Child Care

Over the past year, the Hopelink Board of Directors and the leadership team have been working on a strategic plan that will build on our mission to help the greatest number of families served by Hopelink reach their highest levels of self sufficiency. We have come to the conclusion that to accomplish this will require a more intensive focus within Hopelink's Community Services Division on comprehensive and long-term support of individual families and on their education, employment and housing needs. Thus, we have spent many hours discussing, weighing options and making some decisions that will be important to achieve this future direction. \

The most difficult decision we have made is that Hopelink will no longer provide child development services at Overlake and Adelle Maxwell Child Development Centers as of September 30, 2008 and that the Centers will close as of that date.

Going forward, Hopelink will increase its focus on services which bridge the gap between our emergency, short term services for at-risk families, and our longer term programs aimed at enabling the families we serve to move toward self-sufficiency. We believe that, by focusing more heavily on bridging this gap, our client families will be able to gain additional, critically-needed financial, educational and employment skills and tools that will allow them to move further along the continuum toward true self-sufficiency. We plan to achieve these results by better integrating our proven case management processes with enhanced asset-building tools and skills; we believe the result will allow these families to reach greater stability and safety.

We greatly appreciate the dedicated, caring services our child development staff has consistently provided to the more than 1,000 children and families served in our Child Development Centers during the past eight years. And we thank you for entrusting your children to us.

We also recognize that closing the Centers is a difficult situation for families served. Hopelink is committed to working with each family as they transition to other childcare programs. Specifically, we have contracted with Child Care Resources (CCR) to provide on-call support in identifying and securing other childcare. Trained professionals from CCR will make every effort to identify alternate, high-quality care for children and to provide guidance on a variety of child care options and choices. The CCR website, www.childcare.org is a valuable resource to consult as well. In addition, Hopelink will provide Case Management services to support families through this transition; these services will be available through Hopelink's Housing and Family Development Programs.

Questions may be directed to Meghan Altimore, Hopelink's Director of Asset Building, at 425.829.1241 or meghana@hope-link.org.