Provides step-by-step guidance for preparing to develop a community child care center. Child care professionals and community organizations learn about the various roles a community-based organization can play in the development process; analyzing the market for child care services; recognizing key cost and revenue factors, including personnel and staff turnover, space, management, and facilities development costs, vacancy and bad debt, subsidy rates, and outside sources of income; testing financial viability in terms of both fixed and variable costs; preparing for management and personnel challenges, such as rapid response to shifting revenue and expense factors, staff recruitment, training, and retention, parent relations, and regulatory compliance; ensuring appropriate facilities design to accommodate indoor, outdoor, and sleeping spaces and bathrooms and changing areas as well as requirements for food storage, preparation, and service; evaluating potential child care operators; and developing a community relations strategy and securing necessary financing. A community organization considering starting a child care program should understand both community needs and its own capacity to support those needs. Community-based support of child care is an important step in improving the care of children, helping working families, and strengthening small businesses.
