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There is nothing like the honesty of a child.
“My favorite thing is lots of things. I like everything here,” said Starr, a three-year-old girl at the Winchester Learning Center. “I like coloring and painting. I know how to spell my name now.”
The Winchester Learning Center is a “grassroots miracle,” declares Executive Director, Penny Vaine, who appreciates the feedback from her young charges.
With donated space in the basement of the United Church of Winchester, a $30,000 loan from the Loan Fund for renovations and start-up expenses, and individual support, the facility is an early learning success story.
In 1996, a small group of families wanted to fill the huge gap of quality childcare in their southwest New Hampshire town. At the time, there were only three licensed home care providers and no childcare centers in the area, leaving many working families out in the cold.
Determined, the group stuck with it…for five years.
“This group faced numerous challenges. From scratch, they had to establish the nonprofit child care organization, build an effective board of directors, write a business plan, find the right place for children and raise money in one of the most stressed areas of New Hampshire—an area in which 20% of children live in poverty,” said Julie McConnell, the director of the Loan Fund’s Childcare Program. “The community of Winchester was engaged!”
By 2001, the doors of the Winchester Learning Center opened. The brightly painted walls, new cabinets and bathroom were the most recognizable changes, although less obvious were upgrades of insulation, wiring and plumbing.
Today, 37 children ranging in ages from two to five years old attend the facility, with 12 other children on a waiting list. Six paid positions have also been filled there.
“This is a good example of how a small amount of money can make a huge amount of difference,” said McConnell.
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A modest amount of money can sometimes go a long, long way.
No one knows that better than the educators and parents at the nonprofit cooperative Children’s Workshop in Barrington, who faced a crisis in December 2001.
“We needed desperate help to pay our debts and we had to rebuild the back wall in a classroom which was falling apart,” said 29-year-old Crystal Coggeshall, who was director of the center at the time. “We were about to close.”
But with a $7,500 loan from the Loan Fund, the doors remained opened, bills were paid and renovations were completed. New programs flourished and the institution transformed from a part-day pre-school into a comprehensive full-day center which offers childcare and educational programs to 50 area children.
“We were able to quickly step in and help save a valuable community-based program,” said Julie McConnell, director of the Loan Fund’s Childcare Facilities program. “The Loan Fund has a nimbleness that other financial institutions don’t have.”
Systems analyst Mike Kreps and his wife, a homecare nurse, send their eight-year-old daughter, Emily to the Children’s Workshop. Commuters to Boston, the center is important to all of them.
“Without it, we’d have to scramble,” said Kreps. “The Children’s Workshop not only supplies us with a good service but it is affordable to us. It’s hard to find a balance of the two.”
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Seventy-four-year-old Richard Smith knows a good thing when he sees it.
“I moved here with my wife three weeks ago, and I love the whole place,” said the New Hampshire native in the common space of two renovated pre-Civil War buildings at Harper Acres, an elderly and disabled housing facility run by the Keene Housing Authority (KHA).
In 2001, the historic brick buildings, once housing for millworkers in the 1800s, were on the brink of demolition to make way for a shopping center. Supported by citizens, the Keene Housing Authority had to quickly line up financing to move the 350-ton buildings two blocks from their original foundations to Harper Acres and then to rehab them.
“Without access to the $150,000 loan from the Loan Fund, we would have been unable to make the project happen,” said Curtis Hiebert, chief executive officer of the Keene Housing Authority. “This was the final piece of the jigsaw puzzle.”
The housing group wanted a comfortable indoor place for residents to go.
“A lot of residents live in single rooms and don’t have space to entertain,” said Lola Grab of KHA. “Our idea was that it would be an extension of their home, like a living room.”
Today, the once-dilapidated quarters are spacious and bright, overlooking the Ashuelot River, and complete with laundry facilities. Families and residents have taken note.
“My kids are going to put on a big party right here for my75th birthday this fall,” said Smith. “I’m lucky. I’m a lucky man.”
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