents register through hard-copy forms, not online sign-ups).

Volunteers are essential to accomplishing The GreenHouse’s mission of one-on-one mentorship with youth and adults. The more people they can bring on, the more kids they’re able to serve.

Many of their volunteers are students from the service learning program at California State University, Sacramento, as well as local high school students. Usually about 15 to 20 volunteers work with GreenHouse kids each week for about 2.5 hours on average.

The demographics of the neighborhood have also shifted over the last 20 years. Today, the neighborhood has far more families from Latin American and Central Asian countries — primarily Mexico and Afghanistan — and significantly fewer white families.

Bibi Muradi is 19 and a recent GreenHouse graduate. She came to California from Kabul, Afghanistan with her family in 2016. After a series of bombings that year, her parents made the difficult decision to uproot their lives and move across the world to give their children a safer childhood and, hopefully, a brighter future.

Shortly after they moved to the neighborhood in 2018, Bibi’s father, Abdul Jabar Muradi, learned about The GreenHouse. He suggested that Bibi and her four younger siblings start attending, if they wanted.

Even though The GreenHouse has its foundation in Christian beliefs, Bibi Muradi and her family, who are Muslim, don’t see this as a barrier to participation.

“I just come in and just do my own thing. I never, like, think about that,” she said. She participated in The GreenHouse’s evening faith group, and even though she wasn’t familiar with the particular stories from the Bible that they would sometimes discuss, she always felt like she came away having learned important life lessons and skills.

“We just talk about how to respect, to forgive, and also to give back,” she said.

Bibi’s parents, Shahja and Abdul Jabar Muradi, said in Farsi that they’re thankful for the safe environment The GreenHouse provides for kids and how closely the staff works with families to help children succeed. When Bibi was struggling to pass most of her classes, GreenHouse staff members joined a meeting with her counselors and parents to discuss how they could best support her. She doesn’t think she would’ve graduated if not for The GreenHouse’s help.

“My parents are really grateful about that,” Bibi Muradi said, translating for her mom and dad. “I was behind (in) everything — every class.”

Advocates wish more programs like GreenHouse existed to support other affordable housing communities in Sacramento.

Mutual Housing, the nonprofit that owns the housing complex next to GreenHouse, tries to provide after-school programming at its other 18 properties. But at the other communities, interns from Sacramento State’s school of social work provide the tutoring, and they’re only available for a few hours on certain days of the week.

“We could only be there maybe an hour or two after school, two days per week,” said Fernando Cibrian, the former director of community organizing for Mutual Housing who retired in February.

“Compare that to what GreenHouse is doing where they’re there every day, building connections with the community,” Cibrian said. “There’s no other program in Sacramento that’s offering what GreenHouse offers.”

Cibrian asked Crocker if she’d be interested in expanding their programming to the other Mutual Housing communities. But she declined. The GreenHouse is special because it’s place-based, Crocker said.

“It just takes deep roots and a long time,” she said. “You can’t rush relationships and trust.”

The future of The GreenHouse

Even though youth and families come and go from the neighborhood, The GreenHouse remains a steady and ever-growing presence on the block.

Some participants stay rooted in their community after they graduate. But in other cases, The GreenHouse’s preparation pushes youth to pursue opportunities that lead them to move away from their community as adults.

One of Muniz’s childhood friends and GreenHouse classmates, Estafania Hernandez, still lives with her family in the same apartment where she was raised. Like her friend, Hernandez credits the program with encouraging her to pursue higher education. She just graduated with her associate degree in accounting and plans to transfer to Sacramento State in the fall for her four-year degree.

Hernandez’s son, Odie Ruiz, now goes to The GreenHouse and will start the teen program in the fall.

Jose Salazar, one of The GreenHouse’s eight graduates this year, plans to live at home for the next few years while he attends American River College.

But his long-term goal is to move away from the neighborhood. After playing a few years of soccer at ARC, he hopes to earn a Division I soccer scholarship to Sacramento State and hopefully play professionally for The Sacramento Republic. Eventually, he wants to buy a home of his own and pursue a career as a social worker.

If he hadn’t discovered The GreenHouse when his family moved to the neighborhood in 2015, “I think I would honestly be a whole different person,” Salazar said. “This is where I learned so many valuable social skills, and this is where I found my love for soccer.”

For most of his high school career, Salazar wasn’t sure what his plans were after graduation. Through internships that The GreenHouse offered, he discovered a love for working with people, particularly kids. Since graduating, Salazar has returned to The GreenHouse as part of the summer staff.. He helps run day camp programs for the younger children.

Salazar will be a first-generation college student this fall. He definitely feels the pressure to succeed and not let his family down. But if he needs anything on his journey — a letter of recommendation, a practice interview, or even just a listening ear — he knows The GreenHouse will always have his back.

“I know that it’ll all be worth it in the end,” Salazar said, “and I’ll feel really proud about myself.”

Muniz moved out of her parents’ house at age 18. As a senior in high school, she’d been homeschooled so she could work more and contribute financially to her family. But as her parents requested more and more of her earnings, Muniz realized she needed to leave home if she was going to achieve the dreams that The GreenHouse helped her discover.

She went on to study biology and child development at American River College before eventually finishing a certificate in healthcare interpretation. For two months, she worked for Kaiser Health as an interpreter before leaving to become a full-time mom.

Although Muniz now lives in South Natomas with her husband and three children, she tries to come back and support The GreenHouse whenever she can, especially for big events such as the harvest carnival around Halloween and the Cinco de Mayo parade.

And she still has dreams of one day moving out of state to explore living in a new part of the country. But when all is said and done, her roots will always trace back to The GreenHouse and the block where she grew up.

“I will always come back here,” Muniz said. “This is my home.”