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WNC Business

Dogwood Health Trust's Strategic Investments in Western North Carolina's Nonprofits and Early Childhood Education

Dec 14, 2024 10:32AM ● By Randee Brown

In an 18-county area of Western North Carolina including the Qualla Boundary, approximately 1,200 501(c)(3) nonprofit organizations work to offer positive impacts to the communities they serve. Partnerships with funding partners and foundations are critical to helping nonprofits meet their goals of addressing issues and challenges.

Created in 2019 following the sale of Mission Health, Dogwood Health Trust has been a strategic funder to hundreds of nonprofit organizations around WNC. During its first five years, Dogwood invested more than $318 million in organizations aligned with their mission to dramatically improve the health and wellbeing of all people and communities of the region. The foundation has also attracted significant capital from outside the region for grantee organizations, and uses impact investing — a tool that increases access to capital for organizations.

With the help of the community, Dogwood originally identified priority investment areas which include Education, Economic Opportunity, Health and Wellness, and Housing. Community discussions continue to be vital to informing future plans and strategies, as well as encouraging collaboration with area organizations and their leaders.

“As Dogwood looks ahead to the next five years, we remain focused on improving the conditions of health and wellbeing for all people – things like a child care system that works for everyone, safe and secure housing, access to a good education, jobs with income to support the whole family, and a health ecosystem where people can get the care and services they need when they need them,” Dogwood Health Trust CEO Dr. Susan Mims said. “This work is deeply connected to the ideas, wisdom, and leadership of people in Western North Carolina, and together we are creating the opportunities to make those things happen.”

For a large population in WNC and beyond, access to Early Childhood Education has become an increasing concern for families, children, and employers, as well as a hot topic among various business communities. A critical need at the heart of working families, access to a high-quality, sustainable, affordable, and reliable childcare system is something everyone deserves, according to Dogwood’s Vice President of Education Dr. Ereka Williams.

“The first 2,000 days of a child’s life really determine and set up what the future will be for them,” Williams said. “Access to care is one of the best and strongest investments we can make in children getting a good start to life. You also have to think about this as a working parent. You cannot show up to work focused if you’re not sure about the quality, safety, and dependability of the care your child is getting.”

Supporting access to Early Childhood Education deeply aligns with Dogwood’s mission and priority investment areas. Experiencing significant closures and losses to ECE centers during the pandemic, Dogwood formed a relationship with the Child Care Services Association to determine level of ECE need in the region.

An inventory report showed 50,000 children under the age of six reside in this part of WNC, and of those, 60% were in families with working parents. This information helped Dogwood craft a long-range plan to help support this need. Increasing workforce capacity and upskilling ECE professionals to combat losses was a large portion of Dogwood’s mission in this focus area, and the foundation made a $19 million investment to fund partners with innovative ideas addressing this need.

“A learning collaborative recently completed a year of self-study around ways they could think about approaching their practices,” Williams said. “We are looking to go even deeper with that in policy and advocacy work as part of Invest Early NC — a group of funders across the state dedicated to early care and education.”

Governor Roy Cooper recommended a $745 million investment in the 2024/2025 state budget to strengthen access to child care and early education for working families, though Williams said, in some ways, that is not enough. Both amounts and policies surrounding investments in child care, employer tax credits, and family tax credits could go further.

“People dedicated to early care in education in our region have been tackling these issues incrementally for decades now,” Williams said. “But it’s a marathon, not a sprint, and we are prepared to go the distance to continue making improvements.”

Williams encourages people to look at ECE as an ecosystem. Center closures due to lack of staff or funding affect more than the working parents of affected children; they impact the economic health of the region. Parents who stay at home to care for their children cannot appear at their place of work, which not only affects the businesses they work for, it affects the people who patronize those businesses as well.

Two years ago, there were almost 450 childcare centers in WNC, 400 of those being nonprofits, which employed more than 2,700 individuals. Across the state, there has been a loss of approximately $5.6 billion dollars each year due to insufficient childcare, which leads to increased turnover rates, absenteeism, tax revenue loss, and economic instability.

“It impacts us all because it is a multi-layer issue,” Williams said. “Dogwood will continue to do what we’ve been doing, which is investing in innovative ideas, looking at promising practices and models, but the policy and advocacy piece is wrapped around decisions that we make in Raleigh and Washington, DC. Unless we approach this in a multi-pronged way, there’s no amount of money that one or two organizations can pour into it that will fix it. We have to shift into an understanding that this is work for the public good.”