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REGION – Coastal Enterprises, Inc. (CEI) is offering three concurrent virtual courses of its Child Care Business Lab, helping entrepreneurs start new, quality child care businesses in under-served areas of Maine. Applications are due on February 5, 2021 at 5 p.m. EST. The applications and more information can be accessed by going to https://www.ceimaine.org/advising/childcare/. The program begins in March.

The Child Care Business Lab is an intensive cohort-based program that gives entrepreneurs the tools to start a successful small business, helps them refine their child care/early childhood education philosophy and guides them through the licensing process. Designed as an experiential leadership opportunity, the Child Care Business Lab will provide participants with a blueprint for a high-quality, financially viable nonprofit, for-profit, co-op or shared model child care business.

The six-month program consists of ten 2½ hour workshops conducted live via Zoom, 25 hours of on-demand online learning sessions, bi-weekly one-on-one meetings with a business advisor and personalized coaching sessions with a child care mentor.

Two of the 2021 cohorts will focus on child care businesses in Maine’s Rim Counties (Washington, Aroostook, Piscataquis, Penobscot, Somerset, Franklin, and Oxford), while a third cohort will focus on child care businesses for non-native English families in the Tree Streets Neighborhood in downtown Lewiston, which faces unique challenges around child care including securing appropriate facilities. The Rim Counties cohorts are made possible with funding from the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services and the Bill and Joan Alfond Foundation. The Lewiston cohort was made possible with funding from the John T. Gorman Foundation and aims to expand the number of slots for child care in the Tree Streets Neighborhood by 50 in 2021.

For families and single parents who want or need to work, having access to affordable, high-quality child care is essential to working full time. Across Maine, only 26.5 percent of children up to 14 years-old (55,000 children) are in paid child care, indicating that many parents are shuttling children between family and friends and/or working part-time jobs. Nearly 152,000 Maine children up to 14 years-old (74 percent) may require paid child care services, indicating significant unmet need.

This need has only increased with the COVID-19 pandemic. Existing centers closed or were forced to reduce capacity, schools have gone full or partially remote, and working parents, primarily mothers, have had to make difficult decisions about how much they would be able to work. In Maine, a majority of those collecting state unemployment aid in September – 55 percent – were women, according to demographic data from the Department of Labor. Child care and health concerns are the top issues raised by jobless Mainers that call into a hotline staffed by Maine Equal Justice Partners.

 

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