FROM ALICE JEWELL, CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER, MCKENNA FOUNDATION AND PERRI ROSHEGER, VICE PRESIDENT OF COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT, H.E. BUTT FOUNDATION
MARCH 2026

AFN Short Take is a blog series highlighting insights and perspectives from recent AFN programming events.

The families who grow the country’s food and power much of its energy infrastructure live and work in rural communities. Without reliable, affordable child care, they cannot fully participate in the workforce. Child care in rural America is foundational to the national economy, and it deserves philanthropic investment that reflects that scale.

Across Texas’ small towns and unincorporated counties, families face a child care crisis that rarely makes headlines. Providers operate on razor-thin margins, parents sit on impossible waitlists, and the capital, workforce, policy, and business support that make early childhood care possible are stretched thin or simply absent. Closing these gaps requires philanthropic investment designed specifically for how rural communities work and a genuine willingness to treat rural places as distinct investment environments, not smaller versions of urban ones.

On February 6, 2026, funders, providers, and community leaders gathered at the Cibolo Nature Center in Boerne, Texas for Growing Together: Aligning Investment for Rural Early Childhood, an AFN Summit sponsored by the H.E. Butt Foundation. The conversations that followed offered a clear-eyed look at what rural communities need and where philanthropic investment can make a durable difference. What emerged was not a single solution, but a shared commitment among funders to move from planning to coordinated action.

Designed for Rural: A Different Approach, Not a Smaller One

One of the most consistent themes of the day was a call to engage rural communities on their own terms, rather than as smaller, under-resourced versions of urban ones. Geography, distance, lower population density, and tighter social networks create genuinely different conditions that require genuinely different approaches.

Those differences cut both ways. Yes, distance makes convening harder but rural communities have something difficult to manufacture in larger systems: trust. When it exists, resources move more efficiently, partners align more readily, and impact becomes visible more quickly. Participants also pointed to the nimbleness of rural local governments as an underappreciated asset. Rural communities can demonstrate results and use that evidence to make the case in policy conversations, something larger, more complex urban systems often cannot do as swiftly.

For funders, this reframe opens real opportunity. Evaluation frameworks, grant timelines, and program models can be tailored to rural conditions — and where they are, funders find partners who are nimble, motivated, and deeply rooted in their communities.

Providers Are Running Businesses—They Need Business Support

Across every table discussion, a common thread emerged: rural early childhood providers are small business owners doing extraordinary work with inadequate infrastructure. Their challenges are not just about passion or purpose. They are about cash flow, insurance, working capital, and the complexity of navigating grants, regulations, and licensing requirements that were not designed with them in mind.

Participants surfaced a cluster of interconnected needs: access to small business loans and financing, pooled insurance options, technical assistance on grant-writing and regulatory compliance, and virtual provider networks that allow small operators to share knowledge and resources they could not access individually. The federal 45F employer tax credit represents one underutilized tool. Beginning this year, eligible small businesses can claim a federal tax credit equal to 50% of qualified child care expenses incurred to provide, arrange, or subsidize child care support for their employees, subject to annual ($600K) caps. As Andrea Figueroa of the San Antonio Area Foundation observed, awareness of this credit remains low among rural employers and providers alike, and there doesn’t appear to be an infrastructure to connect them to it. That is a fundable gap.

Workforce stability and child care availability are also directly linked, and rural employers represent an underutilized partner in that equation. A rural employer engagement initiative that educates employers about existing policies and programs, provides technical assistance to encourage use of tax incentives, and recognizes participating employers could unlock meaningful new investment in child care access without requiring new policy.

Nontraditional Providers Are Already in the Gap—Meet Them There

One of the most compelling moments of the day came from Pastor James Leinneweber of Rebecca Creek Baptist Church in the northernmost part of Comal County, a community with virtually no nonprofit child care providers. His church was already running a food pantry, a medical trailer partnership, and a Christian Academy. When McKenna Foundation’s data identified a child care desert in the area, the mission alignment was clear.

“The whole purpose for us in getting involved in this in the first place was we just wanted to do something to help those families in our community that can’t afford daycare. We really want to get in front of people.Pastor James Leinneweber, Rebecca Creek Baptist Church

Today, his church houses a child care center on its 21-acre property, offers its facilities rent-free to a licensed provider partner, and contributes $50,000 per year from church funds to keep care affordable. He recently established Rebecca Creek Christian Ministries as a standalone 501(c)(3) to strengthen accountability and open the door to grant funding.

The McKenna Foundation played an early role in this partnership, bringing community needs data that helped identify the child care desert and engaging in sustained conversations long before any formal grant relationship. In rural early childhood work, that kind of accompaniment often has to come first.

For funders, the opportunity is significant: faith communities, school districts, and civic organizations are already filling child care gaps in rural areas and are well-positioned to do more with the right support. Engaging these actors early — with data, relationships, and technical assistance — can extend philanthropic reach into communities and contexts that traditional grant relationships rarely touch.

The Policy Window Is Open—Rural Communities Need Help Walking Through It

Ryan Franklin of Philanthropy Advocates framed the barriers clearly: rural challenges differ from those in other contexts, rural voices are underrepresented in state capitals, and the return on investment can feel uncertain. But Franklin also noted a genuine and growing recognition that rural communities are significantly underresourced, and that political moment creates a real opening.

Proposition 2’s property tax abatement for child care centers, passed in Texas in 2024, illustrates the gap between policy and activation. Sharon Perry of Kids R Kids Liberty Field noted that it remains unimplemented in most rural counties not because of opposition, but because no one has walked local city councils through the process of putting it on their agendas. The policy exists. The activation infrastructure does not. Funders can help close that gap by investing in advocacy capacity, storytelling infrastructure, and the kinds of data tools that help rural voices make their case consistently, not just in moments of crisis. Rural communities are often better positioned than they realize to tell direct, personal stories of impact. Those stories land with legislators in ways that aggregate data cannot. The opportunity is to help those voices reach the right rooms at the right time.

What Funders Can Do

The dynamics surfaced at this summit are not unique to Texas. Rural early childhood ecosystems across the country face the same structural gaps: providers running businesses without business infrastructure, employers disconnected from child care solutions, and policy tools sitting unused for lack of activation support. For funders invested in early childhood, the opportunity is to ask whether that investment is reaching rural communities on their own terms.

Several questions from the summit apply broadly to funders working in early childhood. Are investments reaching the business infrastructure rural providers need, not just program delivery? Are nontraditional actors already filling child care gaps in your region getting the accompaniment and technical assistance they need before a formal grant relationship makes sense? And could coordination with peer funders accelerate early childhood impact in ways no single institution can achieve alone?

Prioritizing child care in rural communities is also an investment in national economic resilience. Large shares of the country’s food and fuel come from rural areas, yet the families who live and work there often lack viable workforce infrastructure. Building strong child care systems in asset-rich, low-density geographies is not a niche concern — it is foundational to the broader economy that all communities depend on.

The families waiting for child care in rural communities are not waiting for a perfect plan. They are ready for partners — funders who will show up, stay engaged, and invest in the infrastructure that makes everything else possible.

Please explore these additional resources for deeper learning and action:

Asset Funders Network, Supporting the Homes that Support the Economy: Housing & Asset-Based Solutions to the Child Care Crisis; First Five Years Fund, Rural America Faces Barriers Accessing Quality Child Care; San Antonio Report, Workforce Solutions Alamo op-ed, Parents shouldn’t have to choose between working and caring for their children; U.S. Department of Agriculture & U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Joint Resource Guide to Strengthen and Expand Child Care Facilities in Rural Communities