Rural counties have options to bring childcare to their communities

Key Takeaways

America’s childcare crisis is exacerbated in rural communities, where local governments have limited funding and families have fewer options and farther distances to travel. 

However, rural areas have more unique strengths than their urban counterparts that they can leverage when building childcare, such as being more naturally collaborative and community-oriented, said Heidi Hagel-Braid, president of First Children’s Finance. Hagel-Braid launched the organization’s Rural Child Innovation Program over a decade ago. 

“Childcare in rural spaces requires leaning on ‘What is the very best about rural communities?’ They’re flexible, they’re innovative, they’re highly connected,” Hagel-Braid said.

Urban areas usually require more formality around establishing partnerships, whereas rural communities tend to have more of a willingness and capacity to collaborate, she said.

Seven hats

People in rural communities “walk into a room wearing seven hats. They may be a county commissioner, a superintendent — they’ve got connections all across the community,” Hagel-Braid said. “What is unique about rural communities is that people have multiple roles. They’re interconnected, so we really like playing to that strength and positioning rural communities as their own problem-solvers.”

The Rural Child Innovation Program helps rural counties create tailored action plans by gathering local data and engaging community leaders to inform where its childcare gaps are.

“You can’t open up a needs assessment for a county anywhere and say, ‘I know exactly what they need to do,’” Hagel-Braid said. “We’ve got some ideas, we know what has worked in other places, but the magic of it is allowing the community to lead their own process, and that’s what makes it sustainable.”

Economic impact

According to the Bipartisan Policy Center, the economic impact of the childcare gap in rural areas falls between $32.79 billion and $49.93 billion (the estimates represent the initial year’s economic loss plus the residual burden over the next 10 years). 

It’s important to frame childcare through the lens of economic development, because it’s essential to the health and vibrancy of a community and a strong rural economy, Hagel-Braid said. 

“We don’t expect the community pool or the library to be a revenue maker in our community,” Hagel-Braid said. “We invest in it because it provides a quality of life, an amenity to families who live here, and I think positioning childcare as a part of the infrastructure [is important]. 

“What childcare does is so much bigger than what the library or pool is, but we sort of have this idea that it should exist and succeed on its own without any public investment, and so I think that is a really great way to continue to move that conversation forward at a community level. If you really want people to live and work in your community, making sure childcare is available is key to the survival of those rural communities.”

Transportation

A 2021 Bipartisan Policy Center survey on rural childcare found that parents in rural communities were significantly more likely to drive more than 10 miles to access childcare than parents in suburban and urban areas, and only 26% were able to find childcare within five miles. 

Rural areas also often have limited public transportation, which can make access even more difficult.

Redlands Christian Migrant Association (RCMA), a nonprofit providing childcare and early education to the children of farm workers and low-income rural families across 21 Florida counties, operates its own bus system, providing transportation not only to its childcare and schools, but also to other services, such as health appointments. 

Home-based childcare

Because rural communities have limited childcare options and further distances between childcare centers, rural families are significantly more likely to use home-based childcare than their urban counterparts. Across the country, the number of licensed home-based childcare programs has been decreasing since 2005, which can partly be attributed to fewer people having the financial means to become homeowners, according to Hagel-Braid. 

Home-based childcare programs “used to be one of the lowest barrier businesses to start, but it’s incumbent on you owning a home, so as we see home ownership rates shifting, that is shifting who can start these businesses,” Hagel-Braid said.

If local governments want to incentivize individuals to create home-based childcare programs, they need to provide education and funding, according to Isabel Garcia, RCMA’s executive director and a member of the National Advisory Committee on Rural Health and Human Services.

“You almost really have to start with helping them design a business model,” Garcia said. “‘What is the contract process? What is the licensing requirements? How do you manage your money?’ I also think there need to be startup funds available, because there’s a lot you have to do — if you don’t have a fence outside your house, you need to put one up for children, so that itself is already a big expense.”

Stanislaus County, Calif.’s In-Home Child Care Expansion Project, a 12-week cohort program that walks participants through the necessary steps of launching home child-care businesses and provides the startup funds to do so, has already created 536 licensed childcare spots and is on track to help launch roughly 230 home-based childcare businesses in the county over the course of two years. 

Training a workforce

The Community Action Corporation of South Texas, serving 16 counties, works to get more childcare providers licensed in rural areas. The organization’s trainer prepares individuals for a state credential exam and works with high schools and colleges to create a Child Development Associate Credential program, that would function like other certification processes where participants enter the workforce after graduating, said April Anzaldua, director of community services and development.

Funding

First Children’s Finance worked with one county that initially planned to create a childcare center, but didn’t have the funding to do so, so instead the county set up a pool of forgivable loans to start family childcare businesses. 

“What they ended up doing was creating the same amount of spaces for $50,000 instead of a probably multimillion-dollar price tag of one childcare center that may not have been able to survive and sustain itself,” Hagel-Braid said. “They created the same number of slots with a significantly less amount of money with greater flexibility, and it was dispersed across a geographic area that allowed for people to access it who live in different places across the county.” 

The childcare crisis can feel like an overwhelming obstacle, especially for rural communities that don’t have funding to build out expensive solutions, but small initiatives and progress can be really meaningful, Hagel-Braid said. 

“I think communities can get really overwhelmed by the size and scale of the issue,” Hagel-Braid said. “… But, just taking small steps forward can create momentum in your community … because there’s immense power in a rural community, and harnessing that really can be transformational.”