ProYouth to lay off 81 workers after Visalia Unified ends contract

ProYouth, a Visalia nonprofit honored last June as the city’s Nonprofit of the Year, will lay off 81 employees after losing a key contract with Visalia Unified School District. The cuts, disclosed in a WARN notice filed earlier this month, are set to take effect June 5 and mark a sharp turn for an organization that serves 15,000 children across six school districts in Tulare and Kings counties.

The layoffs land hard because they hit both workers and the programs families rely on after the school bell rings. ProYouth has long provided after-school and other services across the region, making it a visible part of the local safety net in Visalia, Tulare County and Kings County. With Visalia Unified deciding to manage its after-school program internally rather than contract with ProYouth, the nonprofit is losing work that helped support its staffing and day-to-day operations.

The workforce reduction also points to a broader stretch of contraction for ProYouth. The organization filed a WARN notice for 247 employees in 2024, showing this is not an isolated cut but part of a larger reordering of its staffing footprint. For a nonprofit that had just been publicly recognized for its work, the turnaround is especially stark and underscores how quickly revenue tied to school contracts can vanish when districts shift services in-house.

That pressure is showing up elsewhere in the Fresno area economy as well. The ProYouth layoffs were grouped with another local business closure, a brewery, highlighting how nonprofit providers and small businesses alike are feeling the strain of higher costs, changing demand and tighter margins. In a region where school partnerships and community contracts can sustain hundreds of jobs, the loss of 81 positions at one of the Central Valley’s best-known youth-serving nonprofits is a warning sign that financial stress is reaching organizations that had been seen as stable.