Johanna Philbrick, 5, made her way straight for one of the three slides on the play structure at Grace First Lutheran Church once she got outside for recess.

Other children crowded the fence to see deer in the distance.

Johanna and her fellow playmates attend ReVillage Community Coop child care, which has recently expanded to its third site at Grace First Lutheran Church in Bend. The child care organization, created by parents and local church leaders in 2021, holds day care in underused churches during the week. It’s an innovative solution to a perpetual problem in Central Oregon: finding quality child care at an affordable rate for working families.

What started as a part-time stopgap has grown into a model that serves around 30 children in three locations in Bend.

The organization began through a series of conversations in Bend living rooms about how to handle child care. Then the churches started offering space.

“First Presbyterian offered up one of their classrooms and said ‘here, you can have it.’ So we started a child care cooperative,” said Erika Spaet, co-founder. “At the time, the vision was it would be half-time and parents would be doing 100% of the care. It was just a way for us to show up for one another.”

That was in March 2020, and so the cooperative pivoted during the pandemic. Leaders realized they had to offer full-time, certified care for working families.

Although it works with churches, the organization is a separate nonprofit, and does not have any religious education.

“We were just a group of moms who learned how to certify a classroom, and hired some teachers, so we opened our first classroom in May of 2021,” Spaet said.

Play-based, emotionally focused

ReVillage’s model is play-based and social and emotionally-focused child care, Spaet said.

”The notion is that children can follow their own intrinsic motivation to seek out what they’re interested in,” Spaet said. “Every day there’s two times at least of outdoor play. What’s great about this site, is that we have that amazing playground.”

The rest of the day is taken up by rest time, stories, art, lunch and singing and sharing in a circle.

“We want to make sure that the adults in the classroom are people that we trust our whole lives with, and who are nurturing and caring and loving,” she said. “That’s one of the other reasons being a co-op has meant so much to me, is that I know there’s another parent or grandparent who will snuggle my kid if he’s had a hard day. We want it to feel like home.”

At least one parent is in the classroom every day as an aide alongside teachers.

“That helps us build community and build relationships, and helps parents have a deeper investment in their child’s care and their education,” Spaet said.

In July 2023, the second classroom opened in Bend Church downtown. It now provides care for infants, ages 6 weeks and older.

“Churches have empty space 9-to-5 Monday through Friday and have a heart for families, and so we’re able to use these spaces,” Spaet said. “We’ve been able to retrofit and redesign church classrooms for our needs.”

Refreshing approach

Parent Ben Philbrick, who lives in Bend, said the co-op has been helpful since his wife died in January. His two daughters joined one of the other locations earlier this year, and now they are at the Grace First Lutheran site.

“They held full time slots open for us so that we could ease into our new situation. They continue to be very accommodating since I’m a blue collar single dad now, and I can’t afford to take much time off of work to help in the classroom,” he wrote in an email.

He finds the play-based approach “refreshing,” he wrote, and he feels it lets kids have a childhood. He said he wants Oregon to have more child care funding available for parents who need it.

Expanding to a third church

Earlier this year, organizers at Grace First Lutheran Church approached ReVillage about opening to child care. Simultaneously, the Rotary of Greater Bend opened an application process for its signature grant project, which ReVillage was awarded. The $100,000 grant gave the nonprofit the funding to open classrooms at Grace First Lutheran.

It will take time to get to full capacity, Spaet cautioned, but once that happens, ReVillage will be able to provide care for up to 60 children, ages 6 weeks through 5. Each class will have between eight and 14 children.

At the moment, the classroom has 12 children ages 3 through 5, while the three sites have around 30 children total.

ReVillage is a Baby Promise partner, so it is {span}part of an Oregon Department of Early Learning and Care program that provides public funding for free child care for low-income Oregonians. It’s{/span} important for the organization’s affordability, said Spaet. Through other programs, more than 50% of students across the program have subsidized tuition. Though it will be a years-long process, the organization is building toward a sliding-scale tuition model, said Spaet.

“Classes opened on Sept. 3, and we are slowly opening classrooms as we are able to,” said Spaet. “We are just waiting to have the building code up to code, because to have children younger than 3 years old on the second floor you have to meet a higher standard of code. That’s been a part of our learning process.”

Spaet believes it will take everyone in the community to help child care work in the region. Making sure classrooms are up to code has been challenging since everyone has had to learn processes in real time.

“It is really, really difficult to operate a child care that can pay their staff well enough to be able to have a thriving wage in Bend but also not charge families too much that they can’t afford it, because these are working families,” she said. “It really takes investment from a variety of community partners. That’s how we’ve been able to survive.”

Spaet is excited to get the Grace Lutheran Church site fully up and running.

“We don’t have $5 million to build a new building. What we do have is relationships with community partners, so how can we go into existing buildings and help make them be child care?” she asked.

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