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Child Care Providers and Public Charter Schools

Supporting Quality Care and Education

Child care. True community-building must extend beyond housing and direct economic development. Quality child care is essential to supporting working parents and giving kids a healthy start in life. More than two decades ago, Self-Help was an early pioneer in providing financing for child care providers, with a focus on female business owners who serve low-income communities.

Public charter schools. Self-Help began lending to public charter schools in 1998, seeking to support social entrepreneurs who were working to provide strong educational choices in low-income communities. We focus on high-performing schools that prioritize service to children poorly served by existing options.

To date, our loans have helped create 84,000 school and childcare spaces.

Success for Every Student

Blackstone Valley Prep (BVP) is a nonprofit public charter school in Rhode Island that serves mostly low-income elementary students. A $3.9 million loan from Self-Help helped BVP expand to accommodate nearly 1,000 more students.

Healthy Foods in Schools

Find out more about an innovative strategy for improving the eating habits of students in a low-resource community in rural North Carolina. The program is called SPOON, Student Power Over Our Nutrition. Watch our video.

Charter School Policy Work

Self-Help is an active member of the Charter School Lenders Coalition working at the federal level to ensure that high quality charter schools serving low-income children have access to facilities funding. Self-Help also works on charter school policies in North Carolina and provides advice in numerous other states.  In 2014 Self-Help partnered with the A.J. Fletcher Foundation in convening over 40 education leaders to shed light on the challenges and opportunities of North Carolina's expanding charter school sector. The resulting report, N.C. Charter Schools: Excellence and Equity through Collaboration, recommends strategies to increase equity between charter and traditional district schools, to expand collaboration between the charter sector and traditional district schools, and to enhance the quality of all public education opportunities for all North Carolina students.