Investing in tomorrow means something different once you look past the loan itself.
A dollar deployed to a childcare provider is easy to log as a single transaction. It closes, it’s counted, it moves on to the next application. But that dollar was never just funding one business.
Three futures, one loan
When we finance a home-based childcare provider, we’re funding the child in that provider’s care, the parent who can go to work because of it, and the provider building something of their own. Each outcome depends on the one before it. A parent’s ability to work depends on the provider’s capacity to operate. The provider’s capacity to operate depends on capital sized for a home-based business, often difficult to access through conventional channels.
A provider who can operate reliably becomes something the families and small businesses around her depend on, quietly, every day. That’s the case for treating childcare financing as its own category, not a smaller version of a standard small business loan.
Where this started
Our Childcare Provider Initiative began in New York in 2018, paired with coaching from day one. The results are the evidence the model works: more than $1 million in capital delivered to nearly 100 licensed childcare providers, and 100% of those borrowers used their loan to grow or expand their business.
In 2025, we brought that same model to California, in partnership with LIIF and Working Solutions CDFI. [Note to Sofi/Gustavo: California scale figures pending updated numbers from Gustavo’s separate email, not included here yet.]
What this means for our partners
For funders and partners, this is the case for treating childcare financing as its own category of investment. A dollar deployed through a model built around a provider’s real operating needs does more than fund one transaction. It funds a parent’s ability to work, a child’s care, and a small business owner’s path to the same kind of growth capital any other entrepreneur can access.
That’s what investing in tomorrow means from where our partners sit: not simply funding more childcare slots, but funding the people on every side of that one loan.
Trusted Sources
On the Ascendus, LIIF, and Working Solutions CDFI partnership in California: https://www.ascendus.org/press/childcare-provider-launch-california/
This Way Up.
