By Javacia Harris Bowser | For The Birmingham Times
Even though 74 percent of Alabama families rely on a female breadwinner, Alabama has the 49th lowest female labor force participation rate in the nation. Research has shown that one of the key factors holding women back is lack of childcare.
Women’s Foundation of Alabama’s (WFA) now has an initiative in place to help address that problem. Advancing Alabama Childcare Accelerator is an 8-week program that focuses on the business side of owning a daycare facility with the goal of helping participants open centers that can offer accessible quality services for parents and competitive wages for the centers’ workers.
The accelerator is the brainchild of Zhaundra C. Jones, Vice President of Philanthropy and Learning at WFA, which seeks to accelerate economic opportunity for women by supporting legislation, research and philanthropy that promote gender and economic equity.
“Comprehensively, what we’re really trying to do is focus on access, affordability, and workforce,” Jones said. “I felt like an accelerator would allow us to design something that would pour into these business owners and if we could also give them access to much needed infrastructure capital, we could do our part of this puzzle of addressing the childcare gap in the state.”
Thanks to financial support from United Way of Central Alabama and other local and national partners, participants are also awarded grants to help with the launch of their centers.
Participants met weekly this past spring — sometimes online, sometimes in person at Polaris in Woodlawn — and each class was led by a different subject matter expert.
Kaitlee Daw, the Women’s Foundation of Alabama program officer who facilitated the accelerator, worked closely with the participants to ensure the program was providing the cohort with the resources they needed.
“I was meeting with them every week to make sure they felt it was a worthy use of time,” Daw said. “They were coming one to two nights a week and some were driving as far as Chilton County or Walker County to be there.”
Participants are working to open facilities in areas across Central Alabama including Bessemer, Center Point, Clanton, Hueytown and Parrish; and other places in Chilton, Jefferson, Shelby, and Walker counties.
Several are thinking outside the box, too. One entrepreneur in the program is developing a program centered on nature-based learning. Another is working on a program for kids with learning differences.
“They’re bringing really innovative programs to communities and still making them accessible,” Daw said.
Though classes were typically scheduled for only 90 minutes, they often lasted for two or three hours because the participants had so many questions.
“They were like sponges,” Daw said. “They wanted all the information they could get. They would come early, and they would stay late.”
For the first cohort, which began in April 2024, the selection committee had to choose 12 applicants from a pool of 55 candidates. They considered several factors when selecting the cohort participants.
“What’s your mission? What’s your goal here? What’s your background in childcare?” Daw said, listing some of the questions the selection committee had for applicants.
Jones explained, “We were really looking for folks that wanted to open a center and were pretty well positioned to do so within the next three to six months.”
During the program, participants also learned how to give pitch presentations, which they each delivered at their closing ceremony held in June.
Crystal May, owner of Little Royalties Child Development Center in Hueytown which is set to open in mid-September, is one of 12 members of the first cohort of this program.
May said she enjoyed learning about profit and loss statements, marketing strategies, and the importance of community engagement. “I know it was geared towards childcare, but what I learned in that class can take you on to any type of business,” she said.
May said she also appreciated learning about the importance of businesses having unique selling propositions and what makes her center stand out from others.
Learn more about the Women’s Foundation of Alabama at wfalabama.org
