New Child-Care Coalition Planning Modest--but Innovative--Programs
Eight major corporations announced plans Thursday to sprinkle $600,000 among several projects to improve the quality of child-care and elder-care services in Los Angeles and Orange counties.
This is the work of the American Business Collaboration for Quality Dependent Care, a nationwide coalition of 22 corporations that two years ago pledged to invest more than $100 million in dependent-care programs around the country. The business collaboration also includes about 100 companies that participate in a limited way.
No locally based corporations are helping with the heavy lifting.
No big movie studios or health-care corporations or media companies have volunteered to toss several hundred thousand dollars into the sandbox, as have the eight funders of the Southern California initiative: AT&T;, Bank of America, Chevron, Deloitte & Touche, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Price Waterhouse and Texaco.
And so it follows that Los Angeles and Orange counties get an initial commitment of $600,000, while the Bay Area recently garnered a pledge of $1.7 million over three years.
The corporations involved, after all, are approaching dependent care as a business issue first and are looking for programs that will benefit their employees with spillover benefits for the community at large. The companies employ 32,000 workers in Southern California and more than 50,000 in the Bay Area.
In fairness, subsequent years could bring Southern California more money. What’s more, local corporations are invited to leap in at any time, coalition organizers say.
“We would be delighted to have more companies join us,” said Sue Osborn, Chevron’s work-family coordinator. “The more partners we have, the more money we have.”
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And while the start-up funding in Southern California is relatively modest, some of the programs are innovative responses to the region’s unusual qualities.
“We hope these small steps will build,” said Patty Siegel, executive director of the California Child Care Resource & Referral Network, which is helping to implement the programs. “All of this is feeding the future.”
The eight companies spent more than a year surveying their Southern California employees and figuring out how to respond to their dependent-care problems. More than half those surveyed said they have problems finding adequate child and elder care, according to the coalition, which is managed by Boston consulting firm WFD Inc.
“Key frustrations” include hours that care is available, quality of care, lack of care options for infants and transportation for school-age children.
Other “major issues” cited were cost of child and elder care; finding transportation and in-home services for older relatives; long commutes that hindered the balancing of work with other duties; lack of backup child care because of illness or other factors (school vacations, caregiver vacations, emergencies) that disrupt regular arrangements; and the safety of children when they are not in school.
The programs the collaboration is funding focus on improving care quality even more than quantity.
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Most of the money--nearly $370,000 of the $600,000 in first-year funding--is earmarked for the Family Friendly Quality Improvement Fund, an unusual new project that will allow employees of the participating companies to nominate their child’s caregiver for grants for such things as training, playground equipment and educational materials.
About 700 caregivers, from relatives to family-care providers to day-care centers to after-school programs, are expected to participate. About 13,000 children will be affected; of those, about 1,400 to 3,500 will be children of employees of the participating companies.
The program allows the corporations to improve child-care programs throughout the far-flung region and to meet the needs of white-collar and blue-collar workers, Osborn said.
And it forces parents to find out what their child-care providers need to do a good job, Siegel said.
Other projects will include:
* Investment in an existing backup child-care center operated in downtown Los Angeles by Children First Inc. Parents at participating corporations use the center, which serves as many as 34 children a day when regular child care is not available.
* Expansion of a program called Personal Care Plus, which provides trained aides to help the elderly who live at home with daily activities.
* A registry of child-care providers in Orange County that can provide temporary or emergency care.
Write to Balancing Act, Business News, Los Angeles Times, Times Mirror Square, Los Angeles, CA 90053, or e-mail nancy.rivera.brooks@latimes.com
