PENDLETON — It’s a personal issue for Kathryn Brown: Her work to ease a shortage of affordable, quality child care in Eastern Oregon dates back to when she struggled to find spots for her two young children.

But she sees another side to the issue as well: Quality child care, she believes, is an essential part of a vibrant economy.

Nowadays, more than 15 years after Brown searched for day care for her own children — and with timely help at a crucial juncture from Oregon Community Foundation — the Pendleton Children’s Center has opened, offering child care and preschool education to 36 children. Plans are to add another three dozen children this fall.

And that, Brown said, gets the Pendleton Children’s Center almost halfway to a goal that almost seemed out of reach not too long ago: filling a child care gap of 150 spots in the Pendleton area.

In many ways, the story of the Children’s Center begins with Brown — the vice president of EO Media Group, which owns newspapers throughout Oregon, including the East Oregonian in Pendleton — looking for child care for her two children, who were aged 1-1/2 and 2-1/2 when her family moved to Pendleton in 2007. The search was eye-opening.

“There was a huge child care shortage then, especially for infants and toddlers,” Brown said.

A group of business owners and parents tried to fix that by launching the Pendleton Children’s Center in 2009. The group raised a little bit of money at the time, she said, and a bit of awareness.

Then the recession hit, and all of that was put on the shelf. The board dissolved, and its nonprofit status lapsed.

Zoom forward to 2019. Brown’s children were a decade older, and more or less self-sufficient. The economy was humming along.  

But some things hadn’t changed — the East Oregonian newspaper was losing another employee who had just given birth. The employee had planned to come back to work, but she couldn’t find child care. Reluctantly, she resigned.

“And this was not the first time this had happened,” Brown said.

So Brown hit the pavement, talking with friends and businesspeople and making the case that quality child care wasn’t just an important issue for families, but an economic development issue as well.

“To me, it’s just self-evident,” she said. “I mean, as a business owner, I have just seen so many families in Pendleton have babies and then have to move away. And they’re not moving away because they don’t have a job. They’re not moving away because they don’t have a place to live. They’re moving away because grandma lives in Eugene or Portland and they need child care. And they either can’t find it or in some cases can’t afford to pay for child care.”

The message started to stick. A new board was formed, and the organization started to take a longer look at the landscape: A survey commissioned by the board found that Pendleton needed at least 150 additional child care slots — in a community with about 17,000 people. It confirmed that Pendleton was a so-called child-care desert.

The revitalized board got to work. But a search for a suitable property for the center — hindered to some extent by the COVID pandemic — took two sometimes-frustrating years.

“We were looking at every church, every empty building, every building that goes up for rent or sale and to try to figure out where can we do this that’s affordable,” Brown said. “We went down a couple of paths that ended up as dead ends.”

And then — as sometimes happens — events started to move quickly, and all the work that the board of the Children’s Center had done to that date began to pay off.

In October 2021, board members learned that the leaders of the Pendleton Senior Center — whose membership had struggled during the pandemic — had decided to close their building. But the Senior Center’s leaders didn’t want to sell the building: They wanted to give it away to a worthy nonprofit.

A month later, Oregon Community Foundation gave the Children’s Center the first $100,000 in a two-year $200,000 grant from its Go Kids program, which aims to overcome Oregon’s opportunity gap — disparities experienced by children because of where they live, their race or family circumstances.

That first $100,000 grant from OCF helped jump-start the board’s capital campaign.

“When you have the weight of an organization like Oregon Community Foundation” behind an effort, Brown said, other potential funders take notice. “People know they just don’t hand out money casually. They really want to make sure that you have a strong plan, a strong board and are going to be fiscally responsible. And I think we were able to prove that to OCF.”

And not just OCF: In January 2022, the board of the Senior Center elected to donate its building to the Pendleton Children’s Center.

Less than a year later, armed with that second $100,000 from Oregon Community Foundation and donations from many other funders, the Children’s Center was able to welcome its first group of 36 children to a renovated building. And it continued to plan for additional capacity.

The need for that additional capacity became even clearer in May 2023, when a privately owned child care center in Pendleton with 38 children announced plans to close at the end of the month.

The Children’s Center board rose to the challenge, adjusting its plans to create three additional classrooms. The center will be able to enroll 36 additional children this fall.

That adds up to 72 new child-care slots, created in the space of about two years — assuming that you don’t count the decade-plus of work that laid the foundation.

But Brown notes that it only gets the group about halfway to its goal of 150.

So there are more plans in the works. The Children’s Center wants to purchase the building right next door, a former Seventh-day Adventist church and school that now is being used for offices. “We really need that second building in order to grow,” Brown said. A proposal that would have freed up money for the project didn’t get out of the 2023 Legislature, but Brown still is hopeful.

“We feel like we’ve had such momentum,” she said. “In less than a year, we’ve gone from zero to 36” — and the number soon will be 72.

And the idea that child care is an essential part of economic development is beginning to take root, said Mark Mulvihill, the superintendent of the InterMountain Education Service District in Pendleton — and not just among educators and parents.

“County commissioners need to look at economic development that’s appealing, and so do city managers,” said Mulvihill, who’s worked with Brown and has watched her and the Children’s Center effort for years — and those officials increasingly understand that child care is part of the equation.

It pays off for educators as well, he said.

“For me as an educator, having kids ready for kindergarten is going to make us more successful. It just checks all the boxes. And then, you put the right people in the room, and you have a tenacious leader like Kathryn, it’s going to happen.”