Baby steps: Surging need for child care sparks Maine startup boom - Mainebiz

As Anna Wardwell gets ready to open her new home-based child care business in Hampden, the animal residents are keeping her busy.

Surrounded by chickens and other fowl roaming the undulating six-acre property, Wardwell stops to distribute red apples to three little pigs and check in on a pair of goats, who happen to be sisters. All will have starring roles in Little Learners Homestead LLC, which promises farm-based child care for up to a dozen tots ages three to six.

The weekly $275 tuition will cover three meals a day and activities from milking goats to gardening; similar to Waldorf schools, Little Learners will aim to foster creativity and an appreciation of nature.

“I can’t wait to start and meet the kids,” says Wardwell, who holds a degree in environmental studies from Colby College. As she embarks on her first entrepreneurial venture, she’ll draw on her experience as a horticulturist with the Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens in Boothbay, special education teacher, farmer and biologist.

While Little Learners’ focus will be on the outdoors, Wardwell is also putting finishing touches on a colorful indoor play area, already equipped with reading material and little boots for little feet.

“Making sure everything aligns is a little nerve-racking, but you figure it out as you go,” says Wardwell, a recent graduate of a business incubator launched in 2020 by Brunswick-based Coastal Enterprises Inc. known as the Child Care Business Lab.

When Wardwell opens Little Learners later this month, she’ll join a growing crop of entrepreneurs in child care. Services vary from basic day care to education and enrichment programs like what Wardwell envisions; she’s one of 18 entrepreneurs in Maine’s rural “rim counties” who have completed or are enrolled in the Business Lab, a five-year program designed to bring new child care enterprises to underserved regions.

Four have been licensed to date, with another seven on track to be licensed in September. Another 13 are enrolled in a Lewiston cohort, with six budding businesses including one cooperative and a partnership.

While the CEI program is not the only route to getting a business off the ground, it’s bringing newcomers into a sector vulnerable to economic cycles and staffing and funding challenges, and where waiting lists have long been the norm. The situation worsened during the pandemic, especially early on when parents struggling financially pulled their kids out of programs and facilities. That contributed to a loss of 360,000 child care jobs nationwide or a third of the industry in early 2020, according to the IZA Institute of Labor Economics.

Despite the challenges, startup momentum in Maine’s child care sector remains strong, one microenterprise or nonprofit at a time.

“We are buoyed by the child care startup activity here in Maine,” says Cynthia Murphy, CEI’s senior program director for workforce solutions. Now is the “right time to act,” she says, noting new $2,000 state grants to start home-based care available through the end of this month — and, for those who are so inclined, free coaching through the CEI incubator. All those factors “are combining to provide a supportive onramp.”

In Maine so far this year, licenses have been issued to 70 new child care providers statewide, according to data compiled for Mainebiz by the state’s Department of Health and Human Services (see chart); that compares to 155 licenses issued in 2019 and 106 in 2020.

While heavily populated counties such as Cumberland and York rank among the highest for new child care providers licensed in 2021, rural counties such Knox, Lincoln and Piscataquis lag far behind with one new licensed provider each, though that’s where the need is greatest.

That typifies a nationwide crisis, with 700,000 parents of children under 5 years old leaving the labor force in 2020, including individuals who gave up their jobs because of child care issues, according to a January report by the Center for American Progress, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank.

“Hundreds of thousands of working parents will need reliable, affordable child care before they can even look for a job after the pandemic,” the report’s author concluded.

While public policies and support help a bit, private child care facilities — many of which are small, home-based operations — remain largely undercapitalized and often can’t afford to lower their fees or raise wages above the $11.42 U.S. median hourly rate. While the funding crunch has forced many providers to call it quits, others are starting to sprout up in their place as Mainers with new ventures aim to fill different niches.

Washington County newcomers

New child care providers in Maine include two in Washington County whose founders participated in CEI’s Business Lab, which set out to help launch five enterprises in the first year. The program, which covers business plans, access to capital and licensing, has funding for five years led by a federal grant.

Pembroke resident Tabitha Bennett joined the Business Lab’s first cohort last February, after she and her husband decided to open a child care center in a house they bought in 2019.

They came up with the idea when their pregnant daughter couldn’t find a provider for their future grandchild, prompting Bennett to think about returning to what she had done for many years in California when her husband was in the Marine Corps.

Since returning to Maine in 2005, she thought about getting back into child care for many years but the timing was never right until late 2019, when Bennett contacted CEI and found out about the Business Lab. After going through the program which provided coaching on a business plan and licensing requirements, Bennett opened Little Bird Child Care in August 2020, slightly delayed because of the pandemic. Licensed to care for a dozen kids ages six weeks to 12 years old, she currently has nine charges including grandson Lucas.

Despite tiring 12-hour days, she finds the work fulfilling, saying, “The 12-month-old I have, she came to me at eight weeks old, and it’s amazing to watch the development, to watch their personalities grow — for me that’s the rewarding piece.”

Her advice to others thinking about getting into child care: “Other than liking to be around the kids you really have to have good organizational skills, and there’s also a lot of paperwork.”

About 60 miles down the coast, in Milbridge, Juana Rodriguez-Vazquez is another Business Lab alumna who launched a bilingual childcare program in January at Mano en Mano, a nonprofit that provides support to farmworkers and Latinx communities by ensuring access to employment, housing and other services.

Rodriguez-Vazquez aims to complement those services through Rayitos de Sol, Spanish for “Little Sunbeams,” with three full-time staff members at the nonprofit’s offices looking after a dozen children from toddlers to preschoolers in a conference room; currently at capacity, the aim is to cap the number at 10 based on space. Eventually, the plan is to move to a bigger location nearby so the program can take more youngsters, including infants.

“I’m trying to fundraise — and I think that is going to be a while,” says Rodriguez-Vazquez, who immigrated to Maine with her parents from Mexico more than two decades ago to pick blueberries. Now a parent herself, she’s the lead teacher at Rayitos de Sol while serving as Mano en Mano’s interim executive director.

She’s happy with the nonprofit child care model, saying that gives her more leeway to pay employees better than a private business would, noting,“I think they deserve a living wage with benefits. There’s more opportunity for that as a nonprofit.”

As for the Rayitos de Sol name, she says: “I was thinking about things that have inspiration and wakefulness, like a sun, and thinking about how children have special rays of sunshine and beams out into the world.”

Photo / Courtesy Mano En Mano

In Milbridge, Juana Rodriguez-Vazquez reads to little ones enrolled in a bilingual child care program she launched at Mano en Mano, a nonprofit that provides support to farmworkers and Latinx communities.

Expansion is also in the cards for nonprofit child care providers including The Children’s Center in Portland, which is adding a second location in a leased 3,180-square foot building on Forest Avenue for infant care; and the Boys & Girls Club of Kennebec Valley, which is building a bigger facility in Gardiner that will allow it to expand its child care offerings.

Both are proceeding with plans despite fundraising and other hurdles during the pandemic.

Photo / Courtesy of the Childrens Center

The Children’s Center in Portland runs programs for ages 18 months to pre-Kindergarten.

“We were fortunate enough to get one of the PPP [Paycheck Protection Program] loans, so we’re hanging on, and we have some very dedicated parents,” says Kimberley Hoyt, executive director at the Children’s Center. “Families have been incredibly supportive.”

Ingrid Sanchfield, CEO of the Boys & Girls Club of Kennebec Valley, shares that view, saying she finds that people value child care more than they did pre-COVID.

“People now realize that without child care and when parents have to give up their jobs because they don’t have child care, our whole economic environment changes,” she says.

Small-business snags

Back in the small-business world, Iran-born Sholeh Misaghian of Happy Garden Family Childcare in Portland plans to use a $6,500 loan from international nonprofit Kiva to replace a fence and make repairs to her house to provide more space and a better quality experience. The center she opened in 2012 is licensed to serve up to 12 children and charges $60 a day.

She opened the business after a foot injury forced her to leave her job at Whole Foods, and she enjoys cooking daily meals for the little ones in her care: “I love fruits, vegetables and grains, so my fridge is full and they don’t have to bring anything,” she says.

But thinking back to when she started her business, she says it took her nine months to get her first clients, possibly because she’s an immigrant and she had to earn people’s trust.

“I understand that parents are careful,” she says, “but when kids come here I know what they need.”

Among failed startup tries, Willem Sandberg and Amanda Carbonneau faced different challenges in their attempt to launch a company called Lief (Dutch for “dear” or “loveable”) that was briefly in the Techstars Accelerator at Northeastern University’s Roux Institute in Portland.

After testing the concept for using technology to match families with nannies, the duo called off the venture after failing to secure the required business license.

Sandberg nevertheless is leaving the door open to revisit the idea at some point as he gets ready to start a new career chapter, saying, “I think it would be possible in another state, but in Maine right now I don’t think it would be possible … Perhaps one day.”

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