On Thursday night, Austin Aspires kicked off a new grant-funded program that is meant to provide additional support for child care providers in Mower County.

Providers Empowering Providers and Parents is a peer-based program made possible by a grant through the Southeastern Minnesota Initiative Foundation, that will run through January of 2026, and encourages child-care providers to lean on one another while at the same time Austin Aspires provides additional supports in order to further lift up these workers.

“It’s a time for them to socialize. Connect,” said MaKayla Oxley, an early childhood navigator for the organization. “Feed off each other. Just things so they know they are supported in a place where they feel comfortable.”

This first event was held at Super Fresh, which set up the structure of the event that included snacks, tea and the opportunity for those taking part to choose and plant their own flowers.

This laid back format is one of the goals of the program that seeks to put providers in the same room with others who are facing many of the same challenges 

“It came up that a lot of providers feel lonely,” Oxley said. “It’s an adult with a bunch of kids all day multiple days of the week. When we were doing our core work with them for licensing, we realized that they never get time to socialize. It’s straight training.”

While Austin Aspires does have opportunities for training, those within the organization also understood the need to balance that without putting extra pressure on them.

“It’s kind of a suite of services addressing mental health, education, as well as training for these providers,” Oxley said. “This is just our first mental health provider. We will have one for every month of the grant period.”

Those providers taking part in Thursday night’s event represent a core of providers within Mower County. Overall, providers are representative of providers across the state who are all feeling pressures in the current child care climate.

Oxley said that she thinks that a program like PEPP can be key in similar programs going forward.

“I think it can be something that could be carried out in other counties and definitely mimicked,” she said. “It is showing that our in-home providers need support too, whether that’s a simple social setting like this or maybe something brought into their home for their kids. Something for them to take care of that burned out feeling, the stress, all of that daily stuff that comes with being a child care provider.”