Getty Images / Barbara Peacock

“Whooo, you made a spider,” Violet Williams tenderly exclaims. “I love you, spider.”

Williams sits on a carpeted floor in her Brooklyn home that doubles as her workplace. She is leaning against a wall that displays the alphabet and various geometric shapes while wiggling around a toddler’s arachnid-like creation of interlocking toys. At the same time, her gaze around the room provides her with an opportunity to survey nine other tykes each eagerly crafting fantasies into objects during a play break with her assistants, Suzette and Gaylene.

“Oh, you made a bike,” Williams says to a youngster in a Mello Yello T-shirt. “Is there a man on the bike?”

This is Verny’s Daycare, a licensed child-care facility in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn. Williams is the founder, owner, proprietor, and operator of this full-scale, early-education center. Behind inauspicious apartment doors, Williams’ living room magically transforms from a singing circle (“The money on the bus goes clink-clink-clink”) to a reading center to a lunch room and, finally, to a nap space. Musical devices, books, and two computers are tucked into the apartment’s corners. The hallway is lined with curricula, meal schedules, tips to parents, sand art from a seaside trip, and a statement of Williams’ philosophy promoting “a clean, safe, nurturing, high-quality, developmentally appropriate environment” for children. Williams, a Caribbean immigrant with two children of her own in high school and college, used to be a nanny on New York’s ritzy Upper East Side. “I was really in love with those kids,” she says. “But it was time for me to do something else with my life.”

It was time to become an entrepreneur.

RECOGNIZING A NEED

With a growing number of low-income mothers seeking to successfully transition from welfare to work, affordable child care is in high demand across the Big Apple’s five boroughs. Moms need peace of mind before they can get ahead, which means knowing that their children are in good hands while they’re on the job. For many low-income parents, home-based daycare offers an attractive middle ground between large, expensive day-care centers and dubious, unlicensed babysitting arrangements.

In New York City, licensed home-based providers offer daycare slots to an estimated 56,000 children. But daycare is a highly regulated field, and the complexities of starting and sustaining a licensed child-care business are substantial. Realizing the potential of child-care businesses to fuel micro-economic engines in poor neighborhoods, South Brooklyn Legal Services (SBLS) launched its Child Care Network Support Project in 2000.

Williams opened Verny’s in July 2003 and received critical operational assistance from SBLS. She says, “It’s a whole different feeling when someone calls me and says, ‘I want to speak with Miss Williams, the owner.’”

Success stories like Williams’ are the reason SBLS offers a unique blend of legal assistance and economic development to aspiring daycare owners, says attorney Sarah Dranoff, who directs the SBLS program of training, advice, case analysis, and advocacy. “We’re about the professionalism of providers and allowing them to do their jobs. …it’s helping people view themselves as business people—to see it not as babysitting, but a real job.”

Most home-based providers are not sophisticated in the financial, regulatory, tax, or legal issues that can arise in running a business, especially one that is as closely monitored as a daycare operation, says Raun J. Rasmussen, SBLS chief of litigation and advocacy. In the absence of support for these business owners, the failure rate is high, he says, creating instability for parents and children. Common problems encountered by daycare businesses include delays in licensing or renewal, difficulties in obtaining liability insurance, threat of illegal eviction, problems in securing payment from the government, and recordkeeping and tax issues.

Most new daycare operators turn to one of New York’s roughly 100 child-care networks for assistance, Rasmussen says. The networks are independent associations that offer essential resources to child-care providers, such as technical assistance, lending libraries, and educational planning. The networks also manage government agency contracts for daycare referrals and lunch subsidies for children who qualify through the Child and Adult Care Food Program.

With an annual budget of $225,000 raised from independent grants, the SBLS project assists both the networks and the providers. Rasmussen initiated the project after seeing first-hand how much misinformation was being disseminated to new daycare owners, recalling an episode in which he sat through an insurance agent’s presentation that nearly made his head spin. “This guy was giving them all kinds of misleading information,” he remembers. “I saw a potential client population who could really use our help and our advocacy. No other legal services program was doing it.”

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