For more than 50 years, Child Development Associates (CDA) has made a lasting impact on the lives of working families, creating positive change in the local community by supporting children, families, and childcare providers. Beginning right here in Chula Vista as a family business, the organization has grown from a small one-room preschool in Otay Mesa to serving tens of thousands of families and childcare providers across California. CEO Rick Richardson shares that CDA employees are deeply committed to supporting a thriving ecosystem around education and workforce development: “We believe that all families deserve equal access to supportive services that will promote children’s healthy development and future family success.”
Rick’s passion for this work stems from his childhood. Growing up, his family didn’t have much. “It really starts with my personal experience with childhood poverty and my mother’s struggles as a single parent,” he says.” Rick was a latch-key kid, which meant long stretches of time alone while his mom worked and went to college classes at Southwestern and later, SDSU. Though there were some difficult years, his mother taught him a lot about public service—that communities and organizations can make a real difference by lifting up people who are in need.
“This work feels very personal to me. We’re helping families like me and my mother gain safety, stability, and opportunity to reach their full potential.”
Rick’s mother founded CDA in 1974 as a single preschool in Otay Mesa, committed to her desire to help families like her own. During his college years at San Diego State, Rick worked at a CDA preschool supporting his mother’s dream. Following college, he spent 23 years serving the country through active duty service in the US Army, living all around the world before coming back home to San Diego.
In 2011, Rick returned to CDA to pursue his passion for education and public service. Today, he’s the CEO, running a thriving organization with 374 employees, supporting over 20,000 low-income families in San Diego County, and taking his mother’s original mission beyond her wildest dreams.
What does CDA do?
The mission of Child Development Associates is to empower and promote the well-being of families, childcare providers, and the greater community through financial and support services. At its core, CDA enables parents of young children to work, finish school, and build stability by providing access to affordable childcare, and it enables childcare providers to offer nutritious meals and effective programming for students throughout the community.
The extra support received by families and childcare providers means that the ecosystem of quality childcare in our community is stronger, more cohesive, and designed to support greater opportunities for the futures of children and families.
Building Futures: Impacting Both the Individual and Society
A thriving childcare ecosystem has a wildly impactful ripple effect on society. When parents can afford high-quality care and early education, they have the time and resources to pursue their own stability through school, college degrees, full-time work, and family care. When families are self-sufficient and successful, the entire community benefits.
A child raised in a supportive and sturdy environment is more likely to perform better in school, opening doors to greater higher education or career opportunities in the future. More stable families result in employers with reliable, focused, and dedicated employees they can count on. If employers are operating successful businesses with dedicated and resourced employees, then more jobs are created and more opportunities are available for future families. More businesses means more taxes for Chula Vista, providing more of the resources necessary for thriving communities. The wellbeing of our communities as a whole is profoundly interconnected, and access to quality early education and childcare sits at the center of it all.
A Broken Market
The biggest challenge that families face right now when it comes to childcare, Rick says, is that they simply cannot afford to pay what it actually costs. At the same time, childcare providers cannot survive being paid what families can afford. It’s a broken market.
Right now, San Diego County surveys show that childcare is the second largest household expense aside from rent. Often, childcare costs families even more than tuition at San Diego State. And the solution isn’t simple. Quality childcare isn’t something easily automated or made more efficient with technology. It takes a good deal of resources to care for children well, which is why it is such a costly service. This gap—between what providers can offer and what families can afford—is where CDA comes in.
Planting Seeds for the Future
Rick keeps an acorn seed on his desk to remind him that his work is all about planting seeds. “It’s not about me or you. It’s about how many seeds you can plant, how many trees and plants will grow from those seeds, and then how those plants create more seeds and more growth, causing a ripple effect in the community.”
Planting seeds is something Rick does well. Through his family legacy at CDA, his involvement in the Chula Vista Community Foundation, his role as Commissioner on the San Diego County First Five Commission, and his position as an officer on the Child Care and Development Planning Council, his impact spans far and wide. His focus is on building systems of support so that our already great community can become even greater in the future. Despite everything focused on dividing us in our world right now, Rick finds that sitting down with people in the community and asking, “what are we going to do for our children?” has the power to unite us for the future.
What’s next for Rick? Leaving his legacy equipped to create positive change for the long run. “One of my focuses right now is growing the next generation to lead and operate CDA. I want to leave a team that doesn’t skip a beat when I retire. Who not only keeps CDA going but makes it better and better and better. We’ve been around 50 years, I want to be around 50 more.”