For years, patients seeking care in Calistoga had to work around a single medical provider squeezed into a 40-year-old double-wide modular building — the kind of bottleneck that has long defined healthcare access in Napa County's Up Valley communities. That is now changing, as CommuniCare+OLE has announced a sweeping expansion of health centers in Calistoga, St. Helena and Fairfield, according to seed facts drawn from the announcement.
The nonprofit, Napa County's only Federally Qualified Health Center, is building an 11,000-square-foot facility in Calistoga that will more than double access to primary care and quadruple dental capacity, as reported by The Napa Valley Register. The new building will also add nutrition services, laboratory services and care coordination, and is designed to accommodate up to 3,000 additional behavioral health visits annually. Construction is set to break ground in October, with the Rick Jones Upvalley Health Center expected to open in early 2028.
The scale of the space problem in Up Valley Napa County has been well documented. Before this expansion, CommuniCare+OLE's footprint there consisted of a small rented clinic in St. Helena and that decades-old Calistoga trailer that allowed only one medical provider to work at a time, according to Napa Valley Life Magazine. Upvalley residents rely heavily on CommuniCare+OLE as their primary care provider, and the St. Helena health center alone currently serves nearly 5,000 patients.
Wine Industry Dollars Fuel the Calistoga Build
The Calistoga project carries a hefty price tag, and the local wine community has stepped up in a significant way. The OLE Health Foundation has raised $12 million in private philanthropic support for the Calistoga campus, per the Register's report. That total builds on fundraising momentum tracked over two years: the foundation's Vida OLE! auction pulled in $3.3 million in September 2025, following a $4.1 million kickoff at the June 2024 event, according to Wine Business.
That kind of vintner-backed generosity has deep roots. In August 2022, the Napa Valley Vintners trade group donated its 25,000-square-foot North Napa campus, valued at $17 million, to OLE Health — the association's largest single donation ever, as reported by the Napa Valley Vintners. The financial ties between the wine industry and the region's community health safety net stretch back even further, to the organization's origins.
A Legacy Dating to 1972
Both organizations that eventually formed CommuniCare+OLE trace their roots to 1972, when farmworker advocates and local vintners established Clinica OLLE in Rutherford while volunteers created the Davis Free Clinic in Yolo County, according to CommuniCare+OLE. Clinica OLLE was originally founded to provide bilingual medical care to Spanish-speaking vineyard workers, a mission that has since grown into a much larger regional operation. The organization was formed through the 2023 merger of OLE Health and CommuniCare Health Centers, and today provides primary care, dental services, behavioral health, nutrition, pharmacy, enrollment services and care coordination across Napa, Solano and Yolo counties.
“Community health centers build lasting trust and care for people with dignity,” said Alicia Hardy, chief executive of CommuniCare+OLE, per the Register's reporting. The organization partners with patients to care for the whole person regardless of insurance status or ability to pay, and it now operates 17 sites serving more than 70,000 patients annually across the three-county region.
St. Helena and Fairfield Also Growing
In St. Helena, the organization is expanding its downtown health center with additional exam rooms, dedicated behavioral health consultation space, improved patient amenities and dedicated staff space. The expansion is expected to nearly double capacity and help reduce wait times, with construction slated to begin in January 2027 and finish by summer 2027. The OLE Health Foundation is launching a $5 million capital campaign to fund that project.
Meanwhile in Solano County, CommuniCare+OLE is converting a former 24 Hour Fitness gym into what will become its largest facility: the 40,000-square-foot Fairfield Gateway Health Center, expected to serve more than 20,000 patients and clients annually once construction begins in January 2027. That project follows the May 2025 opening of a nearly 3,000-square-foot primary care site with six exam rooms on Travis Boulevard in Fairfield, an earlier step in the organization's sequential build-out of Solano County care access.
Not every piece of the expansion puzzle is settled. CommuniCare+OLE continues its search for a permanent site for its West Sacramento clinics, reporting continued progress but no final location as it works to consolidate services currently split between two temporary sites in that city.
