Building Stronger Centers | Family Child Care Training

The FUND believes strongly that lack of technical expertise is often just as important an obstacle for child care providers that want to do a facilities project as lack of funding. Most child care providers are ill-equipped to undertake a facilities project, and require assistance, often intensive, in navigating the facilities development process. Providers' expertise is child care, not real estate development, and they are typically unfamiliar with the basics of how to identify and assess a site, pull together a development team, draft capital and operating budgets, raise the necessary funds, and manage construction. Because intensive technical assistance is expensive, most providers cannot access it, and many projects founder as a result.

The FUND has always provided technical assistance to its borrowers and grantees; but in recent years, we have also developed our own capacity to offer more comprehensive trainings to groups of providers. We currently offer two different training programs--an intensive, year-long training and support program for center-based providers planning facilities projects called Building Stronger Centers, and a one-day training through family child care networks, for family child care providers that want to improve their home-based child care environment.

Building Stronger Centers

Building Stronger Centers (BSC) is an intensive training and leadership development program which, combined with access to development capital, is designed to build the capacity of center-based early care and education programs to plan and implement facility improvement or expansion projects. The program begins with a week-long, residential training institute in the areas of facilities project development, organizational management, and leadership development, followed up with a year of individualized technical support and access to both seed money and project financing. The fundamental program goal is to help participants to complete their projects and thereby to grow the state's supply of high-quality child care space.

Eighty senior managers, representing 61 child care agencies, have participated in Building Stronger Centers in the program's first four years of operation. Applications for a fifth round of BSC are now available. Click to download the RFP/application. Applications are due December 14, 2007.

Participant Selection:
Our selection process requires that agencies be established non-profits serving at least 25% low-income children (most BSC participants serve a much higher percentage, averaging 79%), and that they be actively planning a facilities project. In addition, we look at level of board and staff motivation and commitment to utilizing technical assistance, organizational and financial stability, commitment to quality, boldness of vision, and likely impact of their plans. We try to select providers for whom our training and technical assistance will have maximum impact, rejecting providers that are either too weak financially and organizationally or too strong, providers whose projects are either too preliminary or too advanced. We select agencies in cohorts, aiming at a group of 15-20, small enough that each agency can receive plenty of individualized attention, and for the group to develop some cohesion.

Participating agencies have been a diverse group by any measure: coming from all over the state, from programs ranging from small, single-site child care centers to large human services agencies with broad missions, with budgets ranging from $145,000 to $238 million, serving children from birth to age 17. All participants, however, are senior managers in their agencies: typically executive directors, school-age care child care site directors, or early childhood education program managers, and all are committed to seeing their facilities projects through to fruition. The projects they are planning, if and when all are completed, will create new high-quality space for 1,707 children and will significantly upgrade space serving an additional 5,038 existing children.

Training Institute:
We have run four training institutes, one for each cohort of participants, in the springs of 2002, 2003, 2004, and 2006. Participants spend five intensive days together at the training institute location (the Emerson Inn By the Sea in Rockport, MA in year one, and the Warren Conference Center and Inn in Ashland, MA in years two, through four). Training is done by a combination of FUND staff and colleagues, child care providers we have worked with in previous years, and local and national experts in particular fields. The institute covers a variety of topics in three general areas:

• Facilities Development: Our goal is to demystify the development process and give participants concrete tools and skills they can use. We provide training on the overall development process, quality design of space for children, capital budgeting and fundraising, and project management, via interactive trainings, case studies, and a variety of panel presentations.
  
• Organizational Development: Participants learn about the underlying dynamics of child care operating budgets and how to create them, how to use budgets as management tools and ideas about reducing expenses and increasing revenue, how to develop a cash flow budget, and how to read and understand financial statements and calculate key financial ratios. In addition, the FUND's Director of Finance and Operations analyzes three years of audited financial statements for each participating agency, and then spends time one-on-one with each participant in a "budget clinic."
  
• Leadership Development: Lastly, successful facilities development projects need a champion with solid leadership skills. The training institute includes several modules to help participants hone their leadership skills, on topics such as how to share your vision, involve people appropriately in decision-making, and think strategically.

Feedback from the participants about the training institute has been overwhelmingly and exceedingly positive for all four years that we have offered BSC. Many participants told us that this was the best training they had ever taken part in in their lives: high-quality, well-organized, and full of immediately useful information.

Follow-Up: Technical Assistance and Financing:
During the training institute, each participant creates an action plan, describing where they are currently with their facilities projects and in a range of management areas, and where they need to be. The action plans then lay out a road map for how they are going to get there and what sort of help they will need along the way. We work intensively with each agency over the course of at least the next year to help them to further plan and finally implement their projects. The kinds of assistance we offer include the following:

• Additional training: We bring the full group of participants together again every few months to offer additional training in topics that are of broad interest, such as capital fundraising or coordinating the project development team. We have also done a bus tour of recently-completed Boston child care facilities projects, with project sponsors and team members on hand to talk about the process.
• Technical assistance and support: FUND staff follows up regularly with each participating agency to discuss progress on their action plans, and to offer general guidance, strategic assistance, and moral support. Participants are also linked technologically with a list-serve, allowing them to keep in touch and offer updates, questions, and information to each other as a group.
• Seed money: For agencies that need it, we offer seed money of $5,000-$10,000 for project development costs such as hiring an architect to assess project feasibility and do a schematic design or hiring a project manager to identify a site or put together some initial project numbers. Up to $5,000 is made available in the form of a grant, with an additional $5,000 available for those projects that need it in the form of a soft, 0% loan, forgivable if a project does not proceed despite an agency's best efforts. In each round, nearly every agency that applied for these funds received them.
• Project Financing: In addition, we are committed to helping participants to secure the financing they need to actually implement their facilities projects, once planning is complete. Participants can of course access the FUND's loan capital. In addition, we periodically raise grant capital specifically for BSC participants and make it available through competitive funding rounds.

Building Stronger Centers Thus Far
Building Stronger Centers has been a great success thus far, and we believe it has the potential to become a national model. The two primary yardsticks by which we measure our success are: (1) The degree to which program participants have been able to complete the facilities projects they had planned, and (2) The satisfaction they express with the program and its relevance and helpfulness to their overall work.

Facilities Project Completion: Our goal is to help 50% of program participants to complete their projects within 3 years of completing the training institute, and 70% within 5 years. Thus far, we are meeting or exceeding these goals for each cohort of BSC participants.

Participant Satisfaction: BSC participant evaluations of each program component have been extremely positive across the board. Many providers tell us that they have never been part of a training initiative of such high quality. Most say that being part of the initiative has been an extremely important factor in their moving ahead with their projects.

Building Stronger Centers 2008
We will be taking applications in fall 2007 for a fifth round of BSC, with a training institute to be held in spring 2008. If you are interested in the program, please contact Theresa Jordan at 617-727-5944 or email her at tjordan@cedac.org.

Setting the Stage for Quality: How to Improve Your Family Child Care Environment

What can a family child care provider do on a tight budget to improve the environment where they care for children? The FUND has developed a one-day training to help family child care providers answer this question and to make their space work better, through changes in room layout, paint and color, lighting, equipment and furniture purchase, and other low-tech, low-budget improvements. Trainer Mav Pardee helps providers to see their space with fresh eyes, by showing slides of high-quality family child care spaces, through design exercises where providers lay out an actual family child care home, and through discussion of ways to solve typical space challenges, like how to set up an effective entryway or how to make a small space work for children ranging in age from infants to school-agers.

In 2002, with grant funding from the US Department of Health and Human Services, we tracked down more than 20 family child care providers throughout the state with particularly high-quality space, and photographed the creative and beautiful ways they had set up their space and dealt with typical space challenges. We built the training around dozens of these images -- of a "hello-goodbye window," a cozy infant sleeping area, a beautiful and well-placed entry area bench, a tiny but effective office nook -- so that providers, whose long hours often prevent them from visiting many other providers' homes, could be inspired and develop new ideas about their own spaces.

The hundreds of family child care providers who have attended trainings in Boston, Cambridge, Lowell, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and at national NAEYC and NAFCC conferences have had very positive things to say about the material. Said one, "I really enjoyed this workshop and feel like going home and tearing the house to pieces and reorganize!"

New funding allowed us to develop two new components of our work with family child care providers:

• Train-the-trainer workshop on quality environments: Mav Pardee has developed a train-the-trainer workshop based on her "Setting the Stage for Quality" training. Staff from family child care systems, Child Care Resource and Referral agencies, and other family child care intermediary organizations, as well as independent trainers, will be able to attend Mav's train-the-trainer workshop, purchase a CD with all the workshop materials and powerpoint images on it, and then go on to offer the training to other groups of family child care providers in their communities. In this way, we will be able to reach more providers with our training.
• Quality improvement grants for Boston family child care providers: The FUND will offer small quality improvement grants to Boston family child care providers who have participated in the FUND's environments training and need funds to help implement changes to their child care space. These funds will be offered annually on a competitive basis starting in 2007. Funding is limited -- we have approximately $30,000 in 2007.