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A new business center on St. Paul’s east side wants to build a pipeline of Latina business owners for long-term success in the child care field.
Launched recently with more than $5.3 million public and private support, the Family Wellness and Childcare Business Incubator hopes to create new opportunities for needed child care with a cultural focus.
“In the neighborhood, we have Latinos who have grown up here, and a lot of them are parents now. You know, (they) want to keep the culture, the traditions, the values and the language of our culture,” Ruby Lee, the incubator’s CEO, said during a launch ceremony last week.
The goal is to remove barriers that usually prevent Latinas and immigrants from starting family child care businesses — like home ownership or English-only paperwork — according to Communidades Latinas Unidas En Servicio, known as CLUES, a local service organization for the Twin Cities Latino community that launched the effort.
In 2024, the state approved a new special licensing model for family child care providers that allows them to operate in a commercial space.
CLUES is giving four Latina providers a three-year lease in the space as well as training, resources and mentorship so they can grow their businesses. After those three years, Lee said, the idea is to have different Latina entrepreneurs move in to continue the mission.
“We intend to work with this group of women and take the child care providers who already are in the system of providing family child care in an informal way, taking that informal economic system and make it into a formal economic system by helping them access opportunities that they have in the state.”
Raquel Mosquera owns Semillita al Corazon, one of the pilot child care businesses at CLUES’ new building. She immigrated to Minnesota more than a year ago to be closer to her daughter. Without a means to support her family, Mosquera said this program has been a blessing.
“Child care business is more than just a business,” Mosquera said through her daughter, who translated for her. “It's a legacy. For me, my daughter studies education. And for us, it's a way to prepare for the future, to know that we're going to have that support, but at the same time taking care of families and the families of our community.”
Mosquera’s child care will be Spanish immersion and range from toddlers to 10-year-olds.
“We're creating business opportunities,” said Jackie Perez, vice president of programs for CLUES. “These providers eventually will be able to hire staff, create opportunities for others, and then we have these children kind of coming in, getting great education.”
The model using the state's new licensing allowances and including support for families and a food market is the first of its kind in Minnesota. Recent cuts to federal funding that CLUES relied on have made it difficult, Lee said, but she has hope the spaces makes Latino families feel valued.
The new center is expected to open its doors to the general public next month.
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