I am in the process of opening a licensed daycare center in Indiana & I will be serving low-income children, special needs, and diverse races, and also I will be operating 24 hours a day. I am in the start up phase (buisness plan), and have found location,ect. Population is 45,000 with only 458 slots available in licensed child care facilities or homes, but almost 1800+ pre-kindergarten children not counting school age, and all dayshift care. There are 2 questions in which I have. The first is I am struggling on my structure- for profit, or not for profit. I think I am leaning to not for profit, due to this is a need of the community, and I am happy just with a salary. Which has more funding available? The next is where can I find grants for this endevor. I want to be able to serve about 107 children (per shift if needed), so as you can see, this is a costly adventure.
Thank you for your email.
It is my honest opinion that you should make your daycare a combination of both profit and non-profit. It is something that a lot of non-profits have been doing lately and it gives you the best of both worlds in that you will still be eligible for funding for both profit and non-profit endeavors of your daycare. This also answers the question of which has more funding available because you will be eligible for both categories.
You should not rule out operating as a for-profit daycare only because I know that there have been those who have made a lot of money from the government grants that they have gotten for their for-profit daycare business. My last daycare-related client got over 10 pages of information about grant programs that their for-profit daycare was eligible to apply for!
Now since you are just starting your daycare you should also realize that a portion of the information that I have sent to the above-mentioned client also included information for start-up for-profit daycares - so you should be glad to know that such grant programs exist for startups. You should read both my Grant Basics 101 Blog to find out more about the daycare-related grant programs for daycare start-ups.
In answer to your 2nd question you have to understand that since you are not a client you will have to find this information yourself. Finding available grant programs and doing grant research involves a lot of work but it is something that can be done by a non-professional like yourself. All you have to do is invest your time and effort and you should be able to find some grant programs that you are eligible to apply for.
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