Child Care Union Sponsors Business Workshop for Northern California Providers

Redleaf National Institute director Tom Copeland (center) and N. California CCPUnited leadersOAKLAND, CA—Child Care Providers United (CCPUnited), a union of family child care providers, sponsored an innovative business skills and tax workshop in late April to train family child care providers how to successfully manage their businesses and offered tools to mentor and support other providers.

Tom Copeland, director of the Redleaf National Institute in Minnesota, facilitated the exciting, advanced skills workshop for CCPUnited leaders from around the Bay Area. A nationally recognized expert in the field of child care business and tax law, Copeland covered a range of topics including record-keeping and tax preparation, employer responsibilities, and best practices for drafting provider contracts and family child care policies. 

The workshop was offered exclusively to CCPUnited members and specially designed for union leaders and experienced providers. Participants received a CCPUnited resource manual with tools, tips, and business guides for ongoing reference and information sharing with other members. Among the leaders in attendance were Silvia Espinoza from San Mateo County, Jamie Huang from San Francisco, and Megan Hede from Sonoma County, each with more than a dozen years of child care experience. All were among the most active group of provider leaders in forming a union by and for family child care providers. 

Espinoza is a grandmother with two grown children of her own. She became involved in home-based, family child care in 1996 when she started caring for her granddaughter. 

“When my daughter’s friends started asking if I would take care of their kids, before I knew it, I had four kids in my home, and I thought I better go get a license,” recalled Espinoza. “That’s when I realized the importance of being a family child care provider, how much need there was for one.” 

Espinoza was one of the earliest advocates for forming a child care union in California, attending the first ever CCPU (formerly the United Child Care Union) informational meeting in San Francisco in 2000. Now, as president of the Hispanic Association of Child Care Providers of San Mateo County (HACCPSMC), Espinoza said the CCPUnited advanced workshop helped her to better understand which policies are important to include in contracts in order to eliminate confusion over what providers can expect from parents and vice versa.

HACCPSMC President Silvia Espinoza (left) and HACCPSMC board member Luis Funes in class“If I’m better informed, I’m going to be a better leader. If I have people [providers] working in this business and doing things the right way, it makes me a better leader,” said Espinoza. 

These thoughts were echoed by Jamie Huang, who has worked as a child care provider in San Francisco for 12 years. 

“I really liked the workshop,” said Huang. “Unlike other workshops where the information is very general, Tom Copeland was very profes¬sional, and his information was almost like a field training for providers. The information about record-keeping and taxes was very practical.”

Originally from Guangdong Province in China, Huang opened her family child care business in San Francisco in 1996 and quickly became recognized as a leader in the Chinese-speaking provider community. She promptly joined the Family Child Care Association of San Francisco, only to find that the organization struggled to offer resources and support to the hundreds of providers in San Francisco. When she discovered that efforts were being made to form a child care union, she became involved and was put in touch with organizers and other child care providers with the same vision.

“When we didn’t have a union, it was clear that what we wanted was to have somebody to stand by us and help us have more of a voice in budget matters, but nobody was very clear about how to do this,” said Huang. “After we formed the union, we had an organization that could do all these things and let city and state officials know our concerns and advocate our interests, and they started to pay more attention to us.” 

Megan Hede, who also attended CCPUnited’s business skills and tax workshop, agreed. 

“Being that we work at home, people don’t necessarily see us as the professionals we are,” said Hede, who has been in the family child care business for 18 years and is president of the Sonoma County Child Care Association and a provisional board member of CCPUnited. 

According to Hede, one of the principal challenges associated with being a child care provider is that the profession is undervalued. She also cited a lack of education and training specifically for family child care providers and the confusing web of state licens¬ing requirements and subsidy payment policies as additional obstacles. She said she joined CCPUnited because the union has the ability to amplify the voices of child care providers at the state level. 

“The union has helped our credibility, and I think that for too long providers didn’t stand up for themselves, didn’t feel like they had that voice, but now even if we wind up going [to Sacramento] by ourselves, as individuals, as associations, as local leaders, they [the agencies] know we have the union behind us, and they’re much more willing to sit down and talk about issues that they weren’t before.”