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It is a privilege to be here with you today to share with you some of the history of SSDN, our shared history, SSDN's current services, plans for the future, the economics of child care and how together we might lead by word and by example fulfilling William Greenleaf Eliot's motto "Be Silent and Do". Although I may not mention the source for all of the information I share with you today the credit for the content belongs to many¹ and if you are interested let me know and I will get you the source information.

In preparing for my presentation today I had the opportunity to review the history of SSDN and in reviewing this history learn more about your church's namesake- William Greenleaf Eliot and the rich heritage of which SSDN is a part. Some of you may have known S.J. Williamson Jr., a member of the First Unitarian Church, who died peacefully on Saturday, February 18th after 94 years of living. S.J. Williamson was the Board President of SSDN when I was hired 20 years ago and over the course of the past 20 years S.J. became my mentor and my friend. In the last three weeks of his life, I was working with him on the posters I brought with me today. It was important to S.J. that future generation of Unitarians would understand Unitarian's commitment to economic and social justice and that some members would continue the work at SSDN. These posters show the history of SSDN's founding, its shared heritage with many other institutions in St. Louis and the work it is now doing, 120 years after its founding. S.J.'s vision extended beyond the First Unitarian Church as he expected these posters to be shared at the Unitarian Universalist's National conference that will be held in St. Louis June 21st to June 25th of this year.

What I understand about William Greenleaf Eliot is that he led by word and by example, that his family's motto was "Be Silent and Do" and that he and the members of his congregation dedicated themselves to what we would call civic projects. St. Louis is the beneficiary of these people who put their faith into action; in many unnoticed, unrecorded deeds which nonetheless, in their cumulative power and effect, lifted and improved the conditions of individuals and society and through the creation of enduring institutions, including but not limited to the St. Louis Public Schools, Washington University, Mary Institute, City Art Museum, SSDN, and the Urban League of St. Louis.²

Most important to S.J. was what the 15 Unitarian Women "Did" and that in 1886 the Nursery was racially integrated. In 1886, SSDN's mission was stated as "The object of this Nursery shall be to prevent pauperism by assisting bread winners with young children on their hands to earn an honest living." SSDN was a radical attempt to end poverty and to give to working families with children a hands up. Radical comes from the same word as root. Radical programs are those that attempt to change the systems that keep families mired in poverty by attacking the root, or systemic causes of poverty.³ Thus SSDN was founded as an employment agency and a child care center. What was also radical about its founding is that it was in response to the need expressed by the people for whom the service was designed and not designed as if often the case without input from those who would be served. The story goes like this " One day after her infant had received particularly bad care from a neighbor, this mother, who was a seamstress, shared her dismay with her employer, who was a member of the Unity Church , saying that there is no safe place in St. Louis, where a mother can leave her child while she works. She went on to say that in Milwaukee where she had lived before; there were crèches which offered day care for working mothers. The idea was shared in the sewing circle of the fifteen women from the Church of the Unity-and these ladies then organized, raised the money, founded the South Side Day Nursery, and worked harder than they could have imagined to keep it going."⁴

Today SSDN continues its mission to prevent poverty- by promoting community well-being through an integrated approach that includes child, family and economic development services. SSDN is located in the 63118 zip code which is 74% minority with an annual medium household income of under $26,000 and one of the highest levels of children who test positive for lead poisoning in the City of St. Louis.

It is SSDN's belief that Economic Development is essential to preventing poverty and promoting community well-being.

SSDN's Economic Development services include The Cherokee Place Business Incubator and Individual Development Accounts or IDA's. IDA's are matched savings that enable the poor to acquire wealth. People on limited incomes generally need to spend everything they make just to survive-thus it is very difficult to rise out of poverty. IDA's provide a match for people's savings - 1:1 , 2:1 sometimes higher so that the person can accumulate enough to get a down payment for a home, make renovations on an existing home, start or expand a business, continue their education or purchase a vehicle.

The Cherokee Place Business Incubator - is an incubator with and without walls-outside of its wall it assists people to become licensed family child care providers, works to attract businesses to Cherokee Street and assists existing businesses with access to training and loans. SSDN has recently formed a partnership with the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce and will be opening a multicultural micro enterprise Center on the Cherokee Incubator campus. The Multicultural Micro enterprise Center will have a Spanish speaking business counselor on-site at all times, members of SCORE will be available for business counseling, the Black Chamber of Commerce will have an office and through the SBC there will be state of the art technological support for small business development. Within its walls, the Cherokee Place Business Incubator rents space to 12 retail and service businesses at prices below market rate and includes assistance with the business plan, joint marketing and small business development training. I encourage you to come shopping on Cherokee Street. The Incubator's anchor tenant is the South Side Outlet Store which provides brand-new name brand merchandize for the entire family including LL Bean, Lands End, Liz Claiborne, Sag Harbor and Gerber at 50% below the regular rates and 10% of whatever you purchase will be donated to your favorite charity. SSDN's first incubator graduate will be Proper Shoe. The owner has purchased a building on Cherokee Street and will be moving out of the incubator before the end of this year.

SSDN's early childhood and family development services include the original South Side Day Nursery Learning Center and an Early Care Network. The Early Care Network:

• provides a weekly home visitation program designed to assure that babies are born at healthy birth-weights, thrive in lead safe environments and grow up in safe homes
• assures the nutritional value of meals provided in family child care homes and assists those homes to deliver quality care and education
• and operates the South Side Infant and Family Center, a collaborative effort with Parents As Teachers and John Constantino from Washington University to provide a place where non-working parents with young children can come to be with other parents, play with their children and gain access to other needed community services

Future plans include a collaborative effort with Health Care for Kids, John Constantino and SSDN to develop a Center for Comprehensive Pediatric Care. Health Care for Kids would provide the health and dental services, John Constantino the mental health services and SSDN would provide the social services support to link families to other needed services.

I have been asked by Eliot Chapel's Social Responsibility Committee to focus on SSDN's economic development efforts and these efforts start with SSDN's core competency which is child care and education.

In 1989, SSDN started helping people who wanted to care for children in their homes to become licensed child care providers. SSDN's used its competency in helping develop child care micro enterprise to launch its business incubator on Cherokee Street. Since 2002, SSDN has helped over 100 homes and centers become licensed. These licensed child care facilities have created more than 200 jobs. The Cherokee Place Business Incubator has helped launch more than 20 retail and services business which have created more than 40 new jobs. SSDN has developed a model for its family child care home network that addresses both the economic and social return of early childhood education.

SSDN's model for family child care home providers helps to improve both the economic condition of the provider and the quality of care. The model assists providers to move from babysitting, to becoming a registered provider, to becoming a licensed provider, to becoming an accredited provider to becoming an Early Head Start- Head Start family child care home provider. As annual gross income increases from $13,000 to over $113,000 the quality of care and education improves as does the economic impact of the family child care home provider's business.

For a long while, early childhood care and education has been portrayed and treated as a private family issue. In other words, it was only the parents' responsibility to make sure their children got what they needed to be ready for success in school and ultimately later life. It was only their job to negotiate the highly competitive and expensive marketplace of child care and early education, and to find ways to bridge the gaps. We all sympathized with them, especially those with few resources, but we didn't see the cords that tie their situation directly to our own lives, our society and our economy. We didn't fully understand how closely their private struggles relate to public social and economic issues.⁵

Both the Federal Reserve and the Committee for Economic Development in Washington D.C. have recently been presenting conferences and publishing papers on "The Economics of Early Childhood Development: Lessons for Economic Policy." They are using the Nobel laureate James Heckman's work to promote the investment in early childhood as a viable community development tool. James Heckman has concluded that early investments in children produce greater economic returns than do investments later in life and that there is no way to disentangle early childhood care and education from the roots of our economy. Cost benefit analysis have been done on two longitudinal studies. The 1960's Perry Preschool Project from Ypsilanti, Michigan and the 1970's Abecedarian Project from Chapel Hill, North Carolina show that $1.00 invested in early childhood care and education have produced benefits in the range of $2 - $8. These benefits have been in higher graduation rates, post secondary education, higher wages, less crime and less dependency on welfare. This work is encouraging states and cities to view early education as a community development tool with a better return on investment than the more traditional economic incentives offered to businesses.⁶

Annual City government spending for traditional economic development initiatives amount to between 2-4 billon dollars each year nationwide and some of these incentives could be used to invest in early childhood care and education.⁷

In July 2005, Missouri joined over 20 states and numerous municipalities in studying the impact of child care on the economy. This study found that child care is a critical Missouri industry on many levels. Regulated child care in Missouri:

• Employs 34,000 people in 5,000 small businesses - 98.6% of the child care businesses in Missouri are owned by women and 21% are owned by minority women-
• Supports 120,000 workers in other industries - those who use child care are in every industry- at every level of employment from the shop floor to the corner office
• Produces $635 million in gross annual receipts
• Pays over $400 million per year in wages and purchases over $83 million each year in consumables and utilities
• Leverages $255 million in federal funds
• Generates $6 billion in total outputs- is 3% of all state output
• Prepares $181,000 children for long-term workplace success⁸

Unlike all other forms of education, and despite its significant long-term benefits, child care receives limited government (tax) support. It is treated solely as a market rather than a public good. The fact of the matter is that parents can not afford to pay any more and early childhood caregivers-teachers can not afford to take any less. Child Care programs are forced to subsidize the industry by paying low wages. When the child care system fails, everyone suffers. Children receive substandard care, the field is plagued by high turnover, workplace productive is sapped and children enter schools not fully prepared to succeed.⁹

The average take home pay for family child care owner-operators is under $14,000. The average annual wage for a child care center teacher is just over $16,000 and for a child care center director just over $27,000.¹⁰

If you have not read the 2001 New York Times' Bestseller Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich, I recommend it as a way to understand the day to day challenges that are faced by those served by SSDN. The average annual income of those served by SSDN is less than $13,000. Ms. Ehrenreich shares with us that 94% of Americans agree that "people who work fulltime should be able to earn enough to keep their families out of poverty". She says that she grew up hearing over and over, to the point of tedium, that "hard work" was the secret of success. "Work hard and you'll get ahead" or "It's hard work that got us where we are." No one ever said that you could work hard, harder than you ever thought possible, and still find yourself sinking ever deeper into poverty and debt.¹¹ I want to share a long quote from Ms. Ehrenreich's book that is difficult to hear and for me epitomizes a struggle I live with daily.

When poor single mothers had the option of remaining out of the labor force on welfare, the middle and upper middle class tended to view them with a certain impatience, if not disgust. The welfare poor were excoriated for their laziness, their persistence in reproducing in unfavorable circumstances, their presumed addictions and above all for their "dependency". Here they were content to live off "government handouts instead of seeking self sufficiency like everyone else through a job. But now that the government has largely withdrawn its handouts and now that the overwhelming majority of the poor are out there toiling in Wal-mart or Wendy's or in child care-- what are we to think of them. Guilt you may be thinking warily. Isn't that what we're supposed to feel? But guilt doesn't go anywhere near far enough. According to Ms. Ehrenreich, the appropriate emotion is shame--- shame at our own dependency, in this case on the underpaid labor of others. When someone works for less pay than she can live on - when, for example, she goes hungry so that we can eat more cheaply, more conveniently-then she has made a great sacrifice for us, she has made us a gift of some part of her abilities, her health and her life. The working poor are in fact the major philanthropists of our society. They neglect their own children so that the children of others will be cared for, they live in substandard housing so that other homes will be shiny and perfect, they endure privation so that inflation will be low and stock prices high. To be a member of the working poor is to be an anonymous donor, a nameless benefactor to everyone else.¹² SSDN not only serves the working poor, but those who provide the child care so that the working poor can get to their jobs are also the working poor. I share in the shame Ms. Ehrenreich points out.

In the history of our Unitarian ancestors, this presents us with an opportunity to be radical-to change society's structures- through personal volunteering and institutional change. On a personal level SSDN is always in need of volunteers:

• to work with children
• families
• or mentor small businesses

Funding is needed:

• to provide scholarships for the children of working parents
• to endow an early childhood teaching chair so that those who teach our youngest children can make a living wage
• to assist a neighborhood entrepreneur to realize a dream

Another way to support the work of SSDN would be to write a letter to Senators Bond and Talent in support of SSDN's appropriation request for the Cherokee Place Business Incubator and the Center for Comprehensive Pediatric Care. Copies of these requests will be available on the table after the service and I will be available to answer questions and dialogue with you.

To change society's structure- you can lend your voices to the campaign to establish a universal child care system- in which early childhood is seen as the first step in the education of our children, not as a market to succeed or fail on its own, advocate for increasing the state's child care subsidy eligibility and the reimbursement rates-and support increased funding for Early Head Start and Head Start.

I'd like to close with words from the program in 1985 celebrating 150 year of Unitarianism:

Those Unitarians who have gone before us, our spiritual ancestors, have bequeathed to us a legacy in which we take rightful pride. It remains for us of the church of today and tomorrow to carry on this heritage of faith and vision. Cherishing and living by the ideals and purposes which those who came before us so nobly served, and looking forward in hope to a future for our church and our free faith which is at least as grand as the past. By our lives may we ensure the prophecy and the faith of William Greenleaf Eliot¹³ - may we be guided by the motto "Be Silent and Do" and thus lead by word and by example.

Amen

For Further Information, Questions or Comments Contact:

Marlene Levine, Ed.D
CEO SSDN
2930 Iowa
St. Louis, MO 63118
314 333-7100

Footnotes

1. In addition to the other references listed in the footnotes information for this presentation was provided by Vicki Carlson, Jackie Jones and Maggi Carfield
2. Taken from the First Unitarian Church of Saint Louis Sesquicentennial Celebration, Program April 28, 1985- Graham Memorial Chapel Washington University.
3. Taking from presentation by Suzanne Meyer, Pastor First Unitarian Church, on February 3, 2006 at the Collage of Hope Event for participants in the 2006 Annual Event of the Association of Presbyterian Church Educators.
4. History of SSDN 1886 to the present. Contact Sheila Davis, Community Relations Director, for further information.
5. The Economics of Early Childhood Development: Lessons for Economic Policy, October 17, 2003 Conference sponsored by the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis and Early Childhood Development, Minneapolis Fed Special Study
6. Ibid
7. Ibid
8. Child Care Keeps America Working: The Missouri Child Care Industry Economic Impact Report, 2005. 314- 535-1458, 1-800-200-9017 www.moccrrn.org email:
9. Ibid
10. Ibid
11. Barbara Ehrenreich, Nickle and Dimed. (2001) Owl Books. New York: New York. P 220
12. Barbara Ehrenreich, Nickle and Dimed. (2001) Owl Books. New York: New York. P 220-221
13. Taken from the First Unitarian Church of Saint Louis Sesquicentennial Celebration, Program April 28, 1985- Graham Memorial Chapel Washington University.