One Haas Foundation Concentrates Its Grants on Improving Day Care

Like many other people, Miriam (Mimi) Haas believes that wonderful things can happen when day-care programs for children are designed to provide a rich educational experience and receive adequate financing.

And as president of a foundation she formed with her husband, Peter — a former president of Levi Strauss & Company and the apparel company’s single largest shareholder — she’s putting her money where her beliefs are.

“We wanted to prove that, if you work in teacher training, if you work with parents, if you focus on mental-health problems of families, and if you improve the physical site, you can make a difference,” says Mrs. Haas.

Through the Peter and Miriam Haas Fund’s Model Centers Initiative, the couple is providing $1.2-million a year to four non-profit day-care centers in San Francisco.

That effort is the centerpiece of the foundation’s early-childhood program, the fund’s largest grant-making category. Last year, the foundation spent about half of its $8.3-million grants budget on early-childhood programs. It also supports a wide range of educational, cultural, and social-service charities, mostly in the San Francisco Bay area.

New bathrooms, earthquake retrofitting, and other structural improvements paid for by the Haas foundation certainly have made life more pleasant for the 36 children at the Tenderloin Child Care Center, located in a faded residential hotel in a seedy neighborhood of San Francisco. But the most important assistance from the Haases has been the financial support for salaries and training in excess of what is normally available for day-care workers. Graham Dobson, the center’s director, says that, in a field where turnover is rampant, that support has helped him retain qualified staff members.

In two years, not one member of the Tenderloin center’s staff has resigned. That is particularly crucial to the children, Mr. Dobson says, cradling a pouting boy in his arms, because “consistency and continuity is not part of their daily situation at home.”

While the program has succeeded, some critics wonder whether the project will make much of a difference beyond its neighborhood. Staff members and trustees of the Haas foundation acknowledge that they have not determined what the program’s long-term objectives are.

“It’s ironic that this family has been involved in philanthropy for how many years, and suddenly they don’t have a transition strategy for this grant program,” says one Bay Area foundation official, who declined to be identified.

The effort also suffers from a standard flaw in foundation programs, says one official of a San Francisco child-care group: The funds provided are too small to spark a full-scale change in social services. “Like all foundations, they have a somewhat grandiose view of how much leverage their money can provide,” says the charity official, who also asked not to be named.

Still, the Haas fund’s early-childhood grants have made a difference beyond the specific groups that have received grants, observers say. Indeed, the foundation’s efforts in the Model Centers Initiative and in its other grants to aid poor children have been instrumental in encouraging more government and private spending on day-care programs.

For example, with evidence that providing financial support for physical facilities improves the quality of day care, proponents of early-childhood programs were able to persuade San Francisco officials and other private donors to provide additional funds to renovate and expand day-care facilities.

In March, San Francisco Mayor Willie L. Brown announced a plan to provide $1-million in funds from the city and from private sources — including the Haas fund — to improve day-care facilities across the city. “The Haas fund was a real catalyst for that program,” says Amy Kershaw, a fiscal-policy analyst for the Starting Points Initiative in the Mayor’s Office of Children, Youth, and Families.

Even so, the facilities fund will amount to just a small fraction of the estimated $48-million in capital funds needed to offer quality child care to every poor kid in San Francisco.

Regarding the criticism that the fund has an inflated view of its ability to solve social problems, the trustees beg to differ. Peter Haas, a great grandnephew of Levi Strauss, says flatly, “I don’t think private philanthropy alone can handle it.”

Mimi Haas concurs, arguing that government authorities have a much greater duty to pick up the costs of providing high-quality child care, not just at the city or state level but at the federal level as well. “I don’t think that in the past people have realized how basic early-childhood education is to the future of America,” says Mrs. Haas. “I don’t see American society staying No. 1 unless we change the educational system, and you can’t do that just at the local level.”