Elevating Women Entrepreneurs in Child Care

• Get urgently needed capital to the highest-priority child care providers: women, whose businesses serve primarily women and children.
• Create a stronger and more equitable child care system through facility improvement, business skill building, and support in making changes that adapt to changing conditions – all to stabilize operations and promote business growth.
• Scale the program to meet the needs of women across the country, as child care providers, as business owners, and as working parents.

Elevating Women Entrepreneurs in Child Care combines real estate development, business development assistance, and access to capital for women-owned child care businesses. This strategy centers creative, real-world solutions, such as leveraging public funding to invest in the infrastructure of child care for the long term, increasing access to digital tools and the fluency to use them, and connecting child care entrepreneurs to personal consulting teams to help them strengthen their services and gain access to capital. We also build partnerships with community-based organizations that work to support this sector with business development activities, specialized technical expertise, and other resources. Our localized, community-led approach includes:

• Access to Flexible Capital: LISC awards grants to child care providers, providing flexible capital for projects with the greatest impact on business stability and growth, often resulting in immediate, meaningful improvements. These could include facility improvement, technology upgrades, support in business development skills, adaptations to stabilize operations and improve revenue, and professional services for engineering, architectural, and environmental space planning.
• Technical Assistance and Building Grassroots Capacity: We provide grants to trusted, community-based partner organizations. They directly support entrepreneurs with critical business needs, such as experienced business coaches who work with child care providers to craft an action plan for improvements, or guidance on digital tools that simplify operations and enable opportunities to expand networks and collaborate with other child care experts. By providing local partners with capital, consulting, coaching, collaboration, and access to other resources in their markets, LISC is comprehensively strengthening regional child care systems.
• Cross-Market Learning: Elevating Women Entrepreneurs in Child Care trainings and forums help project partners find new ways to work with local child care businesses, to understand and better serve their needs. This creates a community of practice to strategize how best to empower women providers and scale effective solutions, including connections to peer learning opportunities where they can learn from other markets' interventions, liaise with other programs, and understand best practices and challenges.

With seed funding from Procter & Gamble, this program is helping fuel innovation for child care businesses owned by women entrepreneurs. In 2022, Elevating Women Entrepreneurs in Child Care was piloted in three cities, deploying resources in a way that best responded to local needs.

• In Phoenix, LISC provided 6 home-based child care businesses led by Black and Latinx women with 3+ months of business and organizational capacity coaching and grants of up to $30,000 for essential equipment and supplies. We delivered a tailored package of support to each business via a coaching team that conducted an operational assessment, worked with owners to set goals and milestones for improvement, and developed implementation strategies. The program’s findings and strategies helped LISC to secure and deploy $60 million from the State of Arizona in 2023 to support 511 child care facility projects across the state.
• LISC developed a first-of-its kind Digital Accelerator curriculum designed for child care providers, offered in both English and Spanish. It was launched in 2022 in Boston, with 27 home-based child care providers completing the five-week Digital Accelerator program. Each child care provider achieved the program’s goal: an actionable plan for the digital growth and efficiency of their child care business, including a website. They received $5,000 technology grants from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, plus a small business advisor for ongoing post-program support. Ninety-six percent of program participants were female, over 80% identified as Black, and 15% as Hispanic/Latinx. In 2023, we expanded the program in Boston and the Greater Newark market, offering the program to 37 home-based child care providers, all whom now have live websites and access to Brightwheel, a child care management software which is a critical technology tool and business best practice.
• In 2024 in Kalamazoo and Houston, flexible grants will be coupled with tailored business coaching to an estimated 20 BIPOC women-owned child care providers to support facility improvement, increased revenue, reduced expenses, adaptation skills and changes to help stabilize operations and promote business growth. We expect grantees to see immediate, vital improvements leading to greater financial stability and asset building. 

LISC is positioned to scale and expand the Elevating Women Entrepreneurs in Child Care program, based on the success of the pilots and the tremendous demand seen in those markets alone. In Arizona, nearly a thousand applications were submitted for our statewide program, totaling over $176 million in requests for $60 million in available grant funds. In Boston and Greater Newark, there is a waiting list to join future cohorts of the accelerator program. We seek to:

• Expand the existing program by investing further in pilot sites and expanding into new geographies across LISC’s national network of 37 offices and rural communities.
• Replicate the Digital Accelerator curriculum nationwide.
• Provide grant funding to child care providers and project partners, paired with technical support and capacity building to strengthen their business model and enhance their facilities.
• Have direct, positive impacts on the livelihoods of women, and the lives of the families in their communities.

For more than 20 years, LISC has been an advocate, thought leader, and resource for the early childhood facilities sector, poised to investing $149 million and leveraging an additional $518 million for the development of high-quality child care and early learning environments. LISC understands the importance of ensuring that all families, regardless of zip code, have access to high quality early care and education programs. Our high-visibility model addresses this need, particularly in underserved neighborhoods and communities.