A new financial resiliency accelerator for early childhood education providers in Arlington launched last week, boosted by grants from Amazon.com Inc. and PNC Bank's philanthropy arm.
The accelerator comes from 20 Degrees, a D.C. management consulting company that works with nonprofits and child care providers to increase income and investment. The company partnered with the Arlington Chamber of Commerce to provide a training series on business and financial skills, as well as stipends for the 25 participants, most of whom are women, to support their small businesses.
The workforce implications of supporting early childhood education providers are two-pronged, said Sara Gibson, CEO and co-founder of 20 Degrees. First, working parents need quality child care and education for their children; second, providers need quality training.
“Because the fundamentals of child care have shifted, because where people work has shifted, one of the needs we’re addressing is enrollment,” Gibson said in an interview with the Washington Business Journal. “When you have high-quality operators, they just need to find new families in new ways.”
Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) granted $25,000 and the PNC Foundation (NYSE: PNC) gave $12,500 to the accelerator, Gibson said.
When Arlington established its child care initiative in 2017, the jurisdiction only had capacity for a little more than half (55%) of the county’s children under the age of 5. Child care responsibilities and their coinciding workforce effects often fall more heavily on women, a trend exacerbated by labor shifts during the pandemic.
The financial resiliency accelerator from 20 Degrees got its first test with two cohorts in Montgomery County in 2020. This latest installation is the organization’s first in Virginia, Gibson said. In addition to skills training, the program offers one-on-one coaching for the providers, some of whom teach at clients’ homes while others operate out of early childhood education centers.
The program, which provides training around record-keeping, staffing, hiring, cash flow and other business fundamentals, as well as a $150 stipend, is free for the participants. The program had its first virtual session Nov. 4, with two additional sessions to follow.
