A year ago, Raquel Mosquera arrived in Minnesota from Ecuador with a dream of reuniting her family and starting a business to build a nest egg.
She’s now part of a group of four women launching child care businesses as part of a pilot program started by Comunidades Latinas Unidas en Servicio (CLUES).
The businesses will be housed in the nonprofit’s new Family Wellness and Childcare Business Incubator on St. Paul’s East Side. Participants will get three years of business training development, financial planning and mentoring — all in Spanish. Eventually, the four entrepreneurs will graduate and leave the program to operate businesses in their own spaces.
The child care hub, which held a ribbon-cutting in late September, is a $5.3 million effort that drew funding from multiple foundations and state agencies.
“It’s a way to prepare for the future,” Mosquera told the Sahan Journal after the ceremony, “but at the same time, taking care of our families and the families of our community.”
Mosquera said she decided to bring her family from Ecuador to the United States to reunite with her daughter, Damarias De la Torre, who came five years ago to pursue a degree at Mankato State University. De la Torre has now finished her education degree and will be helping her mother run her business, Semillita al Corazon, at the hub.
“This project is not a business,” Mosquera said in Spanish during her speech with De le Torre translating at the opening ceremony. “It is a legacy, a dream come true.”
The four entrepreneurs will operate family-based child care businesses, which typically run out of the owner’s home and enroll fewer children than a standalone child care center. Children enrolled in the child care at the hub will learn about the Spanish language and aspects of Latino culture.
“We want to just make a point of being proud of our heritage, being proud of our language, and teach those kids to love who they are and to love where they come from and to have that generational seed there,” Mosquera said.
The pilot program is aimed at increasing the number of family-based licensed child care providers in the Latino community to meet the needs of parents struggling to find affordable, culturally specific care.
Up to 56 openings will be available for families looking to enroll their children in the child care businesses at the hub. The hub will also offer services for families, including free food distribution and parenting classes.
“As staff moves on and goes on,” CLUES CEO Ruby Azurdia-Lee said at the opening ceremony, “this building now belongs to the Latino community.”
The previous owner of the building, the First Lutheran Church, located across the street, lowered the price by $800,000, she said.
“This is a city that understands that simple lesson that when we bring to the table differences, we make the table bigger,” St. Paul Mayor Melvin Carter said at the ribbon-cutting.
‘You just can’t really plan’
Minnesota ranks third nationally for the cost of child care, according to the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington, D.C., think tank. Parents pay more than $22,000 a year, on average for infant care, and as much as $40,000 a year for an infant and a toddler.
Those prices put child care out of reach for many low-income families.
In 2022, CLUES worked with Latino parents to identify gaps in services for families. At the time, they found a shortage of 700 slots for families that needed child care.
They also found that Latino child care providers who operate in their own homes face barriers to access training and navigate state licensing requirements.
The findings led CLUES to launch a new program called “Logros Tempranos” to assist child care providers with resources such as transportation, tech help and pre-licensing info in Spanish. Mosquera and the three other entrepreneurs are graduates of that program.
“They opened the door for me to being able to put my ideas into work,” Mosquera told Sahan Journal. “Now we’re here, and we’re starting, and I can take care of my family and can take care of my business.”
Violeta Hernandez, CLUES director of early childhood initiatives and program policy, said staff members heard that community members who wanted to start home-based child care faced challenges getting licensed. That inspired the child care incubator.
Longtime Minneapolis child care provider Luciana Carballo said she’s heard from others facing those challenges.
“I am seeing that it’s taking more work and time for some people to get licensed, and sometimes they just want to give up,” said Luciana Carballo, an Argentinian immigrant.
Before starting her own child care business two decades ago, Carballo said she was working full-time and studying to be a kindergarten teacher. As a mother to two daughters, a 1-year-old and 3-year-old at the time, she said it was expensive to send them to day care. She also wanted her daughters enrolled in a Spanish-immersion day care so they could be bilingual in Spanish and English to communicate with their relatives.
The closest Spanish-immersion child care provider had high staff turnover, she said, and her daughters were in separate classes, due to their age difference.
“I could just tell my daughters were unhappy,” she said, which motivated her to start her own day care.
Over the years, Carballo said many parents have told her they prefer a home-based provider — especially for babies — because their children are kept together as siblings and the providers serve a smaller group of children who get more attention.
But in recent months, Carballo said she has seen some child care providers living in fear or losing their work authorization under the immigration crackdown by President Donald Trump. That could lead Spanish-immersion child cares to close or limit the number of children, leaving parents with fewer options.
“You just can’t really plan,” she said.
Carballo said the licensing process wasn’t difficult at the time she applied since she was already bilingual and had some college coursework under her belt. But she has heard from other family-based child care providers who reported inconsistent enforcement and unclear rules. Family-based child care providers who operate at home must obtain a license through the county where they operate. The licensing process requires background checks, home inspections and fees.
“The rules need to be clarified and licensors need to all follow the same rules, just like we do,” she said.
Hollee Saville, president of the Minnesota Association of Child Care Professionals, said many family-based providers feel some of the regulations are burdensome and overly punitive. “It’s just a sense from providers that we’re not allowed to just focus on our jobs, which is loving, caring and teaching these children,” she said.
Oftentimes licensors enforce the rules inconsistently for family-based child care providers and require them meet stricter standards compared to commercial child care centers, according to Saville and Carballo.
Saville is looking forward to licensing updates currently being drafted by the Minnesota Department of Children, Youth, and Families. A draft including feedback from parents, providers, licensors and other stakeholders will be released before the 2026 Legislative session.
What’s next
CLUES plans to offer feedback on the licensing draft, said Hernandez. The hub has space to add more providers and there’s a waiting list of providers who want to be part of the pilot program, she said, but state law prohibits more than four independent child care providers under a single roof.
“With this model, CLUES is helping remove barriers to entry into the field, improve retention of family child care providers and increase the number of licensed Latina and Spanish-speaking child care providers,” she said in her speech at the opening ceremony, adding that the providers will earn a “viable” income and build generational wealth.
Parents can enroll their children at the hub’s child care centers by contacting the providers, she said.
Hernandez said she is hoping the pilot program and hub’s model will be replicated in other cities.
“We want to celebrate not only Ecuadorian culture, but also we want to celebrate all of the Latino culture. We are hard-working people. We are very joyful people. We like to hug,” Mosquera said. “So there’s definitely going to be a lot of that in these classrooms — a lot of joy, a lot of pride of being Latino, a lot of celebration and love.”
CORRECTION: A previous version of this story misstated the name of the state department in charge of child care licensing updates.
