Big changes may soon be coming to Youth and Family Outreach, a Portland child care and preschool dedicated to serving low-income and otherwise at-risk children and families.
The Portland Planning Board is scheduled Tuesday night to look at the child care center’s plan to knock down its existing facility on the corner of Cumberland Avenue and Preble Street and replace it with a six-story mixed-use building housing an expanded child care facility and 48 affordable and 12 market-rate apartments.
Youth and Family Outreach, a Portland childcare and preschool dedicated to serving low-income and at-risk children and families, is going before the Portland Planning Board on Tuesday night to seek permission to knock down its existing facility on the corner of Cumberland Avenue and Preble Street to construct a six-story building housing an expanded childcare and 48 affordable and 12 market-rate apartments. Their current building, the Preble Street Chapel, was built in 1851 but is is not in a historic district or designated as an official historic landmark. Brianna Soukup/Staff Photographer
The nonprofit child care’s executive director, Camelia Babson-Haley, said in a phone interview Monday that she hopes the planned expansion will make a dent in the crisis-level shortage of affordable housing and child care slots.
Their current building is the Preble Street Chapel, which was built in 1851. But the building is not in a historic district or designated as an official historic landmark. The city’s historic preservation board considered classifying the building as a landmark at its June 12 meeting, but opted not to.
The planning board workshop to consider the plans will begin at 4:30 p.m., but members will not vote on the proposal until the next meeting.
Youth and Family Outreach child care was established in 1986, but the organization had served Portland’s neediest residents for over a century before that under a different name. The new facility would allow the child care center, which reserves 60% of its slots for low-income families and prioritizes serving teen moms and homeless and immigrant families, to double the number of children it serves from 58 to 110 and provide space for other services to be provided.
Roughly $20 million of the $24 million project would be funded with federal and state money earmarked for affordable housing, said Babson-Haley. The other $4 million would be raised by Youth and Family Outreach, which has raised $2.1 million so far.
The project began taking shape six years ago, when the neighboring property went up for sale, opening the door to dreams of expansion. Over the years, the nonprofit hit multiple roadblocks, including budgetary issues following the increased cost of construction triggered by the pandemic.
A rendering of a mixed-use development planned for the corner of Cumberland Avenue and Preble Street, with a child care center of the first floor and apartments above. Courtesy Portland Planning Board documents
But Babson-Haley believes this plan is solid and hopes to break ground on the expansion in June 2025 and open the doors to the apartment complex and new and improved childcare facility in the fall of 2027.
Youth and Family Outreach is still working out where it will temporarily house the child care. Babson-Haley said priorities are being near a bus line and as close to the peninsula as possible.
Babson-Haley has worked in early child care for 35 years and has been at Youth and Family Outreach for 24. Once a teen mom herself, she is dedicated to providing quality child care at an affordable rate to those who need it most.
For her, finishing this project would be a display of what happens when hard work is put behind ideas to make them into a reality and an answer to some of Portland’s most pressing issues.
“There is a serious need for these services,” she said. “Everyone is talking about the crisis in housing and child care. This project would answer those issues with concrete things. It’s an actual boots-on-the-ground effort that will have an actual impact on those in need.”
To Babson-Haley, expanding the child care and building affordable housing would carry forward the organization’s almost two-century goal of supporting the community where it most needs it.
“It would mean we are actually following through on what we say we are going to do for these families,” she said. “We would be giving them something beautiful and new that would meet their needs.”
Send questions/comments to the editors.
Modify your screen name
Join the Conversation
Please sign into your Press Herald account to participate in conversations below. If you do not have an account, you can register or subscribe. Questions? Please see our FAQs.