Making way for child-care
centers
Statewide partnership offers funds, expertise
to renovate facilities
By
Marion Davis, Staff Writer,
Providence Business News
A Place to Grow, a
nonprofit child-care center in Wakefield, found a
home in an old warehouse with
renovation help from Local Initiatives Support Corp, Rhode
Island in the form of a 15-year, $422,500
loan. The center serves about
110 families. Photo by Krzystyna Harber
An old nursing
home. An empty warehouse.
Inner-city apartments.
In the last three years, LISC Rhode Island has helped them all
become viable child-care spaces: Child Care Connection Central
Falls, serving 260 youngstersfrom mostly low-income families;
A Place to Grow, serving about 110 families in Wakefield; four
home-based child-care centers
in a renovated apartment complex on Woonsocket’s Constitution
Hill.
The projects are part of a statewide effort to create, expand
and improve child-care spaces that has invested nearly $3.3
million since 2001, including $2.6 million in low-interest
loans as well as grants to community groups and family
child-care providers.
The idea behind LISC’s Rhode Island Child Care Facilities
Fund, which is supported by public and private sources, is
that quality child care is “a very important part of the
economic health of our communities,” as LISC executive
director Barbara Fields put it.
“If we’re going to move people from welfare to work, or even
help women to work more hours, we need to have a place for our
children to go where they’re going to be safe, and it’s a good
place for them to be,” Fields said.
LISC Rhode Island is part of a national group, the Local
Initiatives Support Corp., which provides money and expertise
to community groups building housing and revitalizing
neighborhoods. LISC has invested in several child-care
projects across the country, but in Rhode Island and
Connecticut, it’s gone further, working statewide to make a
bigger impact.
The Rhode Island program, run by Cindy Larson, a veteran of
early childhood programs, is financed by the state and the
Rhode Island Foundation (each gave $1.25 million), along with
Alan Shawn Feinstein, the Rhode Island Housing &
Mortgage Finance Corp., the
U.S. Departments of Education and Health and Human Services,
Hasbro and LISC itself.
LISC was asked to work on this issue, Fields said, because of
its expertise in
real estate finance and
community development. While the state has focused on teacher
training and child-care accessibility, LISC is focusing on the
buildings where children are cared for.
“We’re talking about the physical
real estate needs, and it has
shown to be a real powerful tool” to improve child care,
Fields said.
It’s “fairly rare” for child-care centers to have custom-built
facilities, Larson said, even at the high end of the market,
so most providers are making due, in some way or another, in
buildings designed for another purpose. What LISC can do is
help them make those spaces safer, healthier, more
educationally useful and child-friendly, and ensure that new
child-care spaces are that way from the start.
So far, LISC has provided grants and loans to more than 30
organizations working on child-care projects, including
$150,000 given out as “mini-grants” of $300 to $1,000 for
home child-care providers to
fence in their back yards, add child-friendly rubber floors,
and otherwise improve the environment for youngsters.
But the bulk of LISC’s investment has gone into six
large-scale projects from Woonsocket to Newport, adding a
combined 77,000 square feet of quality child-care space and
more than 500 new child-care slots, and improving conditions
for another 300 children.
A Place to Grow, in Wakefield, is a nonprofit center started
as a partnership with South County Hospital. When the hospital
needed to expand, the child-care center got evicted. Director
Jennifer DeFrance looked for months before even finding any
usable space – an old warehouse. Then she faced the challenge
of paying for renovations.
“We tried applying, seeing if we could apply for conventional
loans, and we couldn’t even come close to what we needed,”
DeFrance said. The center already had debt, she said, and its
annual
budget was only about
$700,000, so no bank would touch the project. LISC provided a
15-year
loan, $422,500 with 5 percent
interest. The LISC money allowed DeFrance to turn the sterile
space into a “real child-friendly” place, with lots of light,
observation windows, direct playground access from the
classrooms, and easy-to-reach bathrooms. The warehouse became
a modern, colorful, cheerful space.
“We were facing closing our doors,” DeFrance said. “Without
LISC, we would not be here. I can’t say that enough.”
Child Care Connection, which runs 17 facilities in Rhode
Island and Massachusetts, is a powerhouse in the industry, not
normally the type to have trouble with
financing. But when the
Lincoln-based company set out to transform the old Rose
Cottage Nursing
Home in Central Falls into a
child-care center, to serve primarily state-subsidized
families, banks wouldn’t touch that project, either, said
president and CEO Kevin A. Fusco.
LISC stepped in there as well, loaning $500,000 to gut and
rebuild much of the interior – which looked “horrific” – and
$10,000 for a “top-notch” Boston architect to redesign the
space. “We have centers that serve primarily private payers
that are really nice,” Fusco said. “But I would have to say
Central Falls is the nicest of the 17 centers we have, by
far.”
Since the Central Falls center opened, in 2003, Child Care
Connection has tapped LISC’s expertise to improve outdoor play
spaces and provide more natural environments. The company
hasn’t found another good inner-city site to develop, he said,
but “my definite hope is to do that again.”
Meanwhile, LISC has loaned $625,000 to the Woonsocket
Neighborhood Development Corp., a longtime partner that also
developed the four
home-based child-care spaces
on Constitution Hill, to turn the former Hope Street School
into a 110-slot child-care center, due to open late this year.
And there are more projects in the works, Fields said; the
program is already funded for another year and a half.
Given how interest rates are rising, Fields said, the need for
LISC’s money is unlikely to abate. But the good news is, as
happened with low-income housing over the last several years,
business leaders are realizing the importance of child care
and offering their financial support, she said.
<<< BACK TO
LIST
