In Mission to Support Families, Santa Barbara Foundation Offers Child Care Scholarships

Sponsored Content Presented by the Santa Barbara Foundation

Since 1928, the Santa Barbara Foundation has harnessed the compassion of our community into tangible action that makes Santa Barbara County a better place. A core priority in their services is supporting families. One of the many ways they accomplish this is by increasing working parents’ access to quality child care. Read on to learn more about their child care scholarship program and the many other philanthropic efforts they catalyze.

What does your business or organization offer to Santa Barbara parents?
The Santa Barbara Foundation (SBF) offers child care scholarships to working parents via grants to nonprofit child care providers and pre-schools. These grants are administered through the William and Lottie Daniel Fund Child Care Scholarships. There are a certain number of scholarships available for each child’s age group, including infant, toddler, pre-school and school-age. We encourage parents to ask their child care providers about scholarships. 

SBF collaborates with Children’s Resource and Referral of Santa Barbara County and the Santa Barbara County Education Office’s Child Care Planning Council to assist child care providers with workforce support, technical assistance, and business model and facilities planning.

SBF’s child care scholarships also support professional development for staff and teachers, including curriculum for children with disabilities, family engagement, and English Language Development (ELD).

The application period for child care capacity building grants for child care businesses will be open from August 21–September 20. Visit this link for more information. 

What are the costs associated with your services?
There are no costs to parents or organizations who collaborate with SBF. Grants are funded by donors and other sources.

What are the unique benefits of your services?
As a community foundation, we bring together organizations, funding, experts, and thought leadership to make Santa Barbara a better place. We also communicate with our local government and community members about needs and opportunities. This advocacy led to major grants this year, so that we could expand child care capacity across Santa Barbara County. 

Who is behind your organization, and what is their background and experience?
The Santa Barbara Foundation has been serving our county for 95 years. It was originally founded by Santa Barbara community-minded philanthropists and has grown with the generous giving of donors and gifts of all sizes. Our current CEO Jackie Carrera has been at the helm for five years, following a wide-ranging career in Foundation and nonprofit leadership.

What are the top priorities of the Santa Barbara Foundation?
Our mission is to mobilize collective wisdom and philanthropic resources to build empathetic, inclusive, and resilient communities in Santa Barbara County. Our current strategic priorities include basic needs fulfillment for our county’s most vulnerable, workforce development and child care for working families, support for our social sector, access to healthcare, and digital equity.

How does the Santa Barbara Foundation help support parents and families?
Our grants fund child care scholarships for providers. We are also undertaking an initiative with recent funding from the County of Santa Barbara to significantly increase the number of child care openings by supporting child care centers, neighborhood/family/extended-family child care providers, and more.

Scholarships are made available to nonprofit organizations that provide quality child care for working families.

Santa Barbara County awarded SBF $1,125,000 in ARPA funds to implement childcare sector recovery and resiliency efforts due to the effects of COVID-19.

We also award grants to nonprofits in support of health care, behavioral health, food and shelter, and safety.

How do you identify the areas of greatest need in the community?
We conduct research, convene stakeholders, and cultivate relationships among government, business, education, nonprofits, funders, and individuals who share their lived experience in order to identify and respond to critical issues in Santa Barbara County.

With your 2018-2023 focus on vulnerable populations, working, families, and the social sector, what have you done so far, and what are you planning to do to help these groups? 
We are expanding our grantmaking to local nonprofits and making it easier for nonprofits to apply. For example, we expanded our grant cycle from one to two years so nonprofits can spend less time on grant applications and more time doing their great work.

We fund organizations that offer critical basic needs to our most vulnerable community members such as food, shelter and safety, behavioral health, and health care.

We also sponsored the recent State Street Job Fair in Santa Barbara, Partners in Education’s paid internship expansion to North County and the energy sector, Allan Hancock College’s Career Fair, and Santa Barbara City College’s ESL Peer Advising for Student Success Program.

See above for scope of our work to support working families.

Credit: Courtesy

How can people get involved in helping the Santa Barbara Foundation accomplish their goals?
Donations of any size to our Community Engagement Fund make a direct impact on our neighbors in need by helping to fund our grants for direct service providers countywide.

How do you find donors to support your initiatives?
We connect deeply throughout Santa Barbara County, we appeal to donors directly, and we provide donors with an array of services to achieve their philanthropic goals.

What are some of your greatest achievements this year?
Our Annual Report contains details about four of our favorite achievements: 

• We administered more than $1,000,000 to more than 160 local businesses in disaster relief grants. We were thrilled to help business owners and service providers wrangle the long-term economic impacts of the pandemic, so they can continue to provide their wonderful services to our community.
• We started the Digital Equity Coalition, which is a collaborative program that aims to equip Santa Barbara County communities with the information, insight, skills, devices, and connectivity to offer equitable online access for all residents. Amazingly, 8 percent of county residents have no access to reliable internet!
• Our Community Healthcare Workers/Promotores (CHW/P) Capacity Building Collaborative ensures that our local communities have access to health care education and support navigating care systems.
• Our Conservation, Environment, and Public Trails Fund provides grants to local organizations working to ensure that Santa Barbara County residents have sustainable access to outdoor spaces and that our natural environment is preserved for generations to come.

Are there opportunities for S.B. youth to get involved in volunteering for the Santa Barbara Foundation?
We encourage young people to develop their community service, workforce skills, and philanthropic giving by volunteering with any of our wonderful local nonprofit partners, or by making donations of any size to the Foundation. Their gifts will be put to use serving their community’s greatest needs. 

Santa Barbara Foundation
South County Headquarters: 1111 Chapala St., Ste. 200
(805) 963-1875
sbfoundation.org

This content was supplied and paid for by Santa Barbara Foundation