to Strengthen Child Care Businesses Led and Staffed by Black and Latinx Women in New Orleans
Led by Beloved Community, twelve New Orleans organizations will work together to address inadequate investment in child care, high wage disparities and limited access to affordable, quality child care.
NEW ORLEANS, February 7, 2022—JPMorgan Chase today announced New Orleans as one of six winning cities in its annual competition to source innovative and sustainable ideas to advance equity in communities across the U.S. A collaborative of twelve organizations will receive $5 million over three years to make child care a family-sustaining career. Led by Beloved Community, the organizations will work together to foster Black and Latinx women-led child care businesses that value Black and Latinx women as caregivers, entrepreneurs, employees and mothers. The project has been named NOLA C.A.R.E.S.: Creating Access, Resources, and Equity for Success.
"I am grateful and excited that the City of New Orleans has once again been selected to be a part of JPMorgan Chase’s AdvancingCities initiative," said Mayor LaToya Cantrell. "This bold, collaborative effort will aid not only in boosting our economy, but also reducing poverty and crime and building better futures for our children and our city. Overall, this partnership is a great example of how we are prioritizing high-quality early childhood education and care, especially for our underserved Black and Latinx communities."
Child care center owners in New Orleans––who are almost exclusively Black and Latinx women––lack access to capital to improve and expand their facilities, leaving thousands of children unserved. The pandemic has heightened this lack of investment, as more than one-third of Louisiana child care business owners expect to close due to insufficient public subsidies that fail to cover the cost of care and high facility costs and lack of operating capital.
With support from JPMorgan Chase, the collaborative will increase access to capital, provide training opportunities for career advancement and develop a more equitable workforce in New Orleans, informed by the experiences of more than 800 Black and Latinx women. NOLA C.A.R.E.S. seeks to align policy and practice across sectors so Black and Latinx mothers working in caregiving professions are valued and able to build wealth as the entrepreneurs, workforce, and beneficiaries of high-quality employer-supported child care.
“This investment from JPMorgan Chase is going to be catalytic for economic mobility of Black and Latinx women in our region. We're honored to partner with such committed and innovative leaders to provide comprehensive support that includes workforce development, entrepreneur capacity-building, community engaged research, and ultimately access to more quality child care options for all New Orleans families.” said Rhonda Broussard, Founder and CEO of Beloved Community.
This is the second consecutive year that a New Orleans proposal has won an AdvancingCities competition. In 2020, JPMorgan Chase awarded $5 million to a collaborative led by NOLA Business Alliance to provide career pathways for people of color in the blue-green infrastructure industry. This new commitment is part of JPMorgan Chase’s $30 billion commitment to advance racial equity and builds on the firm’s $500 million, five-year initiative to invest in solutions to drive equitable growth through community-based strategies.
“The NOLA C.A.R.E.S. project represents a transformational opportunity to take a holistic approach to economic equity for Black and Latinx women. In this project we are truly taking a systemic approach to disrupting cycles of inequity for women in our communities,” said Lesley Brown Rawlings, Vice President of Strategy for Beloved Community.
NOLA C.A.R.E.S. will implement two key interventions: 1) introducing child care as a workplace benefit and 2) providing capital and/or business and workforce training to support Black and Latinx women who provide childcare for Black and Latinx families. Over the course of the three-year commitment, the collaborative will help at least 120 Black and Latinx women receive a Child Development Associate certification, establish an Early Learning Facilities Fund to make low- or no-cost childcare facilities more widely available, create a cohort of 20 local hospitality businesses to develop and implement plans for racially equitable workplaces that help Black and Latinx women advance into management positions, engage at least 500 women in participatory research and support public policy to provide low-cost facilities to child care centers and increase public subsidies and worker compensation in New Orleans.
“Improving access to quality childcare has many deep and lasting benefits. It can mitigate the gender wage gap and increase lifetime earnings. It can provide children with a safe and stimulating environment so they thrive. It helps employers retain talented, dedicated, working mothers,” said Greg Rattler, executive director and a market leader for JPMorgan Chase in New Orleans. “This partnership is working together to create the right solutions for our city and its people. It’s exciting to think how many lives will be made better by the work of this wonderful collaborative effort.”
The official announcement of the commitment and collaborative will be made February 7 at the TEP Center, the transformed site of historic McDonogh 19 school in the Lower Ninth Ward. The mixed-use project was developed with the help of a $1.8 million federal historic tax credit investment made by JPMorgan Chase. The TEP Center will have affordable senior apartments and offices for nonprofits groups serving the community- including the Leona Tate Foundation for Change’s "Lower Ninth Ward Living Museum," dedicated to the history of school desegregation and civil rights.
About the Project Partners
Agenda for Children: Agenda for Children works to improve a child’s well-being by supporting, informing and empowering the adults who can impact their lives, including teachers, parents, policymakers and donors.
BanchaLenguas Language Justice Collective: BanchaLenguas is a worker-owned collective based in New Orleans (also named Bulbancha by the original native peoples of this land and its descendants) that partners with communities to create multilingual spaces through high-quality and responsible in-person and virtual interpretation, translation, consulting and language justice training.
Beloved Community: Beloved Community is a national non-profit that works exclusively on sustainable solutions for diversity, equity, and inclusion. Beloved Community provides policy advocacy and capacity-building supports via Equity in Schools, Equity at Work, and Equity at Home programming.
City of New Orleans Office of Youth and Families: The Office of Youth and Families works to improve child well-being by increasing coordination between agencies, expanding resources, ensuring equitable policymaking and engaging youth and community input.
Power Coalition for Equity & Justice (Power Coalition): The Power Coalition is Louisiana's leading coalition of groups involved in grassroots organizing and power building with Black and Latinx communities.
For Providers by Providers of Louisiana (4pxp): 4pxp is a non-profit formed by experienced child care providers for child care providers to coordinate their leadership development, engage them in policy advocacy, provide business technical assistance and training, and launch demonstration projects to expand their impact and financial sustainability.
Early Partners: Early Partners is a non-profit focused on building a scalable and sustainable model for high-quality early childhood education (ECE) through public-private partnerships.
Louisiana Department of Education: The Louisiana Department of Education (LDOE) strives to provide educators, stakeholders, and the general public citizens with information, leadership, technical assistance and the oversight necessary to create a world-class education system for our children. Through its various offices, the LDOE implements initiatives that will help Louisiana reach its critical student outcome goals efficiently and effectively.
Louisiana Policy Institute for Children: The Louisiana Policy Institute for Children is a nonpartisan, independent source of data, research, and pertinent information for policymakers, stakeholders, and the public at large around issues related to children ages birth through four in Louisiana. We also develop policy proposals informed by data, research, best practices and the experiences of other states for improving outcomes for Louisiana's young children and conduct educational and outreach activities around these recommended policy solutions.
Total Community Action: Total Community Action addresses the needs of the poor and near-poor by providing direct assistance and the opportunity for people to better help themselves. Total Community Action’s mission is to reduce poverty in our community through Collaboration with other agencies by providing human services, experiences and opportunities that move persons from poverty to self- sufficiency.
United Way of Southeast Louisiana (UWSELA): UWSELA coordinates the GLR collaborative, which engages 125+ businesses, childcare centers, parents, elected officials, advocates, program providers, schools, and philanthropists to expand access to quality child care in New Orleans.
Windsor Court Hotel: Windsor Court Hotel is a luxury hotel located in the Central Business District. In Collaboration with Early Partners, Windsor Court is building a consortium of New Orleans hotels to provide priority access for enrollment to their employees.
About JPMorgan Chase’s $500 million commitment to drive growth
In 2018, JPMorgan Chase created a $500 million five-year initiative that combines the firm’s lending capital, philanthropic capital and expertise to support innovative solutions to challenges that have limited equitable and inclusive economic growth. The program includes large scale commitments where deeper investments are needed to drive inclusive growth, as well as a challenge to source innovative cross-sector solutions for U.S. cities. What started as the AdvancingCities Challenge launched in September 2018 has since attracted more than 600 proposals over three cycles; in 2021, we received more than 200 applications from nearly 80 communities across 34 states.