Solving Missouri's Child Care Puzzle

The Missing Piece: Central office support

A new business-oriented approach to addressing Missouri’s chronic child care crisis is the focus of a report just published by west central Missouri’s New Growth Women’s Business Center with University of Missouri Extension. The report’s findings contribute to local and state efforts to address the significant economic, community, and family challenges that now exist for Missouri with too few early child care and education options.

The report, Solving Missouri’s Child Care Puzzle, advocates for a shared services approach to helping the state’s mostly small and home-based child care businesses survive and thrive in a highly regulated and under-resourced industry. Shared services, or central office support to small and independent businesses, is the missing piece in the state’s multi-faceted work to stabilize and increase the number of early child care and education providers in Missouri.

Economic imperative.

Solving Missouri’s Child Care Puzzle offers insights and examples from a growing national shared services movement in early child care and education. It also provides the context of Missouri initiatives and investments that local and state leaders could align and advance for development of shared service support to small and home-based child care providers.

Shared services is a critical approach for local and state leaders to consider as families struggle to find and access child care.

A recent Missouri Independent investigation confirmed that nearly half of all Missouri children 5 years and younger live in childcare deserts; areas with few if any child care options. This has a ripple effect for businesses and communities. Missouri misses out on $1.35 billion annually in economic opportunity due to severe child care challenges that the state’s workforce faces, according to the Missouri Chamber of Commerce and Industry.

Central office support

Solving Missouri’s Child Care Puzzle highlights the fact that Missouri’s mostly small and home-based early childhood education providers need help.

They need the kind of collective buying power, back-office functions,and financial management assistance that are common in the business world. For example, corporations provide satellite locations with central office support that ranges from procurement of supplies to assistance with regulatory compliance paperwork.

Such shared services in child care involve hub organizations working with independent early childhood education providers to access similar time and money-saving support. Efforts to build such shared services alliances around the country are producing results: More sustainable and high-quality child care providers.

Among examples in the report are stories of family-based providers in Texas expanding their businesses, child care providers in Wisconsin accessing millions of dollars in tax credits and grant funding, and businesses logging cost savings as much as $6,000 in one quarter through discount purchases available through shared services alliances.  

Learn More

Read and download Solving Missouri’s Child Care Puzzle from the New Growth Women’s Business Center.

Look for or sign up for further informational opportunities. The New Growth Women’s Business Center and report collaborator University of Missouri Extension will host upcoming webinars about shared service solutions in childcare. The webinars will feature on-the-ground experience from around the country.

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New Growth is a rural community development corporation that provides farm and non-farm business development services and microfinancing. New Growth also builds innovative solutions to stubborn community and economic development challenges. Its New Growth Transit program provides on-demand rides in remote rural areas through community partnerships and an extensive, supported volunteer driver network.

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