The Child Care Resource Center (CCRC) and Beansprout.net have partnered to help child care centers get on-line.  This partnership evolved from a shared commitment to promoting the elements of professionalism, competitive marketing, and enhanced communication with families.  Through a short training which details the entire process of building a site, a center designs its own website and goes on-line!

Establishing an Internet presence has become extremely important for the child care community.  The obvious reason is to improve communications with the families a center serves and meet the expectations that many computer savvy parents have for businesses, including child care centers.  However, other reasons to have a website are to educate prospective families about a center’s services, have a valuable resource that supports a center’s work with children and families, and increase business efficiency so that the center can concentration on children’s growth and development.  The labor involved for this endeavor is minimal because templates and text that may be edited and customized for each center are provided.

The process is a single 2 ½ hour training session (there are trainings offered during the week and on Saturdays).   Instructors explain every page of the website along with how to make changes future and add information where there is no template.

For the registration fee of $30.00, a center gets:

• its own customized website in just a few hours

• hands on assistance in a peer setting

• free hosting of the website on the Beansprout Network

• technical assistance in making future changes or additions to the website

• a welcome kit, with gifts for staff and families

• posters and outreach materials to announce that a center is on-line

• 2.5 hours which meet the Office of Child Care Services’ training requirements

• connections to families through Beansprout Networks’ own marketing efforts

• entry into a drawing to receive a computer for their center once the website is published

Trainings will be held throughout the spring, at CCRC, located in Central Square, Cambridge (on the MBTA Red Line).   Computer experience is not required; however, the best person to attend the training is the person who will continue to update and modify your website.  See the fall training calendar for specific times and dates.

WELCOME . . .

to The Colonnade Hotel from the Employer Services Department at CCRC.  We are extremely excited to help guide you through the often complex puzzle of child care.  Thank you for choosing CCRC!

New Program Director Announced

Jennifer Baily has been announced as the new Program Director at CCRC.  Ms. Baily had been Manager of CCRC’s Employer and Community Services since 1993.

CCRC Strategic Planning Project in Full Swing

Faced with its first major strategic overhaul in nearly a decade, CCRC wanted to move beyond its existing high-energy relationships and program activities in the community and open its eyes and ears to the full range of people and entities that are affected by child care in the year 2000. The world of child care has changed tremendously in recent years because of welfare reform, the internet among other forces, and CCRC has found an interesting way to widen the sometimes narrow focus of a strategic planning process

With support from consultants Paul Wasserman and Associates of Wellesley, MA, CCRC has held eight community focus groups with parents and child care professionals, completed more than 25 key informant interviews and conducted a literature search on everything from child care web sites to voter responses to child care issues.   The results have been both inspiring and thought-provoking as participants have detailed positive, innovative (but sometimes widely divergent) ideas about what child care resource and referral services should look like and how they can best serve the community.

Now, twelve months into its anticipated 18-month duration, the strategic planning project’s assessment phase is nearly complete and the agency is moving to the planning phase with a clear appreciation for what is happening to families, child care professionals, employers, activists and policy-makers.  In addition to a new 5-year-plan for itself, CCRC is exploring ways through which to inform other service providers about what it has learned.  Ideas include a published report and a community-based forum which would promote further discussion and collaboration.

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