Mission

Imagine that your child or grandchild is born with a congenital condition or is diagnosed with a life-threatening illness like cancer. Your whole family's world would be turned upside down. Long bay area hospital stays, countless trips to specialty physicians at Stanford and UCSF and a dizzying array of medications and equipment would become your new norm. Coastal Kids Home Care is here to help through our mission to meet the unique needs of medically fragile children in the comfort of their homes. Our clinical teams surround each patient and family with comprehensive health and mental health services to ease their burden.

The Big Idea

Expanding mental health counseling to children and teens responds to a critical need in our community. Wrenching data shows that the number of teens experiencing depression in the last decade has increased significantly and suicide rates among teens and younger children continue to rise. The pandemic exacerbated these trends, and our community has been ill-equipped to respond. Early in 2019, Coastal Kids Home Care expanded our traditional counseling to include care for mild to moderate mental health services for children. Intervention that this critical stage, when children are coping with issues like loss, divorce, bullying or anxiety, provides children and their parents with tools and strategies to build resilience for the future. Demand for counseling continues to increase, support from MCGives would allow us to invest in additional counselors with expertise in children and teens – to bring back hope to children in Monterey County.

I thought counseling was just like how they showed it on TV where people just have to talk. But it was actually fun! Kate made it fun. We talked, we played, and we worked on arts and crafts.

- Naveah Gonzales