Community Partnership for Children Leading Team Addressing Sheboygan County Child Care Challenges
Check out local media coverage of our efforts related to the the Dream Up! Grant Program!
- How Sheboygan County will use a $75,000 grant to address child care shortages - Sheboygan Press
- Local group awarded grant to address county child care shortage - Sheboygan Sun
- Public survey addressing county child care shortage opens - Sheboygan Sun
The Community Partnership for Children is leading a cross-sector team is working to address Sheboygan County’s child care challenges after being awarded the Dream Up! Child Care Supply-Building Grant Program.
The program provides $75,000 in grant funding and strategic planning support to evaluate, plan, sustain and expand existing child care and support new child care programs in a specific geographic area. Members of the cross-sector Core Team leading the project include representatives from nonprofit, business, government and child care entities.
The team plans to improve Sheboygan County’s child care landscape through three programs:
- Peer outreach and mentorship to currently unregulated in-home child care providers to help them navigate the certification process and increase capacity
- Implementation of developmental screening programs in existing child care centers to support current providers and better understand challenging behaviors
- An impact survey to explore the effect of the child care shortage on workforce and community in Sheboygan County.
The impact survey will launch in early November, and all Sheboygan County residents will be encouraged to complete it regardless of their current child care situation. The grant program’s Core Team plans to host a community presentation in mid-February to share the results of these programs with Sheboygan County residents.
According to a June 2023 study, Sheboygan County currently faces a potential shortage of more than 3,300 child care slots, and 50% of ZIP codes in the county are defined as child care deserts, where there are three or more children per licensed child care slot.
“Affordable, accessible high-quality child care is absolutely critical in setting our children up for success, and it’s in crisis in Sheboygan County,” said Ryan Wilinski, Director of Community Partnership for Children at United Way of Sheboygan County and Core Team Lead for the program. “The programs created through this grant will work in conjunction with existing programs to create new child care supply, provide additional support to current providers, demonstrate the value that high-quality child care programs bring to our community and jumpstart conversations to identify new long-term solutions to the problems facing the child care sector.”
To learn more about the grant programs, contact Ryan Wilinski, Director of Community Partnership for Children, at ryan@uwofsc.org. For more information on the impact survey or to participate, visit sheboyganchildcaresurvey.org.
