One drizzly morning last week, a group of young women sat in a circle in a warmly lit room at the Playspace. As they took turns discussing parenting young children, toddlers sometimes wandered in from a playroom next door for a few moments of attention from their mothers before running off again. Lori Means, a parent educator for Vashon Youth & Family Services (VYFS) and the director of the Playspace, occasionally chimed in with a few words about handling the challenges that come with raising young kids.

“These are the most critical years of (children’s) lives, and it’s a time when parents are the most under-resourced, financially, emotionally and physically,” Means said in an interview.

At the Playspace, in the top floor of a former church building just north of town, VYFS tries to make those years easier by offering a suite of resources to parents on Vashon. In addition to support groups, the Playspace has a large indoor play area where kids can have fun while parents meet and talk. Parenting classes are put on throughout the year, and families looking for more individual guidance can sign up for parent coaching. Parents of at-risk children can get help accessing a slate of services from VYFS and beyond through the Wraparound program, which is also housed there.

While the Playspace — which has fees on a generous sliding scale — has been called a lifeline for parents, VYFS officials say that like any social service, it’s also operating on a thin budget and with non-sustainable funding. Last summer the center all but closed after its programs lost their main funding.

The Playspace has mostly bounced back, but is still “limping along,” Means said, badly in need of dollars to keep programs going in the future. As part of a fundraising push this month, VYFS recently sent out an appeal to donors, and volunteers will be stationed outside Thriftway collecting donations for the Playspace and Vashon Kids, VYFS’s after-school program. A trivia night planned for March 1 will also raise funds for the programs.

VYFS Executive Director Kathleen Johnson said the agency hopes to raise up to $10,000 for the Playspace and Vashon Kids in February. Even if it meets that goal, though, it still needs to secure another $15,000 to keep the Playspace running through the end of the year.

“It’s like having a toddler and realizing your house is always going to be a mess,” Johnson said of the unstable funding picture. “But it’s definitely getting better and moving in the right direction.”

The Playspace opened seven years ago, after VYFS surveyed parents of young children on their families’ needs. The top two requests, Means said, were more childcare options for children 2 and under and an indoor play area for kids. VYFS rented the building from the Seattle YMCA, which once had a daycare and gym there, and eventually purchased it. Everything in the playroom — including hundreds of toys and books, tricycles and large foam play blocks — was donated, as was the labor to transform the building into a family-friendly place.

“It was a very exciting time,” Means said.

Since then, the Playspace has become best known for its playroom, a haven for families when the weather is bad or when they simply need to get out of the house. Last year, 90 families checked into the playroom over 1,300 times. There were nearly 2,400 playroom visits in 2013.

“It’s been a great way to quickly meet people with similar things going on in their lives,” said Jodi Augustine, who was with her two children at the playroom last Friday. She and her husband recently moved to the island, she said, and quickly found the Playspace was a good spot for their son, who is almost 2, to “burn off steam,” she said. They’ve also sat in on some of the parent support groups.

“So far one of our favorite parts of being on Vashon is having this available,” she said.

Having small children on Vashon can be isolating, Means noted, unless families have a place to connect with one another. Parents who meet at the Playspace often become friends and create an informal support network.

“Everyone is supportive here. I remember thinking, ‘It’s okay to talk about difficult stuff,’” said Erin Blower, a mother of two who also works as an attorney and has taken advantage of the Playspace’s offerings. She said the center was a huge help when she was exhausted and studying for the bar or facing challenges with her kids.

“Lori has helped me think of a bunch of (parenting) strategies,” she said. “We think our kids are so lucky that we moved to the island.”

When it comes to programing, the Playspace operates on a model of prevention. Plainly put, Means said, children who are brought up using solid and research-backed parenting strategies are less likely to experience mental health issues, to struggle socially or battle addiction later in life.

“Research shows that parents who are given support and resources have a drastically improved opportunity to parent the way they want to parent and for their children to thrive as a result,” Means said.

Experts are increasingly recognizing the benefits of so-called prevention work, and government agencies are funding it some, with hopes that dollars spent now will ease the need for social services in the future.

Last year 283 families participated in programs at the Playspace, a number that is up from 207 in 2013 and around 170 just four years ago. Nearly 70 parents or families took part in support groups last year, and 87 did one-on-one parent coaching.

Still, Johnson said, it takes years to see the results of prevention work, and many funders prefer to support programs with more immediate and measurable outcomes.

“Prevention funding is the first thing to get slashed by the government, and it’s the last thing to be restored,” she said.

For several years, Playspace programs grew with solid support from King County and United Way. When the county had to make cuts and revamped how it provided prevention funding — focusing more dollars on communities with the highest rates of teen alcohol and drug use — Vashon kept its prevention funding in the form of a large grant managed by the Vashon Alliance to Reduce Substance Abuse (VARSA) and administered by VYFS. With about $90,000 a year in VARSA funding, the Playspace was able to offer even more parent education and expand its Wraparound services.

In 2013, however, confusion over what the grant could cover resulted in a public conflict between VARSA and VYFS. While VARSA worked through its struggles and created a new spending plan, as required by the county, the Playspace lost about 90 percent of its funding. The center nearly went dark as Means’ position became half-time, and Delene Rodenberg, coordinator of the Wraparound program, lost half of her position as well. Yvonne Monique Aviva, a well-known parent educator who worked out of the Playspace, resigned when she learned she’d be laid off, and the center also lost its administrative assistant and a parent educator who worked on contract. Around the same time, the Vashon Maury Cooperative Preschool, which had been renting the bottom floor of the Playspace, moved out.

For several months, Means devoted most of her time to working one-on-one with the families most in need. While she says she understood VARSA’s actions, she also called that period “utterly heartbreaking.”

“It was sad because I had been steadily building this program to serve an increasingly larger and larger number of parents, and for the first time we were heading in the opposite direction,” she said.

Today, the Playspace is much more lively, as VYFS has gradually been able to restore staff. VARSA, with the school district as its new fiscal sponsor, now funnels more money to programs for teens, but still contributes about $43,000 a year that helps the Playspace offer parenting classes for a variety of ages, coaching for families with teens and Wraparound services.

With an annual costs of $104,000 at the Playspace, VYFS has adjusted its budget to help cover programs there. It also expects to see additional funding from government sources, and the day care that now leases the bottom floor of the Playspace provides additional income as well. Still, Johnson stressed the Playspace still has a deficit that it hopes donors will help fill.

“We are definitely coming out of a difficult time, and things look brighter, but part of that is we always depend on people donating out of their pockets,” Johnson said. “Without that, it wouldn’t be such a bright future.”