Giving Compass' Take:

• Chalkbeat reports on a trend in child care — nonprofits and for-profits attempting to create "shared services" in the space, like Uber and Lyft did for ride sharing.

• What are the benefits and downsides of this effort? There is an opportunity for disruption, with so many child care needs going unfulfilled, but will the market align with the gaps in early childhood education?

• Here's why child care support is critical for advancing workforce development.

One summer morning, Yemi Habte sat at the kitchen table in her suburban Aurora home poring over a 10-page packet of child care forms with her mentor Steph Olson, a veteran child care provider who lives nearby.

Soon, Habte would open her own home-based child care business, Shining Little Lights, and Olson had come over to answer her questions. Habte wondered what to do if parents didn’t want to list their employers on the form? Or wanted their children to have only organic food? The pair also talked through emergency contacts, sunscreen procedures, and field trips.

The friendly kitchen table meeting, punctuated by cups of rich Ethiopian coffee and a snack of crisp roasted barley, didn’t happen by chance. It was the work of a new Colorado-based company called MyVyllage.

The idea is to make opening and running a high-quality home-based child care business easier and more lucrative. That means guiding providers like Habte through the complicated start-up process, helping them fill open spots, and simplifying back-office tasks such as billing and record-keeping.

Over the long haul, MyVyllage has ambitious plans: minting more than 100,000 new licensed home-based child care providers and a million new child care slots nationwide over the next decade. It’s a lofty goal in an industry marked by low pay, long hours, a maze of regulation, and a steady decline in the number of licensed home-based providers.

But MyVyllage isn’t alone in this enterprise. A growing cadre of for-profit and nonprofit groups — with names like WeeCare, WonderSchool, Early Learning Ventures, and Pie for Providers — are using what’s called a “shared services” approach to help new and existing child care businesses achieve efficiencies they couldn’t on their own.

Read the full article about innovating the business of child care by Ann Schimke at Chalkbeat.