14 Kirk Street, Lowell MA 01852
978-937-5899 phone; 978-937-5148 fax
Training and Small Business Development
© 2006 Acre Family Day Care
Updated April 27, 2007
Gaining hope by providing it to others:
Day care program in Lowell's Acre helps to turn many lives around
By John Laidler, Globe Correspondent
Boston Globe
December 12, 1999
Lowell -- It was not so long ago that Lan Chuong looked out at the world through tearful eyes. A Cambodian refugee who came to Lowell in 1994, she was burdened by the terrible trauma she had endured during the years of the Khmer Rouge in her native country, and a feeling of despair about her family's prospects in a strange new land.
But these days, Chuong, 34, has found a reason to be cheerful. As a result of training she received from the Acre Family Day Care Corp. in Lowell last year, Chuong was able to establish her own family child-care business. And last month, with the help of her own earnings and financial help from the corporation, she and her husband purchased a new home from which she runs the business.
While still sorrowful about her past, Chuong says with a smile, "My life is OK now."
Chuong is typical of many women in Lowell who have been able to help their families climb out of poverty, and to help meet the growing need for child care in the city, with the assistance of Acre Family Day Care Corp.
Since its founding in 1988, the nonprofit community-based corporation has trained as many as 250 women from poor and/or immigrant backgrounds to open their own licensed family child-care businesses. The corporation, whose services are offered in English, Spanish and Khmer, the Cambodian language, also provides a support network and additional training to the graduates of its program.
Its efforts have earned Acre a "Vision 2000 Models of Excellence" award from the US Small Business Administration. Last month, SBA Administrator Aida Alvarez visited Lowell to present Acre with the award and to visit the home of a child-care provider trained by the corporation.
The SBA award was not the first recognition received by the center. Last year, Anita M. Moeller, Acre Family Day Care's executive director, was one of four women nationwide honored by the Ms. Foundation as a "Woman of Vision."
Acre Family Day Care was begun as a project of the Coalition for a Better Acre, a community development corporation that serves the low-income Acre section of Lowell. According to Moeller, who was a staff member, the child-care program was developed in response to two related community needs: jobs and child care. The group concluded that it would be better to train local residents to work as child-care providers than have the coalition open a child-care center itself, Moeller said.
"If we opened a center, we wouldn't have been able to employ as many people as we wanted to reach," she said.
Although largely independent from the coalition from its inception, Acre Family Day Care officially became a separate entity in 1992. Though "Acre" has remained part of its name, it serves the entire city.
The corporation's efforts are reflected not only in the people it has trained, but also in the number of children who have received care from providers trained by the corporation. Today there are 46 family child-care businesses in Acre's network, serving about 275 children, most from low-income or welfare families. About half the agency's annual $2,500,000 budget represents state money that it distributes to providers as subsidies for care of indigent children.
From the start, Acre Family Day Care has viewed its responsibility as not only helping establish women in business, but also ensuring that the child care they offer is of high quality. As a result, it developed a training program that goes well beyond state requirements. Massachusetts law mandates that licensed family day-care providers receive 15 hours of training. At Acre Family Day Care, participants receive 240 hours of training, half of which must be spent interning with an experienced provider.
Each year, the course is taken by 20 women, at least half of whom must be welfare recipients. As a reflection of demand for the service, there are about 100 women on the waiting list for the course. The training was offered initially in Spanish, then also in Khmer, and in the last three years also in English, reflecting differing demands for the service.
The training does not end there. Those who establish family child-care businesses with the help of the corporation become part of Acre Family Day Care's network of contracted providers. Through their membership, they receive payments from the state, administered by Acre Family Day Care, for their subsidized child-care slots. But they also receive continuing training and support from the corporation.
Included are monthly provider meetings at which various child-care topics are discussed. Acre Family Day Care also offers advanced training classes and college-level courses and has at times provided high school equivalency classes and classes in English as a second language. In addition, two Acre Family Day Care staff members provide additional education for providers as part of their monthly unannounced visits to their businesses.
And Acre Family Day Care provides the additional training needed by providers to obtain certification as child development associates, a title that recognizes a level of proficiency above licensing standards.
"They have such a thirst for it," Moeller said of the continuing training and education sought by providers. "We now have women working on their college degrees that before didn't have a high school diploma." She said it is a "misconception that people on welfare don't want training, or people in low-income communities aren't interested in excelling professionally. Everything we offer, they attend."
In an effort to give its participants a further boost out of poverty, Acre has established a program in which it adds $75 for each $25 they place in a special savings account each month for two years. Participants must use the money to purchase or repair their homes, educate themselves or their children, or capitalize their businesses, and they must attend classes on money management.
For Chuong, Acre has provided the helping hand she needed to climb out of poverty. A survivor of the Khmer Rouge genocide that claimed the lives of her parents and 11 of her 13 siblings, Chuong said she suffered from frequent bouts of tears during her first years in Lowell. As recently as early last year, she was on welfare, living with her husband and three children in a cramped apartment.
But after graduating from Acre's training program in May 1998, Chuong left welfare and started her own business. During her first year, she grossed $7,000, and this year, as of November, she had grossed $33,891, not including payments from nonsubsidized parents and federal subsidies for food costs. Her earnings enabled Chuong and her family to move into a larger apartment. Last month, with the financial help from Acre, they acquired their two-family home. The family rents out the top floor and resides on the first floor, where Chuong operates her business.
Chuong, who is assisted in the business by her husband, is licensed to care for up to six children. A warm atmosphere pervades the home, where the front rooms are well supplied with children's books, toys, dolls, and other necessities of child care. On a recent day, Chuong spoke with contentment of her new life, amid the chatter of five small children under her charge - four of them Cambodian and one African-American.
Before, she said, her life was "very, very difficult. Now no more."