The Accelerate Rural Indiana Regional Development Authority approved a resolution Wednesday that would support two local funds’ joint effort to pursue grant funding to use for childcare.
RDA Engineering Consultant Mason Gordon said he’s been encouraging the Decatur County Community Foundation and the Blue River Community Foundation to pursue the Lilly Endowment GIFT VIII Planning Grant.
The reason why results from a focus group the board held with community stakeholders regarding barriers to childcare. The biggest barriers that came from that meeting are not the lack of facilities, but rather the lack of funding for programming or staff.
“The big takeaway I had from this discussion is that practically all the barriers are non-capital related barriers,” he said. “So operational cost, regulation, staffing, finding ways to provide alternative care times for second and third shift [workers], all those things were major barriers to providing additional childcare, and unfortunately none of those were capital, infrastructure-related items. There was even a comment that building the building was the cheapest part of childcare. I felt discouraged there that there wasn’t this grand READI 2.0 idea we could latch onto because it seems like the major barriers there are hampered by the strings attached to the READI 2.0 dollars.”
The strings attached are that READI 2.0 dollars have to go toward capital projects, not programming.
So when Gordon heard about the Lilly Endowment GIFT VIII Planning Grant, he got with the region’s different community funds to encourage them to apply for it together. That grant can go toward programming.
“The Lilly Endowment announced their GIFT VIII program, and essentially it’s a two part process,” Gordon said. “The first part is community foundations or groups of community foundations can apply for a planning grant that can identify major issues across their communities and help them develop project ideas. The second phase of this program is taking what they found in the planning grant and applying for a Lilly GIFT VIII project investment.”
The planning grant is $60,000. This grant is noncompetitive – if you apply for it, you get it. The GIFT VIII project investment is $5 million.
“Based on this childcare conversation, I feel like there’s more to this onion that needs to be peeled back, so I’ve had conversation with the Decatur County Foundation, Shelby County Foundation [Blue River Community Foundation], Rush County Foundation and Ripley County Foundation about pulling together to put together a regional childcare planning grant submission,” he said.
The ideal scenario is that the region could use READI 2.0 funding to build the facility, and the Lilly Endowment grant to fund the programming and staff, Gordon said.
“The key outcome from this planning grant is a phenomenal project idea where we’ve identified a potential location, identified a potential provider, we’ve gotten all the people to sign on saying this is a good idea, we’ve identified where READI 2.0 dollars can be used on the facility, and we’ve identified how GIFT VIII could be used on the longevity, sustainability of the project,” Gordon said.
Rush County and Ripley County already had prior commitments to submit grant applications with other counties, but are offering letters of support to be included with DCCF and BRCF’s application.
The RDA approved a resolution showing support to to DCCF and BRCF as they apply for the Lilly Endowment GIFT VIII planning grant. The application is due Nov. 10.
“Worst case scenario, we use the $60,000 and don’t come up with a grand idea, but we’ve got $60,000 worth of additional data and potential assets identified for future conversation,” Gordon said. “There’s no loss for this scenario.”
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