After a long wait, Tacoma’s Cora Whitley Family Center, the Multicultural Child and Family Hope Center’s new child-care and family-services hub, opened its doors this week in Hilltop. The two-story, 32,000-square-foot facility carries a price tag of about $20.9 million and is built to serve up to 300 children, from three months to 12 years old, with roughly 60 staff members expected on site. A ribbon-cutting is scheduled for July 1, with organizers planning to begin accepting students in mid-July.
According to The News Tribune, the center packs in 19 classrooms, many outfitted with private bathrooms, sinks, and their own outdoor play areas to cut down on shared spaces. The paper also details a 3,700-square-foot gym and basketball court, plus a staff break room topped with a sun-roof patio meant to make life a little better for instructors and caregivers who spend their days there.
Design and partners
Design and construction teams on the project include BCRA as architect and Korsmo Construction as general contractor, with structural engineering by Swenson Say Fagét. The firm describes the center as a 32,000-square-foot, 19-classroom facility built to broaden infant and early-learning capacity in Hilltop. Classroom exteriors are styled to look like homes, creating a “village” feel along the hallways, and the added footprint gives the nonprofit room to shift other community services into newly freed spaces at its older site.
Why it matters
The new center opens in a county where only 19.8% of low-income families receive early-learning services, according to state data cited by The News Tribune. Local leaders say the new slots are expected to chip away at a waitlist that currently stretches about two and a half years. Construction was funded largely through grants and donations, but the nonprofit still needs about $190,000 to furnish classrooms before the site can fully ramp up operations, the paper reports.
Funding and next steps
Organizers say the project’s financing came from a mix of public grants, philanthropy, private gifts, and some federal funds secured during the capital campaign. The Multicultural Child and Family Hope Center is steering potential donors to its capital campaign to help furnish classrooms and support program expansion. More information is available from the Multicultural Child and Family Hope Center.
