Fort Worth nonprofit’s expansion means more early childhood education services
The Center for Transforming Lives, a Fort Worth-based nonprofit focused on helping women and children disrupt the cycle of poverty, is expanding its services with a $38.5-million building set to open in the city’s southeast area next year.
The 64,217-square-foot building on the northeast corner of East Berry Street and South Riverside Drive is expected to open in November 2024. It will provide expanded early childhood education, clinical counseling services, housing services and economic mobility programming. The 14-acre property, which has been vacant since the mid-1990s, houses a former a Montgomery Ward building that still stands.
Officials announced the expansion and relocation of the organization’s headquarters on Monday morning. The plans have been a decade in the making, according to Carol Klocek, CEO of Center for Transforming Lives. City, county and center leaders addressed a crowd with remarks that included a “groundbreaking” as children dug into a sand box with miniature hard hats and shovels.
The move stems from the organization outgrowing its downtown location, as it’s encountered obstacles with accessibility to public transportation and maintenance costs. More than 1,000 additional families will be served each year.
“We engage with families of many forms, but we’re most focused on women with young children because that is our community’s greatest need and has the greatest long-term impact,” Klocek said. “But for too many years, the Center for Transforming Lives has been hamstrung by limited facilities and distance from the very people whose lives we intend to impact.”
Klocek noted how financial security for families comes from employment, but child care is a necessity for parents to go to work. The new center will accommodate 120 children, an additional 48 from the capacity of the organization’s downtown Rosie K. Mauk Child Development Center.
The organization owns and operates four child care centers and partners with an additional six throughout Tarrant County, focusing on children 6 weeks to 5 years old.
Additionally, free drop-in child care will be available to families who are at the new center seeking services, Klocek said.
“In Texas, on average, center-based (child) care costs the same if not more than college tuition. There are subsidies, but only one seat for every five that are eligible,” Klocek said. “Today in Tarrant County, 32% of all single mothers with a child under the age of 5 are living in poverty.”
During her remarks, Fort Worth Mayor Mattie Parker mentioned that she was raised by a single mother who earned about $26,000 a year. Without a community network and support system helping mothers like Parker’s, they won’t be able to make it, she emphasized.
“They just can’t make it without a system, a network, community around them. Thanks to this amazing campus … their lives will be made transformed because of what this place does,” Parker said.
Tarrant County Commissioner Roy Brooks and city council member Chris Nettles also reiterated the need to invest in early childhood education and how the new center will transform the neighborhood for the better.
Brooks emphasized how a lack of education can strain the welfare and criminal justice systems and exacerbate generational poverty.
“It makes sense to focus our resources on children ages 0 to 3, and then 3 to 5. That’s when you get the best bang for your buck because that’s when the majority for brain development in children takes place,” Brooks said.
Nettles said as a father of four children and an owner of a child care center, he is eager to see the facility come to life.
“There have been moments in time that I have hugged parents who have not been able to pay (for) child care. One of the things that we want to invest in people is that you are loved here, you are encouraged here. I truly believe that is what the center is going to do, so I’m excited,” Nettles said.
