When it comes to early-childcare, Boulder-resident Elizabeth Szymanski said there’s three key traits to look for - affordability, high-quality care and availability. Unfortunately, it’s difficult to find them all at once.
“[It's] the illusive trilogy for most parents,” she said.
Szymanski experienced the struggle firsthand while looking for childcare for her children, finding that most centers near her had a two year wait for care.
“I felt horrible, like I was behind the ball and not giving my child the best,” she said.
She shared her frustrations with Erica Mackey, a friend she met at the University of Oxford, who also had just had a child. The two polled other parents and began talking with childcare professionals and realized the problem was two-sided.
Parents couldn’t find adequate care that was available and childcare professionals felt as if they were underpaid, isolated and in a career with little upward mobility.
Szymanski and Mackey teamed up in 2017 to launch MyVillage, a solution that allows caretakers to more easily and effectively launch in-home preschool or childcare programs.
With MyVillage, educators receive front- and back-office tools like accounting, marketing and scheduling to make it easy to launch and run an in-home child care program. MyVillage also offers professional photography, a program website and a marketing toolkit to help caretakers maximize their program.
Szymanski said MyVillage provides caretakers with a business-in-a-box approach, allowing them to do what they do best, focus on the children.
After launching in 2017 in Colorado and Montana, the company has over 100 children in MyVillage programs. On the back of that success, the company announced a seed round of funding to expand the business.
Today, MyVillage closed a $5.95 million seed round, with investors Acumen, Jasmine Social Investments, Atlassian Foundation, Better Ventures, Gary Community Investments, Kairos, Red Sea Ventures and City Lights Capital.
“Acumen America invested in MyVillage because it has the team, strategy, determination and moral imagination to challenge the status quo of child care in the U.S.,” said Catherine Casey Nanda, Director of Acumen America. “The company has a scalable solution that will work in every state to solve the national childcare crisis.”
The company has 16 full-time employees, split between Colorado and Montana. With this raise, Szymanski said MyVillage will focus on growing its community and saturating its two existing markets before looking at expansion.
“We want to build a system that is going to solve this problem for the average American. This is not a model that has to be in Manhattan and San Francisco to work,” she said. “We definitely see this spreading across the U.S.”
In addition to providing software and marketing support, MyVillage provides childcare professionals with access to 10 child-led, research-backed curricula, through the Frontiers of Innovation program at the Center for the Developing Child at Harvard.
The third arm of the company’s mission is centered around career growth and mobility for childcare professionals. MyVillage has created a mentor network, allowing experienced professionals to get paid for sharing best practices, classroom tools and training with other area educators.
Welcome to MyVillage from MyVillage on Vimeo.
“MyVillage is committed to building a community of people who are earning a great living while providing high-quality, licensed, affordable childcare using their own homes as places of business,” said Mackey. “Each MyVillage location creates or supports a small business, allowing six to 12 parents - usually women - to return to the workforce with peace of mind.”
Szymanski said educators are making between 30 and 50 percent more using MyVillage and the company takes 10 percent of the revenue paid for childcare as part of the deal.
With a vision to have more than a million children in care in the next five to 10 years, Szymanski said MyVillage will have to work to shake the negative reputation associated with the home-childcare industry.
“The quality is all over the map. There are over a million licensed providers across the U.S., but how many are high quality?” she said. “We see family home-childcare providers as heroes and we’re helping to professionalize the industry.”
