ATLANTA — Thanks to a $2 million grant, a metro Atlanta non-profit will be able to help more families afford childcare.
Channel 2’s Lori Wilson was at a daycare in southwest Atlanta to learn more about how the program is changing lives.
Quality Care For Children, a non-profit, helps fund daycare for families in need.
Patrick Mission, a father of 3-year-old twins, said it is only from this help that his family can go to daycare to learn and play.
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Mission told Channel 2 Action News that the help was a dire need.
“To me personally, they saved my life,” Mission said.
Mission’s wife had just ad their twins when she suffered a stroke and was hospitalized for nine months.
He told Wilson he’d been desperate for work and needed help caring for his young family and had almost lost hope.
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That’s when Quality Care for Children stepped in to help.
“We have families come to us all the time, feeling like they have no place to go. They want to work, they want to contribute to their families, and yet they can’t afford the cost of care,” Quality Care for Children CEO Ellyn Cochran said.
In 2025, QCC kept almost 500 children in daycare and supported nearly 300 programs with extra revenue.
Now that the organization has received the $2 million grant from the United Way of Atlanta and the Joseph B. Whitehead Foundation, the organization said it is able to give out more of what they call “boost scholarships.”
Families that QCC works with in Clayton County and the City of Atlanta choose daycare, and pay 7% of their income, and the scholarship covers the rest.
“This scholarship, it gave me freedom, it gave me a freedom to breathe,” Mission said. “This school is not just a school to me, it’s a family.”
Stephen Northern, assistant director of Angels of Paradise Higher Learning Academy, told Channel 2 Action News that he was grateful to be able to recommend QCC as a resource for families.
“Especially when you can pass this information on to your parents and you an just see it’s a weight lifted off their shoulders,” Northern said.
Federal data shows the cost of childcare in Georgia has continued to rise at an unsustainable rate.
According to the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, childcare costs rose 29% from 2020 to 2024. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services suggests that families spend 7% of their income on childcare, but the average in Georgia is double that amount, at 14%.
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