Running a child care center requires two completely different skill sets: It is a business, and has to keep the doors open, but it’s also an important partner in the intimate work of educating and nurturing children. It’s often difficult for a child care center to be excellent in both arenas.

Sound Child Care Solutions (SCCS) offers a structure for high quality, stable child care centers to join together, sharing administrative functions to streamline and strengthen business practice, while retaining their community and family identity.  Small community-based centers, comfortable and accessible for families, are usually unable to gain the advantages of economies of scale or respond effectively to market forces.  By uniting across centers and combining cutting edge tools to support early learning and small business, we free resources to improve teacher practice, serve more low-income children and improve program quality.  Our mission is to prepare children for school and life by deeply integrating child-centered, high quality, anti-racist, early childhood education with excellent business practice. Research shows strong administration is critical to high quality outcomes for children.

Sound Child Care Solutions creates a consortium structure where centers gain:

�    The economic strength of being a part of a larger organization, enabling the combined centers greater opportunity to weather economic or enrollment ebbs and flows.

�    Financial discounts that come from economies of scale in business functions like payroll, benefits management, banking, janitorial, food services and purchasing.

�    Higher quality early childhood education (ECE) that comes with a more stable financial and organizational structure and a comprehensive approach to professional development.

�    Technology tools to streamline business and help teachers plan curriculum, tailor it to each child and individualize teaching. Technology will support outcomes tracking, generating data to continuously improve classroom, site and administrative quality.

Centers joining the consortium are committed to SCCS core values regarding high quality ECE, culturally relevant anti-bias practice and professional development. They have some stable source of funding beyond tuition, such as employer subsidies, public funding or discounted rent.  Our on-going professional development, career pathways and supports (like a substitute pool) strengthen centers, ensuring stability and consistency for children and families and a respectful, healthy work environment for teachers and directors. In a consortium approach, we can afford to have both great teachers and great business people, ensuring each child care dollar is used most effectively. It is a sustainable model: once established, the administrative core will need no further funding.

How does it work?  All funds are pooled and managed as one entity under SCCS. Each center director leads education at their center while sharing in major operational and financial decisions that affect multiple centers.  SCCS will have a ‘portfolio’ of different types of centers, with the strengths of each contributing to a stronger whole. We will have centers large and small, faith-based and employer-sponsored, low-income and middle-class.  Our first center has completed the  process of joining. Nine additional centers variously fitting each of these categories are actively considering joining us.  We will serve 110 children in 3 centers beginning late 2007; the infrastructure developed will allow us to strengthen 10-15 small businesses and serve 750-1,000 children by 2010.  Our path for long term growth is to spin off new consortia; we will not grow larger than 15 sites. Our toolbox for replication of the Consortium approach will eventually affect many thousands of children.

Leadership:  Diana Bender and Laura McAlister are SCCS Co-Executive Directors.  Diana spent 10 years in early childhood policy and planning at the City of Seattle where she raised over $5 million for children, created and managed multi-million dollar project budgets and led large, diverse teams. She was interim director of Seattle Early Reading First and national Director of Development for Common Cause in DC where she raised over $30 million. Diana has a master’s degree from Harvard in children and family policy. Laura has been working with children, families and teachers for over 25 years. She’s been a coach, teacher trainer and college instructor in Early Childhood Education; an accreditation mentor; director of an accredited non-profit center; parent educator and a Kindergarten and a Pre-K teacher.  Laura has a master's degree in Human Development (bi-cultural development specialty) from Pacific Oaks College.

We have launched SCCS with a $25,000 Venture Grant from a national child care financing think tank which believes our approach is a necessary component of comprehensive efforts to strengthen the child care financing system.  K & L Gates is handling our legal issues pro bono and we’ve received significant other pro bono assistance.  We are seeking pilot funding, lining up partners and developing financial and technology models to test in the first year of operation.

While organizations around the country have adopted a variety of shared management services strategies, we are the first in the nation to create a new entity for centralized non-profit management of child care with healthy, high quality centers deciding to share their business functions.  Built on national research pointing to the importance of strengthening child care economically, this new model creates an opportunity for centers to choose to come together, rather than be ‘taken over’ by a for-profit chain or large non-profit or forced to merge out of desperation. It generates value through economies of scale while preserving the unique culture that each center creates within its community. 

An investment in SCCS will enable the successful development of a financially and economically sound prototype that can be widely replicated. A commitment to this model, which maximizes each child care dollar, will lead to children’s improved developmental and academic outcomes for years to come. With testing and refinement, the consortium approach will be a highly effective strategy to increase the economic strength of child care and enhance our system of financing education in the early years.