Fairfield County’s Community Foundation has awarded a $9,000 COVID-19 Resiliency Grant to DanburyWORKS to assist home-base family child care providers who face challenges due to changes in enrollment, lost income, and the need for more emergency supplies as a result of the pandemic.
DanburyWORKS is a city-wide collaborative focused on creating economic vitality. It links services across the community to break down barriers to economic engagement and lasting change. A key component of its work has been reducing barriers to employment by expanding safe, affordable quality child care. As part of the Cora’s Kids initiative, launched in 2018, it has created more licensed, safe child care providers in Danbury and developed a family child care network that now includes 32 providers. United Way of Western Connecticut provides backbone support to DanburyWORKS and Cora’s Kids.
DanburyWORKS is working to ensure that the city’s family child care providers can be open and available to local working families as our state reopens over the coming weeks. This grant from the Fairfield County COVID-19 Resiliency Fund will help to provide important cleaning supplies, personal protective equipment (PPE), and other essentials that the child care providers and the families they serve now need as a result of the pandemic.
“These home-based family child care providers have faced many challenges during the COVID-19 crisis,” said Elizabeth Quinoñez, who oversees the project and is the Early Child Care Initiative Manager for United Way of Western Connecticut. “Now that businesses are starting to reopen, we want to make sure these providers are ready to care for the children of workers who are heading back to their jobs—but they need to offer care in a way that is safe for everyone. These funds from Fairfield County's Community Foundation will help the providers comply with new requirements.”
Throughout the pandemic, DanburyWORKS and Cora’s Kids have provided support to the network providers by:
- Keeping them informed about conference calls and remote meetings with the State’s Office of Early Childhood
- Helping them to understand what financial relief might be available to them, as many of them lost all enrollment and income when businesses were closed
- Providing them with donations of diapers and other supplies available from corporations
- Connecting them with United Way’s Healthy Savings program so they can get fresh produce and discounts on other healthy foods.
- Setting up a channel of communication through What’s App, so they can get connected with other community resources.
For more information about DanburyWorks, Cora’s Kids, and the ways United Way of Western Connecticut is helping families during the COVID-19 pandemic, contact Isabel Almeida, Interim President and Chief Operating Office at United Way of Western Connecticut at 203-297-6725, isabel.almeida@uwwesternct.org.
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