Shawnell Johnson has spent more than two decades inside nearly every part of Georgia’s early learning system. She started as a pre-K teacher, then led a child care center, then spent thirteen years at the state’s Department of Early Care and Learning.
For the past four years, she has led the Promise All Atlanta Children Thrive initiative (PAACT), a citywide alliance housed at GEEARS, the Georgia Early Education Alliance for Ready Students. Johnson describes her own role plainly. “I see myself as a community quarterback,” she said.
That description matters because Atlanta’s early learning system, unlike its K-12 public schools, has no single organizing body. Center-based programs, home-based programs, nonprofits, and for-profit operators all interact with the same licensing rules and funding streams, but nothing naturally coordinates them.
PAACT was built to close that gap, pulling together the mayor’s office, Atlanta Public Schools, and more than 200 licensed providers around a place-based strategy: get resources to the neighborhoods that need them.
A Knock on the Door
For Johnson, the sharpest version of that need is playing out right now on the westside of Atlanta, where a wave of redevelopment is reaching the neighborhoods with the city’s highest poverty rates. In a single week last month, she visited eight programs on those blocks. Each had been approached about selling its building, and each was running at roughly half capacity after decades of anchoring the block, first under its founder and now often under the founder’s children.
The buildings themselves are frequently a century old, inherited across generations, and have never had a maintenance plan. Their operators have limited experience navigating a construction permit, and less still weighing the offer that can follow a knock on the door from a developer. “There has never been a maintenance plan,” she said. “It is completely time to think about redesigning the facility, or that septic tank needs to be replaced.”
Redevelopment, in her telling, is not the villain. The absence of a plan for the providers already there is. Left unaddressed, that absence becomes a closing. Met early, the same building a developer has approached can instead become the site of a provider’s own expansion.
Why It Takes a Coalition
That is where Reinvestment Fund enters, as a one of the organizations in the PAACT coalition. The child care providers Johnson works with rarely have time to manage a construction project on top of running a classroom, and some have operated for twenty years without a formal business plan.
Reinvestment Fund, working alongside Quality Care for Children, PAACT’s business coaching partner, the Atlanta nonprofit Early Learning Property Management (ELPM), and fellow CDFI Low Income Investment Fund (LIIF) has supplied the construction expertise, project management, and capacity-building that providers cannot navigate on their own.
Johnson is direct about what has made that partnership work in Atlanta specifically: local presence. “The greatest gift Reinvestment Fund has provided to this partnership was having the local knowledge and presence in Atlanta,” she said. “Atlanta is about relationships and connection and trust.”
That presence is not incidental. Reinvestment Fund maintains a dedicated Atlanta-based team, with more than 13 staff members overseeing investments in housing, education, food access, and community facilities. The ECE-specific support comes from Lawrence Smith, Senior Program Manager, who grew up in Atlanta and proudly calls himself a native.
That trust also reinforces connections that already exist. Many of these providers were in Quality Care for Children’s network long before PAACT, and consistent partnership across the coalition, a repair and renovation grant from Reinvestment Fund alongside business coaching from Quality Care for Children, strengthens those relationships rather than creating them.
70 Providers, 2,415 Seats
The clearest proof point is the PAACT Repair and Renovation Grant Program, an initiative involving Reinvestment Fund, LIIF, and ELPM. Since launch, it has reached more than 70 Atlanta-based providers, funding everything from new playground fences to full kitchen or bathroom renovations.
Over the course of the program, Reinvestment Fund completed 23 projects with capital improvement grants totaling roughly $1.83 million, preserving an estimated 2,415 child care seats across the city. One recipient put it simply: “I never could have imagined that this safe haven would become a reality.”
The lesson traveled faster than the money. The coordinated effort GEEARS convened in Atlanta, with Reinvestment Fund, LIIF, and Early Learning Property Management each contributing, became the working example Georgia legislators drew on when drafting Senate Bill 554, a proposed Georgia Child Care Facilities Program that would create the state’s first dedicated capital funding source for child care infrastructure.
The bill passed committee this year but did not reach a final vote. Johnson and her partners plan to bring it back next session.
From Preserving Seats to Adding Them
The next phase of that model is already underway. Reinvestment Fund’s Rising Futures Expansion Fund (RFEF) extends the same coalition approach shifting from repair to growth, offering planning grants of up to $12,500 and capital grants of up to $285,000 to providers ready to add on to their licensed capacity.
Where PAACT grants preserved the seats a neighborhood already had, RFEF is focused on providers that are at full capacity and ready to expand their space and increase their seats where most needed.
Johnson also sees an opening that has not yet been fully realized. Even with that footprint already built in Atlanta, across housing, food access, and community facilities, she believes Reinvestment Fund’s broader lens, understanding how housing instability and food insecurity intersect with a family’s ability to afford child care, belongs more directly in the PAACT conversation.
“That is a great value add that you have as a partner,” she said. “For early learning, cross-sector conversations are at the heart of social determinants of health. That is an opportunity that is not happening right now.”
A Model Beyond Atlanta
None of this is separate, for Johnson, from her own life. She has navigated child care costs as a parent herself and understands firsthand what families across Atlanta are up against. “I want my children to thrive,” she said. “I want them to love learning, to have a sense of belonging, to see themselves as leaders however they define that.” It is the same outcome she is trying to build, coalition partner by coalition partner, for every family across Atlanta relying on a legacy child care center like the ones she visits every week.
Johnson’s ambition for PAACT reaches well beyond Atlanta. She wants the coalition’s model, public and private capital moving together toward a place-based strategy, to become a template other cities can borrow, the way Atlanta’s own legislature already borrowed from it. “I would love for it to be a national model,” she said.
Reinvestment Fund’s role in getting there is not to lead that story – it is to stay committed to early learning across Georgia for the long run and to keep building the ecosystem with PAACT, government, private foundations, and CDFI partners who share the same goal.