With pandemic-era child care funding gone and bipartisan state leaders prioritizing child care solutions, local leaders like those in Wilkes County are convening, collaborating, and raising money to make things work for their neighbors in the meantime.
“ Communities need to think outside the box,” said Michelle Shepherd, executive director of Wilkes Community Partnership for Children, the local Smart Start partnership.“ I think that’ s the biggest takeaway. These children deserve quality child care, and what does that look like, and what do communities have to offer?”
A child care need, a church need In 2023, Phillips and Hinson were touring every vacant building in town.
They were looking for a larger space to expand their 10-year-old business and help fill child care gaps. That year, a study funded by the Leonard G Herring Family Foundation found that the county needed 836 additional child care slots,
almost double the capacity it had. The report’ s findings, released by the Wilkes Economic Development Corporation( EDC), were starting conversations in the business community.
“ The child care study revealed what a crisis we were in,” Hinson said.
Hinson and her mother were already struggling with a balance familiar to child care owners. They did not have enough revenue to pay teachers much more than minimum wage, couldn’ t raise tuition without pricing out families, and were unwilling to cut costs by lowering quality. Stabilization grants funded through the federal American Rescue Plan Act were expected to dry up, leaving a large gap in the budgets of programs across the state.
“ We just kind of felt like we had done all we could on our own two feet,” Phillips said. Phillips and Hinson were coming up short in their search.“ We had knocked on doors, we had toured all the vacant buildings, we had been to town officials,” Phillips said.
Then they started conversations with a local entity with its own financial struggles: Wilkesboro United Methodist Church.
“ Our church has dramatically shrunk … especially post-COVID,” said Gilbert Cox, who has attended the church since 2008 and was the chair of its finance committee at the time.
Cox recalled holidays when he first joined with people overflowing into the aisles and Sundays with regularly full pews. A couple of years after the pandemic, the church was lucky to have 50 members attending services.
From left: Michelle Shepherd, executive director of Wilkes Community Partnership for Children, plays with PlayWorks students during a fire drill. Mother-daughter team Sharon Phillips and Katy Hinson pose with their new temporary license in PlayWorks’ new location. Liz Bell / EducationNC
“ This is a very common story for a lot of congregations in the country, particularly in North Carolina, particularly in rural places, where mainline churches have just been decimated by a pandemic, by disagreements,” Maberry said.“ And Wilkesboro is not immune to that.”
Plus, more than 90 % of the church’ s space was sitting unused more than 90 % of the time, Cox said.
“ Eventually, what was an asset was going to turn into a liability,” he said.“ The maintenance of it, and it stored more and more. I think we found five pianos. There were two in a closet we didn’ t even know about.”
The church entered a six-week“ design sprint” with the Ormond Center called the Community Craft Collaborative to figure out a different path forward. The process aims to helps churches better understand their community through data and interviews, and then encourages them to come up with an idea to experiment with.
Through a conversation with the EDC, Cox learned about the child care study’ s findings. The organization connected him to Phillips and Hinson, who had recently reached out in their search for a new home.
By the end of the sprint, the church presented its idea: house and expand PlayWorks. Phillips and Hinson toured the church’ s facilities and heard from the church’ s leadership that they were on board.
“ How could we take what is becoming a liability, and better connect to the community?” Cox said.
“ A gut punch” In April 2024, a contractor gave an estimate on the building renovations necessary to meet regulatory standards. It would cost about $ 1.6 million. Everyone involved agreed:“ It was insurmountable,” Cox said.
The potential collaboration felt like it had died, and Phillips and Hinson were back to square one.“ Everybody ghosted,” Phillips said. While they were already down, they were hit with what Phillips described as“ a gut punch.” In June 2024, the program received an eviction notice from its landlord, a local theater company that wanted to repurpose the space. PlayWorks had to be out by September. Their hunt for a new building became a make-or-break endeavor.
“ I can just remember thinking, what are we going to do? What are we going to do? We don’ t have any choices,” Phillips said.“ I immediately called Michelle at the partnership.”
Shepherd, who had been the executive director of Wilkes Community Partnership for Children for about a year, said she understood the urgency. With a back-
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