Ralph C. Wilson, Jr. Foundation Invests more than $1 Million to Support Small Home-Based Childcare Providers in Western New York
The Ralph C. Wilson, Jr. Foundation recently announced more than $1 million in grants to support small, home-based childcare providers through the “Small Grants for Small Children” program. The funds were granted to four Western New York-based community foundations to cover nine counties across the region.
“Childcare is essential now more than ever,” said Amber Slichta, vice president of programs at the Ralph C. Wilson, Jr. Foundation. “Small home-based childcare providers rarely qualify for support and in turn, do not view themselves as small businesses. It’s important that we continue to fill these gaps and uplift these providers, as they are often the only option for working families in rural areas and urban neighborhoods.”
Grants were distributed to the following:
- Cattaraugus Region Community Foundation – $50,000 for Cattaraugus County
- Chautauqua Region Community Foundation – $100,00 for Chautauqua County
- Community Foundation for Greater Buffalo – $516,000 for Erie, Niagara, Wyoming and Allegany counties
- Rochester Area Community Foundation – $384,000 for Genesee, Monroe and Orleans counties
These foundations will work with local child care resource and referral agencies to distribute grants of up to $2,000 to nearly 525 small home-based childcare providers across Western New York. Childcare providers will have flexibility to use the funds as they best see fit to help them re-open or remain open to continue to provide high quality care to children.
“As we begin the reopening process here in Cattaraugus County, childcare will be more important than ever,” said Cattaragus Region Community Foundation Executive Director Karen Niemic Buchheit. “Many people will be returning to work for the first time in months to provide for their families, and they need dependable, safe childcare to make that possible. It is a crucial piece of how we can begin to move into the ‘new normal’ for our community.”
“We are so pleased to partner with the Ralph C. Wilson, Jr. Foundation on this important grant,” said Tory Irgang, Chautauqua Region Community Foundation executive director. “Their quick response to the needs of childcare providers in making this funding available was amazing. These are dollars are helping our childcare providers remain viable during the most challenging circumstances they have ever faced.”
“As we move toward COVID-19 recovery efforts in our community, these childcare grants made possible by the generosity of the Ralph C. Wilson, Jr. Foundation will make a big impact in Western New York,” said Betsy Constantine, Executive Vice President, Community Foundation for Greater Buffalo. “The regional collaboration between the foundations and the Childcare Resource Networks will ensure that we can support childcare providers during a critical time of building back in our community.”
“In-home childcare has always been in demand. But the pandemic has more families looking at home-based childcare as a way to minimize their children’s exposure to large numbers of other children and adults,” says Jennifer Leonard, the Rochester Area Community Foundation’s president and CEO. “This sudden need by families during an already difficult time has placed a great deal of strain on home care providers who want to help.”
During the pandemic, childcare providers have been struggling to accommodate the changing needs of families and balance this with their own needs for reliable income and fears of being exposed to COVID-19. Most challenged are the small home-based childcare programs that serve between three and twelve children. Currently, they are ineligible for many of the Federal and State supports available to small businesses. This is exacerbated by the fact that most programs supporting small business do not have childcare on their radar.
This program is modeled after the long-standing Small Grants to Small Children developed by the Adirondack Foundation.
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The Cattaraugus Region Community Foundation is the area’s supportive, responsive and trusted community foundation. Established in 1994, CRCF is growing good by connecting donors to the causes they care about most in the region. Grants from the foundation support many areas, including education, scholarships, health care, the arts, community development, human service, and youth development. To learn more, call (716) 301-CRCF (2723), email foundation@cattfoundation.org, or visit online at www.cattfoundation.org. CRCF is also on Facebook (facebook.com/cattfoundation) and Twitter (@CattFoundation).
The Chautauqua Region Community Foundation is a tax-exempt, grantmaking organization that serves the charitable purpose of benefitting the people of the Chautauqua Region. Since 1978, the Foundation has helped donors make a positive impact on their community. In 2019, the Foundation awarded $3,385,723 to the community in the form of grants and scholarships.
For more than a century, the Community Foundation for Greater Buffalo has enhanced and encouraged long-term philanthropy in the Western New York community. A 501 (c)(3) organization, the Community Foundation’s mission is: Connecting people, ideas and resources to improve lives in Western New York. Established in 1919, the Community Foundation has made the most of the generosity of individuals, families, foundations and organizations who entrust charitable assets to the Community Foundation’s care. Learn more at cfgb.org.
The Ralph C. Wilson, Jr. Foundation is a grantmaking organization dedicated primarily to sustained investment in the quality of life of the people of Southeast Michigan and Western New York. The two areas reflect Ralph C. Wilson, Jr.’s devotion to his hometown of Detroit and greater Buffalo, home of his Buffalo Bills franchise. Prior to his passing in 2014, Mr. Wilson requested that a significant share of his estate be used to continue a life-long generosity of spirit by funding the Foundation that bears his name. The Foundation has a grantmaking capacity of $1.2 billion over a 20-year period, which expires January 8, 2035. This structure is consistent with Mr. Wilson’s desire for the Foundation’s impact to be immediate, substantial, measurable and overseen by those who knew him best.
A Message to our Grantees About COVID‑19
Dear friends and partners,
In accordance with guidance and recommendations from the Centers for Disease Control and the State of Michigan to mitigate community spread of COVID-19, the Ralph C. Wilson, Jr. Foundation has closed its physical office in Detroit effective today.
As the coronavirus situation unfolds we will continue to review potential reopening on an ongoing basis, which would happen, at earliest on April 6th. In addition, the Foundation is imposing a ban on travel and all in-person meetings through April 20th, at which point we will reassess.
During this time our staff will remain active and committed to our work and communities, and will be accessible via email, phone and remote meeting technologies. We will also continue to process grant payments through our usual means, and organizations may continue to apply for grants through our Fluxx system. Grantee updates related to report deadlines and other related adjustments can continue to be shared via the Fluxx system for active grants.
We want to assure each of our grantees that we understand your work will undoubtedly be affected during this time, including, but certainly not limited to, the cancelation of events/convenings and other necessary program delivery changes and adjustments that will need to occur. And, many of you are working through very real concerns about how this situation will affect your day-to-day operations. Our staff recognizes these concerns and will have flexibility in working with each of you around potential impacts.
Your service and commitment to our communities is critical, especially during these times of uncertainty and crisis. We are grateful for each of you and know that our communities will rise to the challenges that will undoubtedly face us in the coming weeks and months.
We will continue to monitor this evolving situation and, of course, work with our partners on how we can best serve our communities.
Sincerely,
David Egner
President and CEO
Ralph C. Wilson, Jr. Foundation
What We Discovered in “Startup Nation”
Lavea Brachman, Vice President of Programs, Ralph C. Wilson, Jr. Foundation
This May, the Ralph C. Wilson, Jr. Foundation sponsored a trip to explore social entrepreneurship in Israel. Dubbed the “Startup Nation,” Israel’s entrepreneurism has become part of its DNA, sprung from several unique factors, and leading to an unprecedented number of successful high-tech and other businesses.
To enrich the Foundation’s thinking around its grantmaking in Entrepreneurship & Economic Development, we gathered a delegation of partners and grantees from our two regions to join us in exploring how Israelis are leveraging this entrepreneurial spirit and tying it to tangible business creation and skills training activities — connecting underserved and marginalized populations with economic opportunity. We visited with Israeli leaders working to help those living at the economic margins of Israeli society – including Arab-Israelis, Ethiopian Jewish immigrants, ultra-Orthodox religious Jewish community members, and women – start businesses and gain employable skills that allow them to live productive and self-supporting lives.
Our visit focused on innovative organizations creating on-ramps for populations who lack equal access to education, jobs and economic opportunity. The trip proved immensely rewarding as the group learned about unexpected similarities between Israel and our two regions — providing thought-provoking takeaways and allowing for rich learning exchanges.
Only 71 years old as a nation, Israel has diversified dramatically in the last several decades, transforming from a homogenous population composed primarily of European Jews to a country of Jewish immigrants from countries across the Middle East and Ethiopia, as well as a rising Arab population and other smaller religious sects. These culturally and religiously diverse groups have led to marginalized populations and increasing challenges of poverty and isolation, mirroring many of the same challenges in the Detroit and Buffalo regions. As a Jewish-American who has visited Israel in the past, the trip was eye-opening to me, as it exposed often overlooked challenges facing Israeli society as well as surfacing fixes that everyday Israelis are developing in response to these challenges. The group also visited areas under the Palestinian Authority — the city of Ramallah and other parts of the West Bank — to understand the acute economic crises facing Palestinians.
Israeli Social Action Programs with Economic Benefits
The programs we encountered ranged from think tanks and business affinity organizations promoting sector connectivity to grassroots organizations helping individuals to develop skills to work and start businesses. As examples, the group visited the site of a nonprofit, called Unistream, teaching entrepreneurial skills to ultra-Orthodox Jewish (a community that has traditionally opted out of participation in the Israeli economy) high schoolers. Unistream, whose mission is to improve Israeli society by training and mentoring underprivileged teens in entrepreneurship and leadership, is bringing its model this year to a US high school (in Rochester, NY) with majority underprivileged students, in partnership with a Rochester foundation.
We had lunch at a Tel Aviv restaurant owned and operated by Ethiopian women and heard stories about their challenging trek to Israel from Ethiopia (in the 1980s and 1990s), and the discrimination they encountered once they arrived. The female CEO of Olim Beyahad (translated into “Rising Up Together”), an Ethiopian immigrant, spoke about the organization’s success in dramatically increasing the employment rate of Ethiopian Israelis through multiple set of tools, including advocacy, image-changing and skills training.
During our visit, we also heard moving stories of women from religious communities whose lives were changed because they were taught the skills and received mentoring to start small businesses, like catering and textiles, and were provided microloans in order to launch and develop income generating micro-businesses — thus giving them the tools to escape poverty or dangerous domestic situations.
Key Takeaways from the trip for our Southeast Michigan & Western New York Group
The educational tour was inspiring and transformative in so many ways, with three major takeaways highlighted here:
1. Positive Israeli Energy and Can-Do Attitude: Risk-taking and problem-solving are integral parts of Israeli culture across the entrepreneurial, societal and governmental fronts. Israeli culture recognizes the economic benefits of social action — driven by a potent mix of pragmatic/idealistic factors: (1) Existential necessity. As we were told repeatedly, Israel is a “complicated country existing in a complex neighborhood.” Thus, the country’s isolation means its very survival is dependent upon constant innovation and self-reliance which in turn relies upon innovative approaches to seemingly intractable problems, like inventing an ongoing source of fresh water or bringing vast desert areas to life, to farm and generate a reliable food supply. (2) Economic need and demographics. Israel’s economic success, with proliferating tech companies, are resulting in more tech jobs than Jewish Israelis can fill, for instance. With Arabs representing 20% of the Israeli population, they and the other marginalized populations (e.g. women from all sectors, recent immigrants, Orthodox Jews who have opted out of the economy) are a critical talent pipeline and must be mainstreamed. (3) Tikkun olam (translated, “repairing the world”), the Jewish value of doing good deeds, underlies and animates the spirit of these approaches. This leads me to ask, how do we scale up a similar mix of existing elements in our two regions, and what would it take to replicate?
2. A “systems approach” embraces cross-over between high-tech and grassroots organizations. Cross-fertilization between the small grassroots, social action organizations and the high-tech organizations in Israel is engineered through connector organizations that help bind together different parts of the system. For instance, PresenTense, which promotes social change through entrepreneurship, offers workshops and training programs aimed at individuals in marginalized populations, such as Israeli Arabs and Ultra-Orthodox Jewish men and women — thus giving the 85% of the population, that are not part of the prosperous tech scene, the opportunity to connect to the “startup nation” scene, using entrepreneurship as personal and economic empowerment. Intermediaries, such as Start-Up Nation Central, are collecting data or acting as a central data base (acting as “honest brokers” and “information aggregators”). Another broad-scale organization, the Israel Innovation Institute — a “think and do tank” working across business sectors — enables technology to address needs in real life settings and has introduced the concept of an “innovation manager.” In other ways, mandatory military service in Israel levels the playing field among people from all backgrounds and forges a network that transcends sectors of Israeli society.
3. Think big. The group found commonality with the Israeli idealism to “think big” and identified with it. The folks we met came across as ambitious about overcoming Israel’s societal challenges and confident about developing solutions. Ironically, Israel’s very challenges (its tiny geography — not much bigger than the state of New Jersey — and the external, existential threats it faces) coupled with the drive for economic sustainability fuel its idealism and “can do” attitude. We visited the Arab town of Kafr Qasem near Tel Aviv, where Tsofen — a nonprofit founded in 2008 by Arab and Jewish high-tech and civic leaders — facilitates the movement of Arab citizens into high tech firms through a combination of targeted training programs and expanding high tech businesses into Arab communities, seeming to transcend cultural and religious boundaries. Similarly, in our communities, the drive to overcome deep-seated societal and racial challenges brought members of our group to our individual jobs, on the journey to Israel and drives “thinking big” — a dominate theme of the trip. The group wondered how we can promote more widespread ambitious thinking.
In our final debrief, the group wondered out loud how to “bottle” this energy and sense of urgency and how to replicate the systems approach. Our regions exhibit astonishing parallels. For instance, a comparable sense of urgency drives our regions to sustain recovery and keep up with the rapidly changing 21st century world economies. Economic sustainability can only occur if all of the population are taught employable skills, and they form a pipeline to fill jobs and start new small businesses.One cautionary note — efforts toduplicate the Israeli model in our communities inevitably bump up against the reality of a different central governmental role. Government is not filling the same funding and intermediary role in the U.S. as it fulfills in Israel. Our group brainstormed about ways to replicate the cohesive and inclusive network resulting from Israeli military service. Might it be helpful to harness existing cohorts in our two states – such as faith-based, veterans or other community-minded groups – as the basis for collaborative training and networking? With the proper guidance, might such groups provide some of the benefits to their members that IDF service provides Israelis?
Nevertheless, a systems approach in our regions can start with establishing more connector organizations as well as training programs that provide tools and technical assistance for all to generate business startups. The Detroit and Buffalo regions are linked by the Great Lakes, by similar trajectories, and now by professional ties that are mutually enriching.
The Foundation wants to thank and acknowledge Renee Atlas, an Israeli journalist, who documented major parts of the trip and key messages that served as a source of information for this blog.