• 35% of Marin County 3- and 4-year old children do not attend preschool, often due to the high costs for families.
• 65% of Marin’s disadvantaged children do not read at grade level.
• As many as 800 Marin families are currently on a wait list and unable to secure affordable child care.

And there are simply not enough facilities or trained teachers to meet the rapidly growing needs in both counties.

North Bay Children’s Center is in the final stages of a capital campaign for the redevelopment of its headquarters site in Novato, CA.  The 11M project will replace badly deteriorated, unusable buildings with a safe, permanent, modern, and nurturing child development center. Once completed, this project will have a lasting and absolute impact on our ability to nearly double the childcare capacity of the replaced buildings from 72 to 176 children, and in concert with our 13 satellite sites, annually deliver early childhood education to more than 600 low-income children in Marin and Sonoma Counties, positively changing the future educational and economic achievement for our community’s youngest learners.

The Bright Futures campaign will strengthen our early education workforce by creating a North Bay Learning Lab for training teachers, parents and school administrators in the ingredients of NBCC’s successful formula. These highly trained teachers will be able to integrate NBCC’s core competencies’ such as “Raising a Reader” and Garden of Eatin’® nutrition education into their daily lessons. The Lab will also provide needed space for NBCC to further fine tune and enhance these key determinants of student success.

With an expanded, solid infrastructure to fully support more sites throughout Marin and Sonoma Counties, NBCC will increase the number of North Bay children with access to preschool and the path to economic and academic success. And each dollar invested in the Bright Futures campaign will decrease the inevitable costs to society if these children fail to prepare for the work force and are unable to earn a living wage.