14 Kirk Street, Lowell MA 01852
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Training and Small Business Development
© 2006 Acre Family Day Care
Updated April 27, 2007
Anita Moeller's Quiet Revolution
by Kristen Golden
Ms. Magazine
September/October 1998
Anita Moeller is annoyed. The phone in her office, where she serves as the executive director of Acre Family Day Care Corporation, a uniquely successful model program for training and supporting family child care providers, has been ringing off the hook. In the wake of hasty welfare reform legislation, everyone wants to know how she's helped about 150 women become profitable small business owners who provide licensed family child care primarily in low income neighborhoods of Lowell, Massachusetts. The answer is deceptively simple, yet seemingly beyond the grasp of most reformers: through a comprehensive, holistic, grassroots approach.
"I discourage people when they call," she says matter-of-factly of the quick-fix politicians whose approach tends to be work first, train later. "California's the one that blows me away. They said they wanted to double the number of providers to around 24,000 new providers in two years, and how did we do it here?" Laughing, she told them, "I don't think our model's going to quite apply to what you're trying to do."
Moeller's model is a community-based, community-driven program that offers women everything they need to start and maintain their businesses, from extensive training in child development, business administration, and life skills to networking, technical assistance, and financial and emotional support - in English, Spanish, and Khmer. In a state that requires a three-hour orientation to qualify for a family child care license, the Acre model delivers 240 hours of training and on-site internships. Acre providers earn an average of $28,000 a year.
Well ahead of her time, for the past ten years Anita Moeller has been leading this quiet revolution that empowers low income and immigrant women and their families. At the age of 22, she founded Acre to provide much-needed culturally sensitive, affordable, quality child care to the Acre neighborhood, a primarily Latino and Southeast Asian immigrant community. Since then, the organization has expanded to offer training to women throughout Lowell.
Moeller grew up with two brothers in the peaceful countryside of Dunstable, Massachusetts. "We always had somebody living in our home, all my life," she says, "whether is was foster kids, exchange students, people who needed a place to stay." She became particularly close with one exchange student, and at the age of 14, she spent several months living in Brazil as the guest of the student's wealthy family. She loved being immersed in another culture, but was deeply affected by the street children she saw eating out of the trash downstairs from her friend's penthouse apartment.
That summer also prepared her emotionally to better understand the girl of about nine years old whom her parents adopted from Colombia when Moeller was a teenager. Diane was believed to have grown up on the streets and to have been sexually abused. She trusted no one - a fact that did not change despite the love and support of her adoptive family. "I learned much from her," says Moeller. "I really came to understand how important those early years are."
At 17, Diane gave birth to a daughter, Laken. Too young and too troubled to care for a baby, she let Moeller take charge. "I took care of her all the time," she says, "as much as I possibly could." When Laken was four, the Moeller family took legal action to get custody. Her sister immediately disappeared with the child, and no one has heard from them in five years. "She doesn't want to be found," says Moeller. "She knows how to hide. She survived on the streets as a child for nine years." Heartbroken, Moeller hopes that one day Laken will contact her. A mother of three sons, she says, "I have a girl out there somewhere."
Currently on maternity leave, Moeller drops by the office (in a sunny, old historic building that used to house mill girls) to present her newborn baby, three-week-old Will, warmly greeting her staff alternately in Spanish and English. She nonchalantly nurses her baby throughout a day of meetings and interviews. Upbeat and easygoing, she gives the impression that, in her capable hands, anything is possible.
The energy of the primarily young staff of 15 is palpable, and the camaraderie is remarkable, given that they speak three different native languages. "We learned a lot from a workshop that showed us how to communicate effectively," says Sann Thach, the training director and interim executive director while Moeller is on leave. "We looked at cultural differences and communication barriers and learned how to structure ourselves wisely."
Helpful, too, is the fact that the staff is drawn from the community it serves. Although she herself is a white woman who grew up outside Lowell, Moeller is determined to keep Acre community-based, hiring graduates of the training program, former providers, and local parents. Thach believes this grassroots philosophy is what makes Acre such a strong entity, and so well respected in a diverse community.
In fact, Acre was born out of a survey of the community's needs. In 1987, Moeller was tapped by one of her professors at the University of Lowell to survey residents of the Acre neighborhood, under the auspices of a local nonprofit organization called the Coalition for a Better Acre. "So I was out there door-knocking, trying to speak Spanish, working with a team of volunteers," she remembers. "We found that there was definitely a need for jobs, because we found lots of people at home." They also discovered that there was no licensed day care in the entire neighborhood.
Assuming that the best solution was to open a neighborhood child care center, Moeller quickly realized that would be prohibitively expensive, and learned that such a center would be legally required to employ college graduates. With further research, she came upon the family child care option, which at the time had the minimal state requirements of no training and one year's experience with child care, even with one's own child.
A good jumping-off point, Moeller figured, "but it certainly wouldn't be responsible to just say, 'O.K., get a license, you've got a year's experience, take six kids.' The state wasn't even requiring CPR or first aid." After conferring with Acre residents, she developed a comprehensive training program in both child care and business administration. "I was taking child development courses at the university and then teaching them three doors down," she says. "I was sitting in every class thinking, how can I adapt this? How do you say that in Spanish?"
In 1988, about ten women from the Acre enrolled in the first training program, taught in Spanish. "It was exciting to see how enthusiastic the women were about learning the information we were trying our best to offer," Moeller recalls. "They just had so much to share. I feel like I learned from it more than they did." Moeller and her colleagues helped the women produce elaborate business plans to prove that through careful planning, they could create viable businesses. "We were all just learning as we went," she confesses. "There wasn't really any model to follow at that time."
Sharon Woodward, licenser for the Massachusetts Office of Child Care Services, describes Moeller in 1988 as a tenacious young advocate. Woodward had just started working as a licenser, and had an overwhelming caseload of 800 families to interview. Every night, she would pull her car off to the side of the road and cry in frustration. Nearly every morning, she'd look up and Moeller would be coming through the door. "She'd tell me that she really thought there was a need to translate our materials into Spanish," says Woodward. "It's only because of Anita's persistence that we finally did it. She also convinced us to hire a Spanish bilingual licenser." Acre continues to advocate; in 1994, the organization persuaded the state to hire a licenser who speaks Khmer to serve Lowell's growing Cambodian community.
Since Acre was incorporated ten years ago, Moeller has strategically expanded the organization, gradually adding needed services. The extraordinarily comprehensive training program lasts 12 weeks, with eight hours per week of classroom instruction and 12 hours per week of on-site internships. Graduates are thoroughly supported with ongoing education and training, technical assistance, home visits, loans for liability insurance and home improvements, and a vital network of other providers. Recently, Moeller hired a former board member to launch an Individual Development Account economic literacy program, in which providers are encouraged to save for education or business expansion.
If women who successfully complete the training chose not to open their own businesses, Moeller points out, they are prepared for other options, such as working at a day care center or in an administrative position with a child care agency. Those who do create their own home-based child care businesses can earn higher pay than traditional day care workers; in fact, it can change their lives.
When Alycia Heng fled Cambodia in 1981, the Khmer Rouge had killed her parents and four of her six siblings; she herself had been tortured. "I was 17 years old. I should have had fun, but I had the war," she recalls angrily. She arrived in Mobile, Alabama, with her husband and her young son. After more than a year on public assistance, she found a job shelling fish at a seafood company, working 16-hour days, standing on her feet, with her hands submerged in cold water. She withstood these conditions for several years before moving to Lowell in search of more humane work and a way to care for her now four young children. She eventually left the paid workforce to raise her family.
When her children were older, Heng needed to work again. "A friend told me because I had a big van, I could be a bus driver for the Acre," says Heng. "I didn't know about the day care. I met Anita and she try to help me to put the sign on my van and get the license, but I afraid that I'm not good in map to find the street." Then Thach told Heng about the child care provider training program, and encouraged her to register. "I say, but I don't know how to read very well in English," recalls Heng. Thach explained that trainings were offered in Khmer. "I say, O.K., I try. Then I try; it worked out!" she says proudly. Heng, who now studies English as a second language (ESL) at the local high school, has been in business for more than three years. She regularly cares for six children and serves on Acre's board of directors.
Carmen Torres begins her day at 5 a.m. The first child arrives at her home 15 minutes later; the last morning drop-off is at 9 a.m. A few more children come in the afternoon for an after school program. Like the parents of the children she cares for, Torres works hard. A graduate of Acre's training program, Torres moved off welfare by starting her business three and a half years ago. An ambitious woman who markets herself well, she is consistently full to capacity, earning more than $35,000 a year. She is preparing for Child Development Associate certification (an intensive national credential program that recognizes high quality child care) by taking child development classes at a local college - with the strong support of Acre.
"We expect our providers to climb higher on the ladder," says Thach. "We tell them, 'Get your degree. Take ESL classes. Do something for yourself.' We don't just teach them child care and that's that. We try to find funding to support them above and beyond us."
Moeller devotes a lot of her time and energy to raising funds. She finances the child care training, technical assistance, and ongoing education programs through grants from private foundations, corporations, and individual giving. Child care services are underwritten and subsidized by contracts she secures with a variety of state agencies. With new contracts that support the transition of women from welfare to work, Acre offered its training program in English for the first time two years ago.
At times, Moeller and her staff are called on to help providers with much more than routine problems. One family child care provider was being beaten by her husband; Moeller had to tell her that they could not send any children to a violent home. She would have to choose between the business she had worked so hard to establish and divorcing her husband of 20 years, an action that would not be widely supported in her close-knit Cambodian community. She called Moeller at home late one night and, with her support, decided to ask her husband to leave. Another provider feared for the safety of two young girls in her care when their uncle was involved in a gang-related murder. Afraid that the girls might be targets of retaliatory violence, the provider turned to the staff at Acre; they put her together with a social worker who devised a solution.
"I really believe that for a kid," says Moeller, "if there is somebody who will stick by that child during those early years, no matter the crazy environment they may be in, later on in their life they can look back and say, 'Wow. That's the reason I'm sane or the reason I'm able to trust.' My sister had nobody, literally. I'm hoping in those early years with Laken, we'll have been her somebody. I also hope that the early years our providers have with many of the children in their care will make them that somebody for those children."
Kristen Golden is the coauthor of "Remarkable Women of the Twentieth Century" (Michael Friedman).