For millions of workers across the country, affordable child care options are out of reach. To address this inequity in their community, YWCA Kalamazoo and Hollander Development Corporation, with support from LISC Kalamazoo, came together to build The Dreamery, an around-the-clock child care center with programs serving second- and third-shift workers and 24-hour drop-in care. This is the story of how it came to be.
When Amanda found out she was pregnant, she made a pledge to the child who would be Jayme, now a toddler. “I promised him I wouldn’t give up,” she says. “And I haven’t.” That meant somehow throwing off the weight of what Amanda calls her “bad past.” She’d been separated from six other children, two relinquished for adoption at birth, the others taken from her as toddlers. “I’d always try to fix the problem that I had,” says Amanda, “but I’d end up losing them at the age of three.” Amanda is now celebrating two years of being free from addiction and she's moving forward in her life—with the strength it takes to overcome systemic hurdles faced by so many mothers living on low incomes.
In her fierce bid to stay well and raise Jayme, Amanda relies on a trusted ally—a child care center right near her home in the diverse Edison neighborhood of Kalamazoo, MI.
Showcased on the south side of a newly built affordable-housing complex and operated by YWCA Kalamazoo, “The Dreamery” is open around the clock, with programs serving second- and third-shift workers and 24-hour drop-in care for when the unexpected arises. It’s geared toward supporting families that are stressed and vulnerable, and offers generous tuition assistance. “If a child comes to YWCA and they cannot afford to pay, that is not their problem,” insists Dr. Grace Lubwama, CEO of YWCA Kalamazoo. “That is a responsibility for the organization.” |  Dr. Grace Lubwama, CEO of YWCA Kalamazoo |
Weekdays, Amanda drops Jayme at the center at 5:30 a.m., then heads to her job in an auto-parts factory. When her employer’s overtime mandates make her stay late with little notice or work on a Saturday, she knows Jayme will be covered. “They are always more than willing to take him and love him up,” she says. Amanda doesn’t have a lot of people in her life she can depend on to back her up as a mom. When Jayme’s at The Dreamery, she knows he’s more than safe—he’s learning, eating well, having fun, getting cuddled.
Housing + child care = livability
The mixed-use development that includes the child care center, 48 apartments, commercial space, and other amenities, opened last year at Kalamazoo’s Portage and Lake streets and is known as The Creamery for the dairy plant that occupied the site for much of the twentieth century. It represents the kind of infrastructure, both physical and social, that many working families need to survive in the twenty-first-century economy. Rent and child care are typically the costliest items in their monthly budgets. Yet no federal safety-net program guarantees access to these necessities, even for the most impoverished. For millions of essential workers across the country, affordable housing and child care are very hard to come by.
In Kalamazoo, what it took to build this infrastructure was a local team willing to hammer together the $14.7 project using a kind of bespoke approach, and raise local funds to help bring it over the finish line. Matt Hollander, managing principal of Hollander Development Corp. based just outside Kalamazoo, is an experienced, justice-minded affordable-housing developer who wanted to build an “aspirational project” in his own hometown. He found an inspired partner in the 137-year-old YWCA whose mission today is twofold: “Eliminate racism. Empower women.” |  Developer and Kalamazoo native Matt Hollander |
For LISC Kalamazoo, which supported both organizations with predevelopment and other grant funds, the project fulfills a long-held objective to bring 24-hour child care into a new housing development, says Sonja Dean, senior program director at LISC Kalamazoo. The Creamery “meets a need in the community that everybody has been pounding the drum about,” she says, “both on the housing-unit side and the access-to-child-care side.”
Developing a vision for the corner of Portage and Lake
It all started a decade ago when the Kalamazoo County Land Bank, after taking possession of the former Klover Gold Creamery via tax foreclosure, demolished the deteriorated eyesore, landscaped the site, and held neighborhood charettes to begin imagining a future use for this corner about a mile from downtown Kalamazoo. The consensus was for a mixed-use development that could mark the gateway to Edison’s disinvested commercial district, once the center of a thriving working-class residential and industrial zone, and offer mixed-income affordable housing, commercial space, and community services.
When Hollander came along several years later with a proposal for the site, it too included mixed-income apartments. Fifteen of The Creamery’s 48 units are affordable to households earning just 30 percent of area median income (AMI), about $16,500 for one person. Twenty-four are set aside for households making up to 80 percent of AMI. And nine apartments, considered “workforce housing,” have rents set at affordability for households earning the area’s median income, with eligibility up to 120 percent of AMI.
Hollander had pored over reports by United for ALICE, a United Way-led research project highlighting just how routinely working Americans struggle to afford essentials even when, by official standards, they’re far from poor. “What we figured out,” says Hollander, “is that in Kalamazoo, if you're a family of four with a household income of like $80,000 a year, you're still in a position where you're not able to pay down your student loans, you're not able to save for retirement. You may be treading water, but you're probably just stuck in a cycle of debt.”
Because wages haven’t kept pace with the cost of living, says Hollander, people near the median income often cannot pay market-rate rents or buy a home. Affordable housing for these people earning about 80 to 120 percent of AMI, often referred to as the “missing middle,” is “exactly what this city, like so many cities, needs,” says Zachary Bauer, LISC Kalamazoo’s executive director. The Creamery was designed to be a small, economically integrated community, with all residents enjoying amenities like an exercise room and rooftop terrace with views of downtown Kalamazoo.
The vision also included a unicorn of a community facility—the comprehensive, 24-hour early childhood center spearheaded by YWCA.
This had been a priority of Lubwama’s since she moved to Kalamazoo in 2014 to lead the organization. As a single Black mother, Lubwama found it very tough to find care for her two young sons. She encountered racial discrimination—one center, Lubwama recalls, denied that it provided child care though it plainly did—and an unwillingness to take on her autistic child’s behavioral needs. Moreover, YWCA’s downtown child care location at the time was serving only 24 children, with a waitlist of over 200.
Lubwama knew that women and people of color working in low-paying shift jobs were contending with even more mountainous obstacles to finding care than she did as an executive. “How,” she asked, “do we allow them to continue in the workforce without worry?”
Hollander and Lubwama met not long after through a family friend of Hollander’s who worked at YWCA, and found they were rowing very much in the same direction.
Financing and building a dream project
The Creamery’s special package of features required a particularly complex financing package. The proposed housing income mix made the project unlikely to win competitive 9-percent Low-Income Housing Tax Credits (LIHTCs), which provide the most equity to a development. So Hollander worked with the Michigan State Housing Development Authority (MSHDA) to instead pair 4-percent federal tax credits with MSHDA tax-exempt bond financing. In an innovation MSHDA hopes to replicate, this bond deal for the first time incorporated local social-impact investors who helped plug a financing gap to realize the project. The Kalamazoo Community Foundation and Stryker Johnston Foundation purchased a total of $2.75 million in project-related bonds directly from MSHDA, accepting a below-market interest rate that in turn reduced the rate of the project’s primary mortgage. The City of Kalamazoo kicked in $350,000 in HOME development funds.
Hollander Development was able to leverage tax-credit and other financing to lower the cost of constructing the child care facility. Meanwhile YWCA’s fundraising team garnered an impressive $7.6 million from 200 individuals, corporations, and foundations to both fit out the space and create a program endowment. “Every single foundation in the Kalamazoo area that has a grant-solicitation process supported this project,” says YWCA development manager Emily Deering-Caruso.
LISC, at work in Kalamazoo neighborhoods since the late 1980s, supplied $140,000 in nimble predevelopment funds to Hollander, and about the same amount to YWCA for buildout of its space, staff recruitment, and to place an AmeriCorps member to advance YWCA’s effort. “LISC primed the pump,” says Hollander. “This was a longer-than-normal development process. There was a period when we had to do a lot of design work to get to closing and ran up some significant predevelopment expenses. LISC helped us out tremendously there.”
Indeed another unusual aspect of the project is how closely the developer and YWCA collaborated on design. Working directly with the project architect, Kalamazoo-based Byce & Associates, YWCA staff seized what they saw as a once-in-a-lifetime chance to shape their child care space around best practices and the science of stress reduction for kids and families experiencing trauma. “Early childhood programs at their best can be such a powerful vehicle for addressing so many disparities—in health, family resiliency, education,” says Nichole Blum, Development and Strategic Expansions Manager for YWCA of Kalamazoo, who project managed the expansion. “We wanted to position our program for that work.”
During this co-design process, The Dreamery child care center dramatically expanded, from an initially planned 3,000 square feet to 7,800 square feet. “We had to redesign the whole building around it,” says Hollander. “It cost some extra money, but in the end, in my opinion, it was the right thing to do.”
The airy space with its two-story interior is full of natural light and textures. There’s an outdoor nature-based play space, and five “classrooms” separated by low walls around a communal kitchen. The partial walls create cozy nests without the intense isolation found in traditional child care settings, where often two adults spend all day enclosed in a room with eight babies. And the central space is an area for shared activities and fresh, farm-to-preschool meals and snacks.
Treating child care workers like they matter
Perhaps even more crucial than its state-of-the-art space is YWCA’s loving support for the child care workforce. In the United States, the early childhood and child care field is staffed predominantly by women of color. These workers typically pour themselves out in teaching and caregiving, earning poverty wages and facing the social stigmas of domestic work. High stress levels can make it challenging to model emotional regulation for young children. And these conditions have contributed to a severe shortage of quality child care providers—in Kalamazoo and across the country. Even with The Dreamery up and running, YWCA calculates there’s only enough child care in Edison to accommodate a quarter of its under-five children.
So, working with partners including the Kalamazoo Literacy Council, YWCA helped establish the Edison Early Childhood Education Career Pathway, a training and apprenticeship program to feed its own hiring, grow the pipeline of qualified local workers, and even seed new child care businesses. The pathway welcomes nontraditional local candidates and provides wrap-around services to ensure their success, including pathways to credentialing and jobs that pay living wages.
Amin Finch helped onboard trainees last year as the LISC AmeriCorps member placed with YWCA. She’s now its full-time Program and Family Support Coordinator. Finch came to the work from a state of burnout in her career in hospitality, and she’s found it deeply rewarding to help troubleshoot issues that trainees may bring, from homelessness to childhood trauma. “We have to heal each other,” Finch says, “because we have to be strong to teach the children we’re blessed to have in our presence.”
Even while trainees are learning the ropes, YWCA offers them full-time employment at a minimum of $15 an hour—more than the national median wage for both child care workers and preschool teachers—plus benefits.
One such new employee, Donna Craig, speaks to the reality that a quality job entails even more than a living wage. Craig raised two children of her own in Kalamazoo—one is in college, the other in high school—and most recently worked in a nursing home where, with very little support, she was tasked with caring for six patients experiencing dementia. At The Dreamery, on the other hand, she’s given scope to design her classroom for functionality, and encouragement to exercise her belief that children need to hear yes more often than they hear no. Whether they’re learning to cut with scissors or braving a high slide, kids need to understand they’re valued, capable—"enough,” as Craig puts it.
“I think it’s important,” she says, “that we get that down in their little hearts and their little minds and their little spirits—to let them know that there is greatness inside of them. This program has allowed me to do that.”
A platform for community self-help
Today, the child care center provides a sanctuary for local children, recognizing that systemic racism has created obstacles for so many of their families, including barriers to economic mobility, family stability and pursuing education. Its drop-in center cares for children who need a safe place to be, any time of day or night and even on weekends. For those who need it, YWCA even provides transportation to take children to and from the center.
The Creamery is an emphatically place-based project; it drives local solutions to deep flaws in the broader economy. It’s planet-friendly, with a solar array, high-efficiency appliances and HVAC systems, and a green roof. It offers affordable homes, excellent and equitable child care, and quality jobs. A local couple, Joy Morris-Burton and Aerick Burton, recently opened a studio for dance, yoga, pilates, and art-making in a ground-floor space. According to Stephen Dupuie, executive director of the Edison Neighborhood Association, Move with Joy is already helping to generate activity and buzz around the long-neglected intersection of Portage and Lake.
In short, the project presents a model for developing infrastructure that empowers local people to share their gifts with one another—nurturing Jayme’s little spirit, for example, and his mother’s as well. Amanda sees The Dreamery staff as a lifeline that’s helped connect her with all sorts of practical help, from a gift card to buy something nice for Jayme at Christmas to a tutor for advancing her own education. “When you’re a single parent,” she says, “it's a lot, to have someone who’s there if you need anything. And I mean anything.”