Not too long ago, Downtown Durham Inc., the Greater Durham Chamber of Commerce, and Durham’s Partnership for Children held a strategic discussion with Durham business leaders about how high-quality child care can support business development downtown.

The dialogue engaged our business leaders working downtown to think about the importance of supporting their employees with high-quality child care. So you may be thinking why is child care related to downtown development?

Multiple studies show that access to affordable, high-quality child care helps parents to be able work, to work more productively, and to be more loyal employees. It makes sense that  high-quality child care options need to be in close proximity to parents’ workplaces.

        Unfortunately, there are only a handful of child care options in the downtown district and those facilities virtually never have vacancies. If we know high-quality child care supports the workforce, and Downtown Durham welcomes more than 13,500 employees five days a week who are 38 years of age on average, we better develop some solutions.

        Durham is great at developing solutions to support the local economy. Over the past 11 years DDI has helped support downtown development and revitalization projects totaling more than $1 billion.

      Recognizing the challenges, Durham’s Partnership in collaboration with the Durham Chamber and DDI is working to develop strategies that can support the growth of high-quality child care options in Downtown Durham.

        Plans call for our organizations to come up with recommendations for including child care in downtown development to make sure prospective developers see the benefits of working to build early childhood education options for their workforce.

        In addition, we’re working on a plan that would encourage developers to make spaces available for child care, adopt development incentives to facilitate new child care centers in major developments and work with the city to ensure zoning and retail policies enable child care centers to fill appropriate retail locations.

        High-quality child care is not only important for our existing workforce, but it also is critical in building a pipeline of future talent. Research shows that quality early education is focused on building the foundation of 21st century skills because they are aligned with social, emotional and cognitive skills learned in early childhood and translate into adults skills employers need.

        In other words, children who have a solid start in life continue on a trajectory of success that includes high school graduation, college and a solid career. If we can help build a bigger, better downtown with enriching developments, like Golden Belt and American Tobacco Campus, we as a community can set our sights on high-quality child care that supports the burgeoning downtown workforce and helps build Durham’s future workforce.

        Bill Kalkhof is President of Downtown Durham Inc., an organization that has served as a catalyst for downtown revitalization since 1993.

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