Stocchetti Anne-Karine
Organization: Optimomes
Year Founded: 1996
Country: France
Website: www.optimomes.org
Geographic Area of Impact: France.
Model: Hybrid Non-Profit
Focus: Children and Youth.
Social Entrepreneur of the Year, France, 2007 The Innovation Anne Karine Stocchetti has identified a glaring gap in French child care service provision. Today, parents whose work requires them to be on the job during hours when traditional child care is unavailable – mostly early mornings and nights, but also weekends and holidays – are forced to fend for themselves, relying on family and friends. But more often than not, children are left on their own or in the care of the eldest sibling who is sometimes as young as five years of age. In 1996, Stocchetti created Optimômes to incubate and pilot her new model for caring for children “after hours.” Fueled by positive initial results, she successfully applied for Equal, a program of the European Union, to replicate Optimômes on a greater scale. To do so, she created Optimômes Development (OD), the replication arm of the enterprise and launched the GEPETTO network and brand. OD has set up GEPETTO-modeled child care centers in eight sites in western France so far and is poised for further expansion. The centers operate according to 3 basic principles. 1) Services are provided in the child’s home and as a complement to other existing services during regular hours. 2) Fees for care are calculated on the basis of the family’s revenues. All children should have access to quality child care in their home 7 days a week, 24 hours a day, including when they are ill, and independently of parents’ incomes. 3) Child care professionals, rather than well-meaning but inexperienced baby-sitters, are deployed to provide the service. Each carries GEPETTO’s trademark, “red bag” filled with games, learning tools and writing utensils to help children develop while having fun. Since its launch in 2003, GEPETTO has benefited over 1,200 families and 1,800 children. Sixty percent of those families are single parent households, the majority headed by women, and 65% of them earn less than 2,000 euros per month. GEPETTO’s impact has been assessed recently by external evaluators. Results indicate significant stability for children and frequently better performance in school, greater peace of mind for parents, and dramatic reductions in absenteeism combined with higher productivity, benefiting the organizations that employ them. Background Today, child care centers in France close their doors for the evening and on weekends just when approximately 30% of the labor force needs them most. About 835,000 children under age 3 have parents working “odd hours,” but this number increases three-fold to 2.4 million when considering similar child care needs up to age 13. Moreover, 26% of children under age 3 are looked after outside their home. Single-parent households also represent a rising social trend, accounting for 17% of French households. This percentage is increasing. Today, French parents needing child care in the home pay approximately 28 euros for an 8 hour day, higher if it is after-hours. This cost is prohibitive for many of Optimômes clients who are among the lowest income earners in France. Parents who use collective child care facilities are paying on average 19 euros a day. Optimômes rates are calculated on the basis of individual household revenues, with prices beginning at 1.50 euros an hour for households earning less than 550 euros a month. Strategy Optimômes’ success has been the result of placing families and their needs at the center of its model. Optimômes Development (OD) replicates the GEPETTO model through a social franchise system. Qualified entrepreneurs who wish to franchise the child care center in their city or commune are screened carefully and then supported with a series of tools and methods to ensure solid replication. OD is responsible for the quality control of the services provided by the franchise through regular monitoring and evaluation. In five years, GEPETTO plans to be active in 70 sites. GEPETTO is also completing a bold move away from a mostly publicly-supported business model and towards an enterprise-based one. This new approach will help roll out the initiative by stressing the win-win aspect of the model, making it 100% financially self sufficient. Optimôme Development has also created “Minuscules,” small child care centers for 9 to 12 year olds, tailored for small and medium sized enterprises and communities, pooling efforts and reducing costs. Optimômes is currently incubating an IT project: “les lunettes d’ALICE”, an interactive software linking parents to local child care services. The Entrepreneur Anne Karine Stocchetti was born and raised in Paris and has three children. She first studied film, working in film production companies and writing scripts. She dreamed of becoming a film director but kept running into fundraising problems. By chance, she landed a job in the stock market in 1986 and eventually became a trade. Yet she grew increasingly uneasy with the question of how to balance work and family life. In 1991, feeling she had made the most out of her stock market experience, she quit her job and moved out of Paris to a provincial town. There, she created a child care agency and quickly discovered the difficulties for parents working odd hours. Their needs clearly did not correspond to the hours offered by child care services, and certainly not at prices they could afford. Bolstered by this realization, she created Optimômes in 1996. For four years, she piloted this experience, and was able to significantly influence national family policy in this regard. She set up GEPETTO as a social franchise to enable the rapid scaling of similar services offering the same quality care in the home at affordable prices for parents working odd hours across the country.
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