Greater Minnesota Child Care Capacity Partnerships

The Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development (DEED) has ongoing partnerships with the six Minnesota Initiative Foundations to support community planning efforts that sustain and increase access to child care in their respective regional service areas. The Minnesota Initiative Foundations are independent entities that are built to respond to regional needs and opportunities by collaborating with community partners to provide early childhood services, and serving their regions with unique grants, business loans, leadership programs and donor services. Each of the Foundations has written a funding plan to serve the needs of their region to build capacity in child care, some proposed solutions being free training, grants to providers, loans and community planning. The six Minnesota Initiative Foundations are: the Initiative Foundation serving central Minnesota; Northland Foundation serving northeast Minnesota; Northwest Foundation serving the northwestern counties; Southern Initiative Foundation serving the southeastern part of the state; Southwest Initiative Foundation serving southwest Minnesota; and the West Central Foundation serving the western central counties. Going forward, these partnerships will be coordinated under the Office of Child Care Community Partnerships.

In the most recent legislative appropriation, each organization will receive approximately $1.1 million dollars in SFY 2024 and SFY 2025 to support the following four objectives:

1. Facilitate planning processes for rural communities resulting in a community solution action plan that guides decision making to sustain and increase the supply of quality child care in the region to support economic development.
2. Engage the private sector to invest local resources to support the community solution action plan and ensure quality child care is a vital component of additional regional economic development planning processes;
3. Provide locally based training and technical assistance to rural child care business owners individually or through a learning cohort. Access to financial and business development assistance must prepare child care businesses for quality engagement and improvement by stabilizing operations, leveraging funding from other sources, and fostering business acumen that allows child care businesses to plan for and afford the cost of providing quality child care; and
4. Recruit child care programs to participate in quality rating and improvement measurement programs. The Minnesota Initiative Foundations must work with local partners to provide low-cost training, professional development opportunities, and continuing education curricula. The Minnesota Initiative Foundations must fund, through local partners, an enhanced level of coaching to rural child care providers to obtain a quality rating through measurement programs.