Dear Friends,

thread has always believed that building on strengths leads to greater success. Your support this year made it possible to strengthen and build capacity within our organization, across communities, and in the early childhood education field in Alaska.

Strengthening child care: During this fiscal year, we still felt the effects of the pandemic. Child care programs continued to struggle to stay open, and access to child care remained a challenge for many families. Through the continued struggles, your support made a significant difference supporting thread to provide the knowledge, skills, and resources that families and child care programs need to excel. Together, we helped stabilize Alaska’s child care sector and achieved some remarkable accomplishments throughout the year.

With annual revenue exceeding $58.6M, we had the largest budget year in our history. We were proud to partner in delivering COVID-19 financial relief to child care programs and stand up new initiatives across Alaska. The COVID-19 relief resources helped hundreds of programs stay open, retain staff, keep the lights on, and make improvements that benefited over 10,000 Alaskan children.

Strengthening our response to child care needs: Following our agency value of being an incubator, thread created the INNOVATION and IMPROVE grant opportunities to increase and sustain the availability of affordable, high-quality child care. The IMPROVE grant allowed 24 licensed child care programs to make improvements such as health and safety repairs and supplies for new classrooms. The INNOVATION grant provided 17 communities across Alaska with resources for planning and implementation of projects for increased access to quality child care including building and sustaining the child care workforce and increasing capacity for high-quality child care.

Strengthening our business model: This fiscal year, thread focused on strengthening our business model with goals of greater efficiency and maximizing customer reach. This includes moving to a unified statewide organization. This is a momentous change for thread as for the last 15 years, we have shared the delivery of our primary services in partnership with AEYC Southeast (SEA-AEYC) in Southeast Alaska and Thrivalaska in the Northern/Interior regions. Through this three-sister organizational structure, thread services grew and expanded to serve the early childhood education community. We are proud of this partnership and our successes and at the same time recognize that the COVID-19 pandemic changed how we work, engage in and respond to service needs, and communicate. These changes, coupled with flat funding for our primary services led to the movement of streamlining services with aim to better serve and respond to the needs of early educators and families across the state. This transition aims to achieve the greatest impact for more accessible, affordable, high-quality early childhood education.

Strengthening our partnerships: We extend our heartfelt thanks to our partners for working together to strengthen child care. Our primary partner this year was the State of Alaska, Child Care Program Office (CCPO). We thank them for their invaluable collaboration in continuing to ensure stability in the child care sector. They, like many of you, stood by and worked with thread to respond to still critical needs and provide targeted resources. We appreciate your partnership to strengthen our mission and impact. Together, we ensured that children have access to affordable, high-quality care.

Thank you for your continued support.

Stephanie Berglund
thread CEO

Highlights:

• In February of 2023, thread reopened offices to in-person visits for the first time since the beginning of the pandemic and used video conferencing technology to safely connect families face-to-face with one of thread’s Early Childhood Specialists.
• thread revised and updated its guidebook for Alaska families in choosing quality child care.
• thread joined Programs for Infants & Children, Inc. (PIC) in the Swaddle Me project to distribute new parent packages to families welcoming babies in Anchorage area hospitals.

COVID-19 relief funding helped stabilize licensed child care programs. thread provided COVID-19 grant support including $29.9M in stabilization grants from ARPA, the American Rescue Plan Act, and CRRSA, the Coronavirus Response and Relief Supplemental Appropriations Act. In addition, thread partnered with the Municipality of Anchorage’s Assembly and Mayor’s office, and the Mat-Su Health Foundation to provide additional funding for child care programs in their service area.

Highlights:

• thread provided $89,590 worth of educational supplies directly to child care programs.
• In partnership with State of Alaska, Child Care Program Office (CCPO), thread offered the Improve Child Care competitive grant, which awarded 24 child care programs approximately $930,000 to improve their programs, including projects such as updated outdoor environments, facilities maintenance, and classroom enhancements.
• thread partnered with the Alaska Small Business Development Center to offer more than 15 free workshops to child care businesses.

In FY23 thread continued its successful management of teleworking, providing quality services to customers while keeping safety and flexibility top of mind. Progress also continued with the implementation of our new customer relationship management software, Salesforce, across the organization.

To meet growing needs, thread created two new positions in FY23: a Chief Administrative Officer to oversee office management, information technology, and operations workflow; and a Community Services Manager to support thread’s collaboration with communities, businesses and tribal communities, to expand our services and increase access to affordable, high-quality child care statewide.

Additionally, thread invested in the well-being of staff by providing a new benefit. Employees now have access to the Calm app free of charge. Calm provides mental health resources such as breathing exercises, meditations, master classes on managing stress and burnout, and sleep stories and soundscapes for better sleep.

Finally, thread launched a new website to better organize our resources and meet the needs of our customers, including updating the child care search tool. We rounded out our online presence by launching a brand-new Instagram account. Follow us at @thread_alaska.

On behalf of the thousands of Alaska children in child care today, thank you for your support.

Together we are working toward the vision that all early care and learning is accessible, affordable, and high-quality to support positive outcomes for children and families.

thread appreciates the community of partners, organizations and individuals who helped build capacity for child care this year by supporting thread’s work. Thank you!

Our supporters in FY23 include:

Alaska Chamber of Commerce
Alaska Community Foundation
Alaska Department of Education and Early Development
Alaska Department of Health
Anchorage Association for the Education of Young Children
Barney and Rachel Gottstein Charitable Foundation
ConocoPhillips Alaska
Credit Union 1
First National Bank Alaska
Gottstein Family Foundation
Halcyon Consulting
Little Red School House
Mat-Su Health Foundation
Municipality of Anchorage
PerkinsCoie LLC
Rasmuson Foundation
The Kroger Co Foundation
U.S. Community Federation
United Way of Anchorage
United Way of Valdez
Valley Hospital Association
And many more donors!

Operating Expenses