Joyful Spaces

About the Program

Joyful Spaces is a program designed to highlight the importance of quality ECE spaces by helping St. Louis-based ECE providers understand their own facilities’ needs and access funding. Leveraging our expertise in quality ECE facilities, IFF is offering three different programmatic components to enable ECE providers to make the best decisions to address their individual facility needs.

Through this program, providers will be able to:

Connect with and learn from Joyful Spaces Peer Champions: other ECE providers that offer support and guidance as providers seek to improve their facilities;
Access the Early Learning Facilities Self-Assessment Tool, a survey they can use to self-assess their facility’s quality and define their needs on an individual and ongoing basis; and
Apply for a unique loan and grant opportunity to fund improvements to their facilities.

The program includes:

Early Learning Facilities Self-Assessment Tool

As an ECE provider looking for funding to improve your facility, how can you ensure you understand your own needs? The Early Learning Facilities Self-Assessment Tool is a survey designed to empower providers to assess their own facility’s quality and define their individual needs. Created with inspiration from the Local Initiatives Support Corporation’s Family Child Care Space Checklist, this self-assessment survey will offer providers information that they can use to inform the proposals they will write to access capital opportunities

Click here to access the Early Learning Facilities Self-Assessment Tool and learn more about your facility.

NOTE: Currently, the Early Learning Facilities Self-Assessment Tool is accessible only to current or past participants of the Joyful Spaces program. For technical assistance, please email joyfulspaces@iff.org. To learn more about joining the program, please reach out to thawkins@iff.org.

Capital for ECE Providers

As ECE providers are better able to identify their organization’s specific needs, they will have access to funding opportunities to respond to those needs. To improve their facilities, providers can apply for capital through a unique loan and grant opportunity. Loans are not limited to classroom spaces.

To be eligible for these grant and loan opportunities, providers must meet the following requirements:

Be a licensed ECE provider for children ages 0-5, with preference given to providers serving children age 0-3;
Be the owner or operator of an ECE facility; and
Have the right to make changes to the facility (i.e., be the lease- or deed holder).

Applications have not yet opened — please check back later for updates.

Joyful Spaces Peer Champions

Joyful Spaces Peer Champions will offer guidance and support to help other providers access and use the Early Learning Facilities Self-Assessment Tool, as well as the loan and grant opportunities offered through the Joyful Spaces program. For more information on finding and connecting with a Peer Champion, you can reach out to Terek Hawkins, thawkins@iff.org.

Our Goal

After completing self-evaluation and accessing resources through the Joyful Spaces program, the goal is that ECE providers will be able to:

Recognize opportunities for facility improvements;
Engage with contractors to ensure they remain in control of facility improvements; and
Engage with funders to advocate for their organizations and understand the scope of improvements they are able to make.

Ready to learn more about your own facility's needs?

Use the Early Learning Facilities Self-Assessment Tool to assess your own facility’s quality and name your own needs for quality improvement.

Once you know what’s best for your facility, explore our grant and loan opportunities to see what might be right for you.

Self-Assessment Tool

Grant and Loan Opportunities

We as a cohort can ensure we are providing the best ECE facilities quality to our communities by making sure providers are at the table, helping create the standards and sharing information with their peers. Partnership and shared resources and knowledge is what is going to allow a program like this to flourish.

MacKenzie Grayson, Interim Executive Director, Gateway Early Childhood Alliance

Why are quality facilities important for providing quality early childhood education? And how can we ensure we’re providing the best ECE facilities possible?

Quality ECE facilities provide clear, research-based benefits to young children. According to a study we completed in 2019, improving certain aspects of an ECE facility, such as indoor air quality, temperature, ventilation, noise, lighting, classroom furnishing, and outdoor play areas, has been shown to positively impact children’s learning, development, and well-being. By investing in quality spaces, we are working to lay the foundation for positive early childhood experiences for St. Louis’s children.

Still, challenges remain: How can we create a definition of “quality facilities” that is helpful for providers? And when the opportunity for renovations arises, how can we ensure providers come to the table knowing what their organizations need?

These are the issues we aim to address through Joyful Spaces. Through this program, we will cultivate Champions who, with IFF support, can act as a trusted source of information. These Champions will help share IFF’s expertise in quality ECE facilities to enable providers to make the best decisions to address their businesses’ needs.

Special Thanks To

IFF actively participates with national colleagues through the National Children’s Facilities Network and the Bipartisan Policy Center on initiatives relating to ECE facilities. Such organizations include Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC), with whom IFF is partnering to test and refine facilities assessment tools in partnership with providers and in service to our shared mission of aligning programmatic and facilities quality and building facilities champions.

In St. Louis, we are striving to build a community of early childhood education (ECE) providers that can identify their needs and better prepare to access the funding necessary to improve their facilities.