What if we told you that Mount Vernon and Lisbon have been selected to receive up to $250,000 to enhance the wages of local child care providers. Sounds great, but what’s the catch? The catch is: we would need to raise local funds for our child care providers by Sept. 30. However much we raise, they’ll match it up to $250,000. What incentive!
Iowa Health and Human Services (HHS) has selected 10 communities to be potential recipients of the available funds for child care workers. Mount Vernon/Lisbon is one of them.
Why us? Because we’ve been working hard to find solutions to our desperate child care situation …and we got noticed. Together, the newly formed community non-profit: Mount Vernon-Lisbon Child Care Solutions board of directors (under the Southeast Linn Community Center umbrella) and our subcommittee leadership have been working alongside Mount Vernon mayor Tom Wieseler and the Mount Vernon City Council to leverage viable solutions for our families. All are in agreement this is an amazing opportunity.
Until the end of September we will be attempting to raise funding to supplement the wages of the men and women who care for our children when we’re not able to be with them. Every dollar counts. Whatever amount we can raise, the state will match it up to $250,000. We’ll be asking for donations from passionate individuals who care about accessible, quality child care, including the support from local businesses, and community leaders. Can you help?
Many families simply can’t pay more. We’ll need to find better solutions to make a child care provider’s compensation approach a living wage. Unfortunately, working full time, year-round does not guarantee an Iowa worker a middle-class standard of living. Nearly 114,000 Iowa working families with at least one full-time worker in the home cannot not meet a bare-bones, basic-needs budget without public support beyond health insurance. That’s 15 percent of all working households. It also includes 45 percent of single-parent working households, who face the daunting challenge of being a sole breadwinner while having to pay for child care.
Full-time work at a self-supporting wage can be difficult to find, especially in smaller communities such as ours. An Iowa worker must earn well over the minimum wage, and in some cases well above the state’s median wage of $19.19 per hour, to sustain a basic-needs budget:
• A single parent with one child has to earn an hourly wage of $21.16.
• Two working parents with two children each need to earn $16.11 or more.
• The working parent in a two-parent household with a stay-at-home parent and two children must earn $21.59.
For more information:
[email protected]
To Donate:
SE Linn Community Center: Go to Selinn.org & Designate as: Child Care
(Please let us know who you are so that we might recognize your generosity, thank you!)
We have an immediate need. In Lisbon, LECC has over 130 inquiries for their child care waiting list. They hope to open a second child care site yet this fall and are now seeking child care providers. We need to compensate them fairly for the dedicated care they provide. Iowa families are working hard, but wages have not kept up with costs and productivity. There are strategies to help make a REAL difference. This is one of them.
Donations or more information For more information: [email protected] To Donate: SE Linn Community Center: Go to Selinn.org & Designate as: Child Care (Please let us know who you are so that we might recognize your generosity, thank you!)