Stanislaus County's 18-Year-Old RAIZ Promotores Program Closes Most Groups June 30 as BHSA Redirects Prevention Dollars to Treatment

Stanislaus County's RAIZ Promotores program — 13 community health worker groups founded in 2008 that serve close to 400 mostly Latino immigrant residents from Patterson to Hughson — is closing most of its groups by June 30, 2026. The closures follow California's Proposition 1 (2024), which overhauled the Mental Health Services Act into the Behavioral Health Services Act (BHSA) and shifted approximately $140 million a year in existing county mental-health/addiction tax revenue to the state while deprioritizing broad community-outreach prevention work in favor of treatment, substance-use, and homelessness programs.

Behavioral Health Director Ruben Imperial said the county is exploring alternatives to retain a handful of workers by shifting their priorities from preventive care to treatment care, perhaps using Medi-Cal funding — but that there is no way to keep all 13 groups active. For FQHCs and county behavioral-health partners relying on promotora referral pipelines in the Central Valley, this is a concrete, dated loss of a trusted bilingual community-health-worker access point.