How IFF is Helping Kids Win in Missouri by Supporting Local Solutions That Expand Access to Quality Child Care November 25, 2024

In communities across the country, the demand for early childhood education exceeds the number of slots available for children, leaving parents and caregivers to navigate a patchwork system that is unaffordable and challenging to access for far too many families. The effects of this are far reaching, with children missing out on early learning that’s integral to their development and success later in life, parents or other caregivers limited in their ability to participate in the workforce, providers struggling to make ends meet while providing quality care, and communities unable to reach their full potential.  

These challenges are particularly acute in Missouri, with approximately 200,000 children across the state living in a community considered a “child care desert” – where there are more than three children ages five and under for every licensed child care slot or no licensed slots at all. With deep experience supporting the expansion of access to quality early childhood education (ECE) in communities throughout the Midwest, IFF has in recent years worked in a variety of ways to help address this statewide crisis. 

Most recently, this included supporting Kids Win Missouri with a supply and demand analysis designed to identify the ECE needs that exist in 11 Missouri cities and counties participating in the organization’s Child Care & Early Education Community Planning Project. Founded in 2013 by a small group of children’s advocacy stakeholders, Kids Win Missouri is a coalition of organizations and individuals dedicated to improving the well-being of Missouri children. Among the coalition’s priorities is increasing access to high-quality ECE, health, and family support services for children in the state to ensure kindergarten readiness and positive lifelong outcomes – both through policy advocacy and direct work with stakeholders in the child care sector.  

As one of the project partners, IFF’s Community Data Insights team took the lead on data collection and analysis in the communities participating in the project (see sidebar for information about each location). And while this work included quantitative research that determined how many additional ECE seats are needed in each community, the affordability of existing child care, and more, it also collected extensive qualitative data from parents, child care providers, and employers to more fully understand the impact of the local ECE system on each group. Broadly, the findings of this research highlighted several challenges that prevent more children in Missouri from accessing quality ECE: 

• Long waitlists and high prices mean that access to quality ECE is both elusive and inequitable. While it’s often accepted that waiting lists and affordability challenges are caused by a limited supply of child care slots, these challenges are often the byproduct of a limited supply of quality ECE seats in a community. 
  
• For families who are able to enroll a child in an ECE program, the cost of care is a burden that can necessitate significant sacrifices like second jobs, home downsizing, or extreme budgeting measures.
  
• Employers see increased requests for time off or workers leaving jobs entirely because of the lack of quality ECE, but few offer child care benefits.
  
• Providers struggle to remain fully staffed, which reduces the quality of care and leads to operating below capacity – meaning that enrollment capacity often obscures the true capacity of the provider. 

“Because of the qualitative surveys that were used for this project, it’s given us stories that help connect the dots in the quantitative data,” says IFF Executive Director for the Southern Region Stephen Westbrooks. “One of the most important takeaways is that having access to child care in your community doesn’t mean that the challenges are solved, which is true in metro and rural areas. An available slot may not be the most convenient option for a family, requiring them to make sacrifices to avoid missing out entirely. That has a real impact on the local workforce and makes this an issue that can’t be solved only by creating more child care slots.”  

Tasked with using the data collected to strengthen local child care systems in those locations are community leadership teams that include parents, providers, business and community leaders, Head Start organizations, school district representatives, economic development officials, and other early childhood stakeholders. Along with the landscape analysis data, each community leadership team is considering cost modeling that quantified the true cost of care associated with improving families’ access to high-quality child care and fiscal mapping that identified public and private resources that currently support child care and early education or could in the future. These resources will inform each team’s development of ECE-focused community plans designed to chart a path in the months ahead toward a local child care and early education system that better meets the community’s needs. 

As this community-driven work moves forward, IFF continues to support the process. For the second cohort of communities participating in the project, IFF’s Community Data Insights team recently analyzed Census tract-level data to identify locations with similar ECE challenges, enabling learnings in a participating community to better inform the approach to systems change in locations with shared characteristics. In St. Joseph, MO, IFF’s Real Estate Solutions team is currently evaluating the local building stock and helping the community leadership team established for the Child Care & Early Education Community Planning Project determine what facilities are best suited to support early childhood education. As additional communities participating in the project advance in their planning processes, IFF’s real estate team will remain a resource that can be leveraged to navigate real estate and construction challenges.   

More broadly, IFF has also worked to ensure that existing child care providers in Missouri have the capital needed to continue serving their communities. For the past year, a backlog of child care subsidy payments from the state has forced ECE providers serving children from families with limited resources to wait months at a time for payments due to them. This has forced providers to lay off staff, delay equipment purchases, deplete savings accounts, and, in some cases, to limit their operating hours, among other measures designed to reduce operating costs. In recent months, Kids Win Missouri surveyed providers statewide to assess the impact of delayed subsidy payments, finding that 16 percent of the 310 providers who completed the survey were at risk of closing their doors permanently within three months because of delayed payments.  

In response, Kids Win Missouri turned to IFF to explore the possibility of offering small loans to providers most at risk of closing to help keep them afloat while waiting for state subsidy payments to arrive. With an existing “flex loan” product that provides flexible, low-cost financing up to $50,000 with an abbreviated closing process, IFF was well positioned to offer the loans to nonprofit providers. To ensure that for-profit providers also had easy access to the resources needed to continue operating, IFF leveraged a long-term relationship with Momentus Capital – a fellow Community Development Financial Institution (CDFI) that lends to for-profit entities. To date, this collaboration has provided four providers with loans that have helped them continue to serve children and families, with more loans possible in the immediate future.  

“IFF’s work with Kids Win Missouri is a really great example of how we’re able to be responsive to needs in the ECE sector and serve as a connector of capital to strengthen communities,” says Westbrooks. “The child care challenges that exist in Missouri are complex and layered, and there’s no easy fix or single solution that will solve every problem. We’re able to leverage a variety of tools to help meet pressing needs and advance the work that’s underway by Kids Win Missouri and other partners in the state working in this space to improve outcomes for children, parents, employers, and communities.”