Cultivating St. Louis’ Next Generation of Community Leaders at Urban Sprouts Child Development Center July 29, 2024

Ellicia Lanier smelled paprika and turmeric the first time she stepped inside 6757 Olive Street. It was 2016, and she was searching for a permanent home for Urban Sprouts, the early childhood education (ECE) center she co-founded seven years earlier. Located in University City, MO, the long, single-story structure had belonged to the McCarthy Spice and Blends company. And while the fragrance was a nice benefit, it was the facility’s location that convinced Lanier it was the ideal place for Urban Sprouts to lay down permanent roots in the community just west of the Delmar Loop in St. Louis after outgrowing two leased locations nearby.

“If we were going to be in the community, we wanted to repurpose a building and put Urban Sprouts in a space that’s accessible to people,” Lanier recalls. “I’ve never not seen beauty in our communities, but oftentimes people think we should have to leave our communities to get what we deserve. Having Urban Sprouts right here in this location meant that our neighbors could get the child care their families deserved right at home. And this particular spot is also easily accessible by multiple public transit routes, so we’re accessible to so many even beyond this community.”

Today, the Olive Street building is full not of spices but the sounds of more than 120 children ages 5 and under who attend Urban Sprouts and benefit from a unique educational model that’s like few others in the state of Missouri. IFF helped the child development center purchase the building in 2016, offering real estate support, financing, and assistance in accessing nearly $2 million from the federal government’s New Markets Tax Credits (NMTC) program.

But Lanier’s relationship with IFF extends beyond a state-of-the-art child care center in the old McCarthy Spice building alone, touching on nearly every facet of IFF’s ECE work in St. Louis.

Urban Sprouts’ growth — and growing pains

An experienced educator and ECE advocate, Lanier founded Urban Sprouts alongside her long-time business partner Andrea Barragan.

“As a mom, I wanted to create a place that I felt was needed and necessary in my own community,” shares Lanier, who had experience as an educator at a corporate office’s ECE center in West County, an affluent and largely white portion of St. Louis County. “I would come back to my own neighborhood, and the child care that I was giving other children in a corporate setting was not what was available to me as a parent. The community needed a place where children could have diverse educators that look like them, with similar social and economic experiences to their own.”

Urban Sprouts’ first facility, a former gas station that the organization leased, initially served 30 children. Growing rapidly, enrollment soon spiked to 50 children, necessitating a second leased location in Olivette, MO. Despite the expansion, demand continued to outpace Urban Sprouts’ capacity.

As Urban Sprouts grew, Lanier and Barragan faced new challenges. Earning accreditation, paying degreed educators, offering healthy meals — all the things that contribute to high-quality care — also drove up the cost of business. By 2015, with several hundred families on the waiting list, Urban Sprouts was in danger of pricing out the very families it opened to serve.

That’s when Lanier connected with IFF.

Established as a for-profit business, Urban Sprouts wasn’t well positioned initially to benefit from IFF’s support. But after meeting and consulting with IFF’s team in St. Louis, Lanier and Barragan decided to convert Urban Sprouts to a nonprofit — putting the organization on a path to sustainability.

Converting to a nonprofit allowed Lanier and Barragan to take advantage of financing through IFF and the NMTC program, providing the capital needed to purchase Urban Sprouts’ facility. By swapping out two leased facilities for one building, Urban Sprouts was able to stop paying to maintain spaces they didn’t own and instead invest in a permanent home where the organization could build equity.

Beyond the financing needed to acquire and renovate the facility, IFF provided real estate consulting to help Urban Sprouts plan for and renovate its permanent home, while also helping Lanier and Barragan hone their business model. This comprehensive support helped Urban Sprouts open the doors to its permanent home in 2017.

A teaching facility

Today, Urban Sprouts serves nearly twice the number of children it could in its two previous spaces combined. The 15,000-square-foot facility on Olive Street includes many different types of indoor and outdoor learning spaces, including three large classrooms (one each for infants, toddlers, and pre-kindergartners).

The facility is optimized to support the Reggio Emilia approach to ECE, which employs the learning environment as a tool for education. On top of traditional classrooms, Urban Sprouts features spaces that encourage children to follow their curiosity, such as a clay and kiln-firing room, water rooms, light and shadow rooms, an outdoor piazza, and a garden/greenhouse where children learn about plants and staff grow food for the facility’s in-house kitchen.

To support the diverse group of children in its care, Urban Sprouts employs a mixed-payment model, where roughly 70 percent of students attend on scholarship and the remaining 30 percent attend through private pay. While difficult to implement, the model makes high-quality ECE more accessible to families who can’t afford to pay full price for child care.

Amplifying the organization’s positive impact in the community, Urban Sprouts also seeks to bolster its families’ and staff’s financial stability by promoting wealth management for its staff, which Lanier credits for 10 of her teachers being able to buy homes in the last three years.

For Lanier, providing more than quality ECE alone is essential. “We’ve leaned into the holistic part of caring for the family, so that when they leave us they have a better start,” she says. Toward that end, Urban Sprouts measures success in the number of families who have moved off of Head Start, the federal ECE subsidy program.

With IFF’s help, Urban Sprouts is now expanding into three adjacent parcels, which will add 12,000 square feet to the Urban Sprouts campus and allow the program to enroll more than 50 additional children. IFF conducted feasibility analyses for the project and is serving as the owner’s representative for a portion of the current facility buildout, supplemented by a loan to finance renovations. Earlier this year, Lanier also participated in Joyful Spaces, a pilot program that helped educate ECE providers in the St. Louis area about the importance of quality ECE facilities and how to develop them. Lanier was one of six Peer Champions assisting other providers seeking to renovate their spaces and acted as an ambassador between ECE providers and IFF.

Working for systems-level change

While Urban Sprouts’ growth has expanded access to high-quality ECE in the communities it serves, Lanier recognizes that no single provider is equipped to single-handedly meet the demand for child care in Missouri — or to reform an inequitable system where many Black, Latine, immigrant, and working-class communities struggle to access quality care.

Still committed to addressing these challenges, however, Lanier engages in advocacy for Missouri’s ECE educators. She’s done some of this work with IFF. In 2019, IFF’s Community Data Insights team published The First Step to Equity, a report studying St. Louis’ ECE infrastructure, gaps in service, and possible policy remedies, for which Lanier served on the report’s advisory committee.

In St. Louis, she campaigned for Proposition R, a successful 2020 ballot initiative raising an additional $2.3 million annually for the city’s ECE services. She also campaigned for Missouri to raise state ECE subsidy rates to match the true cost of care.

Her advocacy extends into how she connects to philanthropy in St. Louis. “I didn’t have the social capital to raise all this money,” she reflects. “I was raised by a Black woman; the way in which we view America is very different, and the way in which we get to access America is very different.”

But rather than contorting to fit racial and gender expectations, she leans into her own authenticity. IFF’s Executive Director of the Southern Region Stephen Westbrooks, who has worked with Lanier since day one, has seen this firsthand.

“Ellicia does it her way,” he says. “She is unapologetically Ellicia, and she’s unapologetically a Black woman from St. Louis. She’s not trying to pander to philanthropy and white St. Louisans. She’ll say, ‘Here’s who I am, here’s what we’re doing, here’s how we’re doing it. Will you support us?’ And she’s gotten some amazing support. She’s been able to take the fight where it needs to go and be who she is.”

Lanier is committed to telling uncomfortable truths. “That’s what my aunt always told me: ‘Lies make people comfortable. Lies will sugarcoat it, Band-Aid it — but the truth exposes things; it brings things to light,’” she says. “For us to ever live in a just world, we can’t be okay with the way things are. I don’t want to leave moments of opportunity behind because I was afraid to move past what people are comfortable with.”

For Lanier and Urban Sprouts, all this work — at the systems-level and in the day-to-day work of the organization — is to set up children in the community for long-term success.

“We know that children need a good start to be a good citizen and a good human — not even a citizen of St. Louis, but a citizen of the world,” she says. “To see children that came through your early childhood center going to college, and working, and doing all these things, is so rewarding.”