Welcome To Advance Child Care, Inc.
The philosophy behind the longevity and success of Advance Child Care is simply:
“There Is A Solution to Every Problem, No matter how Complex or Simple.”
When we allow ourselves to be governed by conventional wisdom, we become blind to a multitude of possibilities.
No matter what mission this non-profit has taken on over the past thirty-four years, Advance Child Care utilizes a methodical process of identifying the barriers to success and building a blueprint to break down those barriers.
Advance Child Care was established as one of the first mom-and-pop day care centers to operate under a non-profit 501 (c)3 agency. This bold move allowed Candy Cane Corner to qualify for subsidy funding under the USDA Child and Adult Care Food Program (CACFP) and minimize agency expenditures through tax exemption. This agency expanded to a four-center system by expanding into rural communities of approximately 20,000 population. This tactical move into rural areas versus larger cities allowed Candy Cane Corner to be the predominant child care center in their communities in short order. …thus, guaranteeing a constant 90% the capacity rate for most of the twenty-seven years this childcare division existed.
In 2000, Advance Child Care took advantage of its 501 (c)3 status to create a new division that allowed Advance Child Care to sponsor unaffiliated childcare centers into the CACFP program. Again, this sponsorship identified the barriers that created hardships for centers desiring to participate in the CACFP, as well as labor-intensive processes on the sponsor. This agency created several automated tools through the latest technological advances to build one of the first web-based CACFP management systems in the United States. Many of the management tools created by Advance Child Care are in use by other CACFP systems today.
Based on Advance Child Care’s web-based system, cooks at child care centers could utilize automated calculations for their food production records (in lieu of manual kitchen math), which cut center food service labor costs by up to 25%. Also, this CACFP Sponsor was able to grade meal production records in a matter of seconds through this automated web-based process versus having to hire a large staff to manually grade menus over a three-week process, thus allowing Advance Child Care to cut CACFP labor costs by 45%. The automated processes that Advance Child Care has been able to develop and implement through the last twenty-three years have helped expand this CACFP Sponsorship to the second largest sponsorship in Texas, with over 400 child care centers participating under Advance Child Care, Inc.
With the success of the CACFP Division, Advance Child Care sold off its child care center division in 2016. The surplus of funds earned from that sale has now allowed Advance Child Care to transform into an Intergenerational Agency.
Advancing Communities Forward (ACF) is this non-profit agency’s economic community development division, designed to assist rural communities in which many of their CACFP client centers are located.
With a presence in more than 150 communities statewide, CACFP staff witness the barriers that poverty creates in the everyday lives of childcare staff we work closely with and the 35,000+ families that depend on these childcare centers for their children’s upbringing. In many cases, families suffer because the community they live in struggles to provide essential services. It is the goal of ACF to seek out funding from third-party companies to subsidize our own agency’s funding to provide needed economic development for these communities.
One essential service that is paramount in today’s economy is senior housing in rural areas. Advancing Communities Forward has made senior housing a priority for our agency and the communities we service with the CACFP.
