Child Care Network Support Project

South Brooklyn Legal Services - 030070

Abstract Number: 030070

May 2003

South Brooklyn Legal Services (SBLS) created the Child Care Network Support Project to provide legal services to child care networks and home-based child care providers in New York City. Child care networks support the work of home-based child care providers by supplying these small providers with legal and technical assistance, training, supervision, and other services. Home-based child care providers regularly encounter a number of business and legal problems such as a customer's failure to pay, licensing problems, housing problems, and insurance problems. SBLS helps resolve these problems by helping providers to secure retroactive payments from the state, to incorporate, to apply for licenses or tax-exempt status with the IRS, and to prevent unlawful evictions. SBLS also hosts trainings educating participants about their legal rights. While SBLS's services usually do not result in litigation, SBLS will litigate in the event that it will help resolve a systemic problem faced by a number of clients.

Services to child care networks assist micro-enterprises run by low-income people while also increasing the availability of child care services in the community. Further, many of SBLS's provider-clients are in the process of transitioning from welfare to work and operating a home-based child care business helps them become economically self-sufficient. In the first three years of this project, SBLS committed one full-time paralegal to this project but now, with the help of a recent grant, assigns one full-time attorney and another part-time attorney to work on this project. For more information, access the Clearinghouse Review article below as a PDF document and visit SBLS' website at: http://www.sbls.org/.

Contact Information:

Chip Gray
South Brooklyn Legal Services
105 Court Street
Brooklyn, NY 11201
Phone: (718) 237-5524
Fax: (718) 855-0733
chipg@sbls.org

Additional Information:

• David Ehrenberg & Raun J. Rasmussen, "South Brooklyn Legal Services' Child Care Network Support Project: How Legal Aid Programs Can Support Family Child Care," Clearinghouse Rev.(September-October 2002) 334-344.*  ( 237k)
  
  *This article appears courtesy of Clearinghouse Review.

Updated 2008

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