Nonprofits Create Community is NIA’s theme for 2026, as we celebrate the ways that nonprofits come through for their communities in spite of all the challenges facing them. In this series, meet some NIA-insured nonprofits who share their stories of creating community in their own words.
Meet the California Family Life Center of Riverside County, CA
Zach Bell, Admin Liaison and Advisory Board Member of the California Family Life Center, explains:
“It’s our mission to provide safety, comfort, and healing to children suffering abuse and abandonment; to teach love and trust; to instill self-esteem, values, and hope for the future.”
How does your nonprofit and your mission create community for the people and places you serve?
Creating safe spaces for people and communities to flourish.
“California Family Life Center is all about creating safe spaces for people to flourish.
We also believe that everything should be done in collaboration with partners and the community. This approach helps us ensure that we can deliver for our clients in a way that is truly wrap-around in nature.
Within all our programs (including youth job training, foster and adoption, and youth homes), we provide additional ways for the community to invest in clients (toy drives, camp scholarships, etc.), but also support groups and activities for clients to feel a part of a larger family.”
What are your nonprofit’s biggest challenges or obstacles to creating community?
Accessibility to transportation, housing, and child care.
“Our clients each face several barriers in their lives. While each is unique in their own way, we often see that transportation, access to affordable housing, and child care are recurring challenges.”
A broker’s take on community in action.
Before a nonprofit can help build community, they need insurance — and brokers are their guide to helping them find coverage, maintain it, and, if needed, make a claim on it.
California Family Life Center partners with Joe Thacker, a broker with HUB International, who helps them get the most value from their NIA coverage.
As their broker, Thacker shared his insight into the benefit California Family Life Center brings to the community:
“As California Family Life Center’s broker for the last 20 plus years, I’ve seen firsthand how deeply their team cares for the children and families they serve.
Their commitment to creating safe, stable environments — and doing it in true partnership with the community — is exactly the kind of mission-driven work that makes this field so meaningful to support.”
