Safia’s family was living happily in Afghanistan. She earned a university degree and taught mathematics at an elementary school in Kabul. Her husband worked as an electrician. They had three children. 51
But her husband’s job was with the United States, specifically USAID, for 17 years. When the Taliban took over the Afghan government in 2021, he was placed on the death list, putting his entire family at risk.
Safia’s family eventually found safety in Houston. They are among 50,500 Afghan refugees who received Special Immigrant Visas (SIV), a program created by Congress to assist Afghans who worked for the U.S. government overseas.52
My family is now safe, but I am no longer financially secure. It takes years to obtain a license to work in a specialty in the United States. He has a low-level job at an electronics company, and the only childcare job she could find was as a low-wage helper at a center far from home. Without transportation, she took too long to get to work.
“Before I started kindergarten, I worked in Afghanistan for a year,” Safia said. “I love working with kids.” She found free child care training and licensing classes at ECDC (Houston Multicultural Center), a nonprofit that supports refugees and immigrants. However, under current funding requirements, the course was only intended for Afghan refugees who arrived in the United States between 2021 and 2023. Safia arrived in 2024.
Childcare entrepreneur Arlene Leverett managed the ECDC Childcare Training Program for 10 years when it was run by its affiliate, the Multicultural Community Services Alliance. She saw how it could make a huge difference, not just for refugees, but for the wider community.
“Child care is in crisis,” she said. “Employers are finally starting to recognize the economic impact of child care. Companies have jobs, they need employees to fill those jobs, and those employees need child care.”
Leverett estimates that 350 to 400 immigrants have graduated from the one-year program during her tenure. Some companies are starting their own childcare businesses to provide an option for parents who otherwise cannot afford childcare. Most graduates used their licenses to secure employment in existing childcare centers, which often find it difficult to expand due to staff shortages.
This is a win for everyone, Leverett said. Parents (most often mothers) who are already at home with young children can “significantly increase their household income.” The same is true for other mothers who need to take up work outside the home, and immigrants may prefer providers with a familiar cultural background. Employers will have access to the workers they need, especially in industries that rely heavily on immigrant labor, such as hospitality and health care.
The U.S. government provides some financial assistance to refugees when they first arrive, but that assistance ends fairly quickly. Nonprofits and other organizations engage refugees in language classes and job training with one goal: to help them support themselves within six months.
“To accelerate this self-sufficiency goal, everyone in the family needs to work,” Leverett says. “When there is no child care available for employees, it becomes a huge economic problem.”
Leverett operated her own day care center in Texas for 16 years. Immigrants have always been a “large part of the industry as employees,” she said.
Providing refugees like Safia with training to secure child care licenses can be effective, she said. “We saw that happen and we saw the change it brought to the community because one of the things that people needed was jobs.”
Currently, Safia is working on finding another affordable program to help her improve her English and obtain a license to open a child care facility. “I love kids and I’m patient with them,” she said. “I want to get better at this field and work with kids.”
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