Nonprofit looks to expand in-home care for medically fragile Bay Area kids

Since its establishment in 2005, Coastal Kids Home Care has expanded in directions that surprised even its co-founder.

“Counseling kind of came out of nowhere,” Margy Mayfield told a group of supporters and clients at a May 7 reception at San Jose’s Palermo restaurant. “I never thought we’d have a standalone mental health program.”

The nonprofit, which has offices in Salinas and downtown San Jose, now has plans to expand its service area to provide pediatric home health care for children with complex medical conditions in communities across Santa Clara County, San Mateo County and East Bay counties.

Coastal Kids currently provides services including shift nursing, home health nursing and therapies, and palliative care to children and their families in a one- to four-hour radius of its main office in Salinas. The service area includes Monterey, Santa Cruz, Santa Clara and San Benito counties.

Mayfield said expanding the nonprofit’s reach will allow them to go into areas where these services aren’t provided.

“We get calls all the time asking us to go places we can’t go,” she added.

Despite the restrictions, Coastal Kids had managed to make about 105,000 home visits and serve 12,000 medically fragile children as of 2024.

Families who have been on the receiving end of Coastal Kids’ services say that nonprofit has a lasting impact. At 5 months old, Susi and Matt Watson’s daughter Claire was diagnosed with Mucolipidosis type II (also known as I-cell disease), a progressively debilitating disorder with profound medical and developmental impacts. In 2019 Susi Watson became aware of Coastal Kids at a San Jose Sharks game where the nonprofit was the beneficiary of a raffle. Until her death in 2021, Claire received in-home nursing care and the whole family benefited from the palliative care program, which provided music therapy for Claire and counseling for her parents and siblings.

“This year is five years since Claire left us, and Coastal Kids is still part of our lives,” Susi Watson said in a speech at the reception.

Coastal Kids Home Care is holding an open house on June 5, 4:30-7:30 p.m., at its Salinas office, located at 427 Pajaro St. RSVP to https://bit.ly/4v7AJGf.