Sherwood Trust grant revives after-school programming in Vista Hermosa

Following a temporary pause in after-school programming for Vista Hermosa students and families, the program is coming back this fall thanks to new funding.

Sherwood Trust has awarded $100,000 to Mano a Mano, a nonprofit in Vista Hermosa, which will go toward funding the after-school program for the next two years.

Mano a Mano runs the seasonal worker housing in Vista Hermosa, where workers can rent beds for up to 10 months. Most of the seasonal workers are employed in agriculture, whether it be at FirstFruits Farms or elsewhere.

Gloria Alvarado, the community executive director for FirstFruits Farms, said that many parents and families work long hours and need somewhere for their children to go after school, especially during the summer.

"They feel safe, and parents feel safe as well," Alvarado said. "I mean, they're working and knowing that their children are in a trustworthy place, being supervised after school."

The program had ended at the beginning of the 2025-2026 school year, Alvarado said, but was able to reopen for about six months during the school year because there was enough money in the budget.

"We noticed students were eager to have that after-school program and since they all know each other from Prescott (School), they feel like it's a hangout spot, not necessarily school," Alvarado said. "We do learning in a fun way … we do experiments, dance, arts and crafts. It's nice to see when students ask their parents to pick them up later because they want to stay for the program."

Mano a Mano was just one of several Walla Walla Valley organizations that received a Sherwood Trust Core Grant this year. Sherwood Trust granted over $880,000 in Core Grants this year to support health care, education, food assistance and more.

The largest of the 11 grants, $250,000, went to Blue Mountain Heart to Heart to fund a learning center at the clinic's new location. The organization plans to move to a larger space, 3 W. Poplar St. in Walla Walla, after receiving $1 million in federal funding earlier this year.

The grant from Sherwood Trust will be used to open the Center for Rural Responses to Substance Use on the second floor of the building.

Executive Director Everett Maroon said that typically, BMH2H does research at the request of the state or federal government. But once data is collected to answer specific questions from the funder, BMH2H has all of this data but not the time or expertise to do more with that data.

"The idea is, what if we brought a postdoc in or a midcareer academic who knows how to set up a research environment and knows how to have some ideas about how to work with some of our data, be it the prevention data or some other kind of data source that we've created, and can then publish on it, and we can contribute in a new way to the thinking around the kinds of interventions that we make in the community."

Maroon said the center would be a way for the organization to come up with inclusive solutions for behavioral problems.

"We'll hire a coordinator for this and then we'll bring in a postdoc every academic year and the coordinator will help us create an initial panel presentation in the fall and then a symposium or something in the in the spring around some of the ideas that came up through the research that year," Maroon said.

Symposiums would provide a way for professionals to come together, learn about the newest data and research, and talk about solutions.

"We've hosted a couple of summits around opioids and opioid response over the years and they each got more than 100 people in attendance," Maroon said. "People who are commissioners were there and law enforcement officers were there and people in health care were there, and we had some really great conversations."

A date for the remodeling to begin is not set in stone, Maroon said, but he hopes it can start sometime this summer.

Meanwhile, an award of $120,000 went to Planned Parenthood of Greater Washington and North Idaho.

Director of Philanthropy Emily Anderson said that while Planned Parenthood of Greater Washington and North Idaho has several clinics in the region, this grant is only for the Walla Walla clinic.

The money will go into the patient assistance fund, which is used to cover out-of-pocket expenses for patients who are uninsured or underinsured.

"We are well-known as a health care provider that will not turn people away because of their inability to pay," Anderson said. "But we would see people for legitimate health care concerns, and then they would need follow-up care, and they just wouldn't come back in for it. And if you have something suspicious on your Pap smear and you just let it ride, that's extremely dangerous, so we didn't want people to do that. So that was what prompted us to create the patient assistance fund and in the beginning it was only used for those sorts of situations, but now we've expanded it to cover every sort of situation we see at our local health care health centers."

Anderson said she predicts this grant will be able to assist about 1,600 people during the next three years. She also said the reason that this money is so important right now is because the federal government is "actively trying to shut down Planned Parenthood health centers."

"We are under a one year Medicaid ban which expires on July 1. It's not very clear what will happen after that," Anderson said. "But we also know that lots of people are going to fall off Medicaid at the end of this calendar year because of changes to laws that were approved in the Big Beautiful Bill, which is the same bill that tossed us off Medicaid for one year. So we're just really grateful to the Sherwood Trust for stepping up for our community members, because we do anticipate more people will be coming to us completely uninsured in the next few years."

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This story was originally published June 5, 2026 at 10:03 PM.