Atlanta Inn for Children
(Central Atlanta Hospitality Childcare Inc.)
Nancy A. Boxill, Ph.D., Executive Director
120 Renaissance Parkway
Atlanta, Ga. 30308
404-874-9535
505-874-9536 fax

Like Jack's beanstalk, this impressive model program grew slowly but vigorously from a very small seed: A newspaper article that caught the attention of Rosemary Strong, who was then the director of human resources for the Marriott Marquis hotel in Atlanta. The article mentioned a 24-hour child-care center that Smith-Kline-Beecham Corp. had established for its employees.

The concept rang an immediate bell for Strong, who knew that one of the most difficult barriers to employment for people in the hotel and hospitality industry is the reality that hotel jobs - from housekeeper to hotel manager - don't generally run from 9-to-5, making it particularly tough for single parents to accept employment at times when there's no way to care for the kids.

So she contacted John Wharton, president of AmeriCare Early Learning Centers, a Georgia business that specializes in operating employer-sponsored, onsite child-care facilities, and asked him how the Marriott could come up with something similar.

It didn't take long for this idea to grow into something far more impressive, and a great deal more difficult to pull together: Rather than establishing an onsite center for the Marriott, they pulled together a coalition of Atlanta hotels.

Rather than setting up a for-profit center, they created a non-profit corporation (which in turn eventually hired AmeriCare as facility manager) that would operate a major child-care facility that stays open during the hours when most day-care centers are closed, open at competitive rates to any family that needs child care during those hours, with grant-supported "scholarships" and state-provided subsidies available to low-income families who can't afford market rates. (The basic weekly rate ranges from $105 to $130 per child, depending on age, for 50 hours of care, with a sliding scale downward based on family income and size.)

Fifteen hotels were involved in the initial planning, Boxill said, a number that eventually shrunk to four (The Marriot Marquis, Marriott Suites, Omni and Hyatt). She laughingly says this may have been the salvation of the program, since even with only four hotels involved, the red tape involved with separate lawyers representing each hotel's owner, each hotel's manager, bond, tax and banking counsel meant that it took four years to get from the original concept to construction.

Particularly touchy issues included the unusual business and non-profit partnership, and defining the relationship between the sponsoring hotels -- which for tax and business reasons did not want to designate child care as an "employee benefit" -- and the center, which both philosophically and as a non-profit organization sought to be open to everyone, not just employees of the hotels. (In fact, Boxill pointed out, although many hotel families take advantage of the facility, so do scores of employees of a nearby hospital and MARTA, Atlanta's public-transit system.

It ultimately required $4.1 million to build the center, a large, bright and modern one-story facility on a street corner in a gentrifying neighborhood near downtown Atlanta, just a short walk from the four sponsoring hotels.

The operation is self-sustaining, its $900,000 (?) annual operating budget fully covered by fees, although under agreement with the bond counsel, each sponsoring hotel is responsible for paying for a certain number of slots whether its employees use them or not. This was an issue only during the early days, Boxill said; it took a few months for the center to build up toward capacity, but it's now at 243, virtually up to its licensed capacity of 250.

Also, although originally intended as a 24-hour center, experience quickly showed that there was simply no demand for that. Heavily used during the days and substantially during evenings, it's now operating from 5:30 a.m. until midnight, 6 days a week. As demand develops -- financial considerations require at least 30 children in order to justify opening the center's doors on a new shift -- they hope to expand that.

A tour of the facility revealed a happy place where both youngsters and staff seemed to be enjoying themselves on a sunny spring day, with lots of toys and smiles and safe playgrounds just outside every door. There's a commitment to quality here that shows in everything from sturdy white cribs for the little ones to brochures advising mothers how to (and how NOT to) deal gently and effectively with the little one who doesn't want to say good-bye for now.

The experience of Atlanta's Inn for Children shows that it's not easy to put together the financial package to make something like this happen; but they've done it very well, and in an era when the service economy creates more and more jobs that take mom away from home at odd hours, and when welfare reform means that mom is increasingly likely to have to work, this is a concept that needs replication. Boxill says Atlanta's Inn will be happy to work with folks from other communities who want to know more about how they did it.

All the feature stories on @GRASS-ROOTS.ORG's pages are reported and written by Robin Garr, a prize-winning journalist who has visited more than 500 innovative grassroots programs in all 50 states since 1990.

Browse his book, Reinvesting In America, at Amazon.com.

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