Bridging Allen County’s childcare gap

The Childcare Bridge Fund was launched in August by the Community Foundation of Greater Fort Wayne in partnership with the Northeast Indiana Early Childhood Coalition (NEICC) and Greater Fort Wayne Inc.’s Ready. Set. Grow. initiative. It will provide temporary support to eligible families who are on Indiana’s Child Care and Development Fund (CCDF) waitlist.

CCDF is a federal program administered in Indiana by the Family and Social Services Administration that helps low-income families pay for childcare so parents can work, attend school or participate in job training. Families who qualify receive vouchers they can use with eligible childcare providers.

In Indiana, new CCDF applicants must have household income at or below 135% of the federal poverty level and meet other requirements, including having a child who needs care because of a parent or guardian’s work, education or training.

Because demand for the vouchers had grown beyond the funding available to enroll new families, Indiana implemented a waitlist for new CCDF applicants in November 2024. The waitlist does not mean families are ineligible for assistance. It means new applicants can be left waiting for a voucher as the state works through available funding.

That distinction is central to the new Bridge Fund.

The program is specifically intended for Allen County families who are eligible for CCDF assistance but remain on the waitlist. Instead of giving money directly to families, the Bridge Fund works through childcare providers.

The goal is to help families maintain access to care while also helping providers maintain the enrollment and revenue they need to stay open.

“We need the centers that we have to be able to stay open and operate at capacity just as much as we need families to be able to afford the care,” said Alison Gerardot, Chief Impact Officer at the Community Foundation of Greater Fort Wayne. “If either one of those things is out of balance, the whole entire system crumbles.”

Allie Sutherland, Executive Director and Founder of the Northeast Indiana Early Childhood Coalition, said the fund grew out of the realization that the community needed to address both problems at once.

“We knew there were two pieces to the work. We had to advocate for more dollars for the state subsidies, but we needed to help these families in the meantime,” Sutherland said.

According to Gerardot, 621 families in the region were on the waitlist, and some have been waiting for more than a year.

In May 2026, Indiana committed another $200 million to childcare assistance, which the state said would allow 14,000 more children to receive CCDF vouchers. But for families still waiting, the need is immediate. They need childcare now, while providers need families in those seats to keep their programs operating.

Gerardot said the consequences can be significant for families who cannot access the assistance they need.

“You would have families that would not be able to work, would not be able to support their families,” she said.

The strain is also visible among local providers. Data from Greater Fort Wayne Inc. show that 2,162 children were using CCDF vouchers in Allen County as of June 2026. The average annual cost of care for an infant or toddler at an Allen County center provider is $16,968, and 197 childcare programs have closed across Indiana, including 12 in Allen County.

At the same time, a recent survey of 16 Allen County ministry childcare providers found that none was operating at full capacity.

The data show how the childcare crunch affects families and providers alike. Families need help affording care, while providers need enough enrollment to keep operating.

For providers that serve large numbers of children who rely on CCDF, losing access to those families can threaten the viability of the entire program.

“If there were no children to go to the seats, well then they would close and we would lose those seats, which would be an even greater expense to our community and our families,” Sutherland said.

Gerardot pointed to Lutheran Social Services of Indiana’s Children’s Village as an example. The childcare program closed in January 2026 after serving a majority of families who received CCDF assistance.

And once a childcare program closes, the effects can be difficult to reverse.

“Families they found other care, staff have found other jobs,” Gerardot said. “And you have to start all over.”

That is why the Bridge Fund is focused on what local leaders call “preserving” childcare seats rather than simply creating new ones.

Sutherland said the program’s first priority is keeping existing providers open.

“Our first goal is preserving seats because we know there’s more families than we will be able to fund,” she said.

Participating providers will be prioritized based on the percentage of families they serve who receive CCDF assistance. Gerardot said the program will first consider facilities serving 70% or more CCDF families, then move to those serving 50% and continue downward from there.

Gerardot said the distinction is important because simply adding childcare facilities does not solve the problem if existing providers cannot remain open.

“You can’t build all of these shiny centers and have no seats, no children to fill the seats,” she said. “I think oftentimes people [believe] we just need more centers. We need the centers that we have to be able to stay open and operate at capacity just as much as we need families to be able to afford the care.”

How the Bridge Fund works

The Childcare Bridge Fund is not an open grant program, and families do not apply directly through the Community Foundation.

Instead, participating childcare providers and coalition partners identify eligible families. Funding is then distributed directly to participating providers through NEIECC’s program administration.

Families must be eligible for CCDF assistance and provide proof that they are on the CCDF waitlist.

The program is expected to support approximately 150 families and 30 to 40 childcare providers during its implementation period.

The fund can work with licensed or registered in-home providers as well as childcare facilities, provided they accept CCDF vouchers. It can also serve school-age children.

The $2.5 million for the program comes from a Community Support Grant that the Community Foundation received from Lilly Endowment through its Giving Indiana Funds for Tomorrow initiative. The foundation has allocated the money to the Bridge Fund over three years.

A bridge, not a permanent solution

The program’s organizers are clear that philanthropy cannot permanently solve Indiana’s childcare funding challenges.

Instead, they hope the Bridge Fund can demonstrate what happens when both sides of the system are supported at the same time.

“For me it’s about always showing proof of concept to our legislature,” Gerardot said.

Sutherland also sees the fund as one piece of a larger approach to childcare financing.

“We have to have multiple paths and multiple solutions in the financing of childcare,” she said. “But philanthropy can’t make up this burden.”

The partners will track the number of childcare seats preserved, providers stabilized and families served. They also want to determine how many families were able to remain employed.

Sutherland said those measures will help show the broader economic effect of the investment.

“How many seats did we preserve? How many families were we able to serve? How many families were able to stay employed?” she said.

The Community Foundation says the information gathered through the program will help inform future investments and community conversations about childcare affordability and accessibility.

Gerardot said the Community Foundation has also been involved in childcare advocacy beyond the Bridge Fund, including work with Hoosier Milestones and policy advocacy focused on early childhood care and education.

The foundation’s broader work grew out of an effort to determine how it could use its resources strategically to address childcare.

Looking beyond the waitlist

Even if the Bridge Fund succeeds in helping families on the CCDF waitlist, local leaders say another significant challenge remains: families who do not qualify for assistance but still struggle to afford childcare.

Gerardot described a gap between families who qualify for CCDF assistance and families who can comfortably pay the full cost of childcare.

“There’s this huge gap in the middle of people who have no access to assistance of any kind and are still really struggling to pay for child care,” she said.

For now, the Bridge Fund is intentionally focused on families who are already eligible for CCDF assistance and are waiting for a voucher.

Sutherland said that focus reflects the immediate need created by the waitlist.

“Thousands of Indiana families qualify for childcare assistance but are unable to access it because of the CCDF waitlist,” Sutherland said in the program announcement.

The Community Foundation expects the three-year effort to provide more than just short-term assistance. Partners hope the program will produce concrete information about how much it costs to preserve childcare capacity, how many families can be supported and what happens when providers receive enough support to stay open.

For now, the Bridge Fund is attempting to hold together two pieces of a system that local leaders say cannot function independently. Families need affordable childcare in order to work, and childcare providers need families to keep their doors open.