Vashon Youth &Family Services placed its Playspace building up for sale earlier this month in a move agency leaders say they hope will bolster the financial picture of the agency and allow it to better focus on its mission.

The Playspace, at the corner of Vashon Highway and Gorsuch Road, is home to a variety of programs for families with children from newborn to age 6. VYFS has owned the building since it purchased it from the YMCA, with financial support from the community, in 2011. VYFS also serves as a landlord to Vashon Children’s Center, a full-time daycare housed in the lower level of the building.

On Feb. 2, VYFS Executive Director Kathleen Johnson sent a letter to donors who helped with the purchase and renovation of the building, informing them of the decision and why it was deemed a necessary move.

“After much deliberation the board concluded that we have no other option than to put the Playspace building up for sale. The agency must sell the building if it is to be able to continue to support needed programming — including early childhood prevention,” she wrote.

The building is listed at $539,000. Windermere real estate agents Sarah Schosboek, a current VYFS board member, and Sophia Stendahl, a former VYFS board member, are the listing agents and are offering their services pro bono, Schosboek said.

As of Friday, no offers had come in, but Schosboek said she was pleased with the interest she had seen from other island nonprofits and from potential private buyers.

When VYFS bought the building, the agency had been renting it for three years from the Seattle YMCA. The cost of the building then was $450,000, but in recognition of the community financial support the YMCA had received when it opened in 2000, the agency credited VYFS $200,000, making the actual cost to VYFS $250,000. Renovations were also needed, and, according to Johnson, an anonymous local supporter offered a private loan with generous terms, for $250,000. Of this, the agency still owes $180,000, which will be due in three years.

“Meeting that obligation would create a significant hardship on the management of the agency and endanger the financial health of other programs serving other areas of need on the Island,” Johnson wrote in the letter to donors.

VYFS board president Marilyn Campbell said the board was acutely aware of the building’s history as a community asset, but selling the building became a necessary move.The agency has had some hard years financially. Grants for early childhood prevention services dried up, and United Way also cut a needed grant, Johnson said. Additionally, Campbell noted that the recession affected giving on the island among VYFS donors.

“While we hope to be and appear to be emerging from that, it is still very tough,” she said.

Once the building sells, both women say the proceeds from that will go to stabilizing the agency and to strengthening services.

“We would pour every bit of the profit into programming that serves children and families,” Johnson said.

Meanwhile, the potential sale of the building has affected the Vashon Children’s Center, owned by Amanda Lawson. The center is slated to close at the end of the month, a decision Lawson said she made after weighing her options and determining none were viable. Now, several families are trying to make new childcare arrangements, with limited options available; Missy Schafer, whose 2-year-old daughter attends the center at least three days a week, is among them.

“Finding child care on the island, it is incredibly difficult,” she said. “We do not know what we are going to do, and we’re scrambling to figure that out.”

Lawson opened the center two years ago because of her own experience with the island’s limited day care possibilities. It took some time to attract a large number of children, she said, but since last summer it has been at its capacity of 22 children. About half of those children qualify for financial support from the Department of Social and Health Services for their care, and it is those families Lawson said she is most concerned about.

Lawson and Johnson disagree about whether Lawson had sufficient warning about the building being listed, with Johnson saying Lawson known for months that it might be put up for sale and Lawson saying she did not have a clear understanding of what was transpiring until real estate agents came in on a Saturday morning during a staff meeting.

After that, Lawson said, she sent an email to families, telling them that they had options, but she decided the options, including purchasing the facility, would not work. One potential buyer offered to rent her space in the building, but at a price she could not afford. Alternatively, moving would be time-consuming and expensive, particularly to meet all the state requirements — and to pay rent in two places while the new space was under construction.

“I looked around,” she said. “It would have taken me at least six months to build a new space out and get it licensed.”

Lawson’s lease goes until September, but she said complicating the picture is that when families learned the news that the building was for sale, six of those who pay privately left abruptly.

“I think it created a panic,” she said. “People just scrambled.”

With their departure, she terminated the employment of three staff members. On Wednesday last week, with a state licensor at the facility, one remaining staff member did not show up for work, and there was not sufficient staff for all the children scheduled to come that day. She turned seven children away.

“I could not meet the requirements,” she said.

From now until the end of the month, she said, she is winding down the business, and will close on Feb. 28.

“I am looking forward to a little freedom, but it also makes me cry,” Lawson said. “This was my dream job. It was not a job. It was creating a place children should have.”

Schafer, too, voiced her disappointment in losing the center.

“This was a find,” she said. “Not only on the island, but in the greater area.”

She is inquiring with other child care providers on Vashon, but mostly, there are waiting lists, she said. Additionally, she and some of the other families now in need of childcare are talking with the center’s teachers to work out nanny shares and private babysitting, if possible.

“All of us loved the teachers and staff in general,” she said. “We’re hoping that we can find something that works out for everyone.”