Building Capacity, Building Community: How Coffeyville Came Together for Child Care
When people think about child care, they often picture the children first: classrooms filled with activity, teachers helping young learners discover something new, or parents dropping their children off before heading to work. What can be harder to see is everything that has to happen behind the scenes to make those moments possible, and the way reliable child care can shape an entire community.
In Coffeyville, Kansas, that work began with a simple question: What would it take to make child care available to the families who need it, including families whose work schedules don’t fit the traditional 9-to-5?
For its commitment to building child care capacity and bringing community partners together to create solutions, the Coffeyville Area Childcare Coalition has been recognized by Child Care Aware of Kansas as a Child Care Community Champion. The recognition celebrates a journey built on persistence, local partnerships and a willingness to keep looking for solutions when the path forward wasn’t always clear.
At the center of that journey is Sharon Brown, who helped bring the coalition together and turn an unconventional idea into a new child care resource for Coffeyville.
A Need Hiding in Plain Sight
The idea started with a question from Brown’s son: “Mom, why don’t we start doing overnight child care?” he asked.
At first, Brown thought the idea was “a little crazy.” But the more she considered it, the more she realized that Coffeyville had a need that wasn’t being met. Families in the community worked early mornings, evenings and overnight shifts, and traditional child care schedules didn’t always work for them. Brown and her husband began looking for a larger space where they could provide the additional bedding, mats and equipment that overnight care would require. What they discovered was bigger than the needs of one child care program: There simply wasn’t a place in Coffeyville designed to meet the needs of families working nontraditional hours.
That realization led Brown to pursue a Child Care Aware of Kansas Community Partnership Grant. The grant required her to form a coalition—a step that Brown now considers one of the most important parts of the entire process. “I don’t think it would have happened if I wouldn’t have done that,” she said, reflecting on the requirement to bring community members together. “It just brought so many people together to help.”
Rather than trying to solve the problem alone, Brown began inviting people from across Coffeyville to join the effort. The coalition included representatives from the Chamber, Montgomery County Action Council, the City of Coffeyville, Parents as Teachers, banking and other community organizations, along with people who brought experience in grant writing, community engagement and child care.
The diversity of the group quickly became one of its greatest assets. People came to the table with different perspectives, connections, and expertise, but they shared a common understanding: If Coffeyville wanted to grow, families needed access to child care that worked for their lives.
Building a Coalition from the Ground Up
Coalitions don’t become effective simply because people agree that a problem exists. They become effective when people are willing to contribute their time, knowledge and resources to doing something about it. For Brown, that meant surrounding the project with people who could help tackle challenges she couldn’t solve by herself. Some members helped connect her to community resources, others provided expertise in areas such as grant writing, and still others helped open doors with local businesses and organizations. One particularly important partnership came through the banking community.
A member of Brown’s coalition told Brown that her husband, Mike Ewy of Community State Bank, was willing to provide property behind the bank for the project. The offer carried an unexpected connection to Coffeyville’s own child care history: When the couple had first moved to the community years earlier, they had struggled to find child care themselves. The property had originally been purchased for the bank with child care in mind. This, Brown believed, was a sign.
Years later, that same property became part of the solution Brown and the coalition were working to create. It was a reminder that child care challenges are not new, and that the people experiencing those challenges today may eventually become the people helping solve them for the next generation.
The coalition also faced the practical challenge of securing the funding required to move the project forward. Brown needed matching funds to apply for grants, and a local foundation stepped in to help complete the match. A fellow coalition member with grant-writing experience, Charlee Brown, helped Sharon navigate the application process, particularly the more complex Accelerator Grant.
Then came another obstacle: The coalition was not itself a 501(c)(3) organization and needed a fiscal agent to receive and administer grant funding. Finding an organization willing and able to take on that role took months. Eventually, Genesis of Coffeyville, a local food pantry led by coalition member Linda Follett, agreed to serve as the coalition’s fiscal agent.
Each hurdle could have brought the project to a stop. Instead, the coalition kept finding another way forward.
Coalitions don’t become effective simply because people agree that a problem exists. They become effective when people are willing to contribute their time, knowledge and resources to doing something about it.
When Businesses See Child Care as Workforce Infrastructure
As the project developed, the connection between child care and local businesses became increasingly clear. The need for nontraditional care was not theoretical. Brown knew that Coffeyville had businesses operating overnight, along with employees whose schedules began long before a traditional child care center would open. The new center was designed to respond to those realities.
Today, the center opens as early as 3:30 a.m. to accommodate parents who begin work early. While overnight care is not yet consistently full enough to sustain evening and overnight staffing, Brown sees the potential. She points to the four Coffeyville businesses known to operate overnight as evidence that the need exists and may continue to grow as families learn that nontraditional care is available.
That flexibility matters not only to parents, but also to employers. When employees can find dependable child care that aligns with their schedules, they have fewer reasons to miss work, change shifts or leave employment altogether. For businesses, that can mean a larger pool of potential employees and fewer workforce barriers standing between qualified workers and available jobs.
Brown articulated that connection clearly when reflecting on the coalition’s impact. The center helps parents work without worrying about whether their children are safe and cared for, she explained, while businesses gain access to a broader pool of potential employees. She also hopes that the availability of child care will make Coffeyville more attractive to families and businesses considering the community.
That is the ripple effect of child care infrastructure. A child care opening may begin with one child and one family, but the impact doesn’t stop there. A parent can go to work, an employer can fill a position, a business can maintain its workforce, a family can remain in the community, and a community can become better positioned to attract new residents and employers. In Coffeyville, the coalition began with a child care need and gradually uncovered an economic development opportunity.
Local Businesses Invest in a Local Solution
Even more than grant funding, turning the vision into a physical child care center required local businesses to recognize that they had a stake in the outcome. As construction costs increased because of inflation and unexpected building expenses, the project came up short on funding. Brown and the coalition once again turned to their community.
Coffeyville Resources ultimately contributed $100,000 to help close the funding gap. Brown credited Jamie Armstrong of Coffeyville Resources with helping communicate the project’s needs and connect the coalition with the company’s leadership. Acme Foundry also contributed $2,500, while individuals throughout the community provided additional financial support.
Other businesses contributed in ways that went beyond writing a check. Decker Construction, through Jason McVey, helped Brown navigate construction decisions and find ways to make the center work. The company ultimately donated a large exterior sign that makes the center visible from the highway.
Together, those contributions demonstrate an important part of Coffeyville’s story: Building child care capacity doesn’t necessarily require one organization to carry the entire burden. It requires a community willing to recognize that the problem belongs to everyone, and that everyone has something to contribute.
Building child care capacity doesn’t necessarily require one organization to carry the entire burden. It requires a community willing to recognize that the problem belongs to everyone, and that everyone has something to contribute.
A New Kind of Child Care for Coffeyville
When the center finally opened, the community was ready. The project had taken longer than expected because of the fiscal-agent process, architectural issues, and funding challenges, but the delays only seemed to increase the community’s anticipation. Brown recalled people seeing teachers wearing the center’s shirts around town and asking when the new facility would finally open.
The result was a child care center designed to offer something Coffeyville had not previously had: care that could accommodate families with schedules outside the traditional workday.
The center now provides early-morning care and has the infrastructure to eventually expand its evening and overnight offerings as demand grows. For workers in health care, manufacturing and other industries with nontraditional schedules, that flexibility could make the difference between being able to accept a job and having to turn it down. For employers, the availability of child care can help remove one more barrier to recruiting and retaining workers.
Brown’s vision extends beyond the current center. If she had unlimited resources, her first priority would be creating more centers modeled on what Coffeyville has built—particularly in other communities that could benefit from flexible child care options. That ambition reflects how far the project has come. What began as a question about overnight child care has become a broader vision for community infrastructure.
The Power of Not Giving Up
The Coffeyville Area Childcare Coalition’s journey was not easy. There were funding challenges. There were administrative barriers. There were construction delays and unexpected costs. There were moments when moving forward seemed much harder than walking away. Brown’s advice to other communities is simple: “Don’t ever give up.”
She remembers how tempting it could be to decide the work was simply too difficult. What kept the project moving was the small group of coalition members who continued meeting, encouraging one another, and believing in what they were building. That persistence may be one of the coalition’s most important accomplishments.
Communities rarely solve complex child care challenges with one grant, one building, or one organization. More often, progress comes through a series of small decisions: someone agrees to join a coalition, a business offers property, a foundation provides a match, a grant writer lends expertise, a company makes an investment, a contractor goes the extra mile. Over time, those individual contributions become something much larger.
“If people don’t have child care… it affects everything in the community.”
Building a Community Where Families and Businesses Can Grow
The Coffeyville Area Childcare Coalition’s work illustrates why child care is about much more than the number of available slots. It is about whether parents can participate in the workforce, whether employers can recruit from the full community, and whether employees can reliably show up for their shifts without scrambling to find someone to watch their children. It is about whether families considering a move to Coffeyville can see the community as a place where they can build a life, and it is about whether a community is willing to invest in the infrastructure that makes all of those things possible.
Brown understands that the center’s impact reaches well beyond the children who walk through its doors. She sees the parents who can go to work, the businesses that can broaden their hiring pools and the community that may become more attractive to future residents and employers. “If people don’t have child care,” she said, “it affects everything in the community.” That may be the clearest description of Coffeyville’s journey.
The coalition did not set out to solve every child care challenge in the community. It started by listening to a need, bringing people together, and finding a way to create something that didn’t exist before. Now, the community has a new child care resource, local businesses have invested in its success, and families have another option for care that fits their working lives.
The Child Care Community Champion Award recognizes that accomplishment, but the story of Coffeyville’s coalition is ultimately about what happens when a community refuses to treat child care as someone else’s problem. One family asked whether overnight care was possible. A group of community members decided to find out. Together, they built something that could help Coffeyville’s children, families, businesses and economy grow—one child care space at a time.
A note from Sharon Brown:
All glory to God for helping put this all together. There’s no way it would’ve happened without him–providing the grant, the coalition members, a supportive family, and everything else.