FAQ’s

What does Crystal Stairs do?
Do you make chandeliers or staircases?
How are you funded?
Do you have Crystal Stairs’ in other states?
What are your hours?
What areas do you serve?
How long have you been around?
Do you only help families who are receiving welfare cash assistance?

What does Crystal Stairs do?
Crystal Stairs is a private, non-profit child development corporation. We help families find, and in many instances, pay for child care. We work with child care providers to enhance the quality of their care, and we offer a number of programs and services that support healthy living, child development, parent education, and family economic independence.

Do you make chandeliers or staircases?
No. But we know why you would ask that. Our name comes from the poem, from Mother to Son (link), written by Langston Hughes. This was a favorite poem of one of our founders, and it speaks to the kind of world we know exists as well as the one we hope to help create.

How are you funded?
We are funded from a variety of sources. Most of our funding comes from government contracts. These dollars go right through our doors in the form of provider reimbursement payments. We work with the state to reimburse providers for taking care of children while their parents work or look for work.

However, we also receive funding from corporations, foundations, and individual donors (hopefully like you). These dollars enable us to do very important work – work that is not funded through our government contracts.

Oftentimes this work is in the form of projects and programs that we know the community needs, such as parent education and advocacy, free cancer detection services, and preventative health care resources, etc.

Do you have Crystal Stairs’ in other states?
No, we do not. There is only Crystal Stairs agency and that is in Los Angeles.

However, there are other agencies that do work similar to ours, meaning that help families needing child care assistance. To find them, you should call your local Child Care Subsidy Agency or Resource and Referral agency .

What are your hours?
We are open from 9-5pm Monday – Friday.

What areas do you serve?
We serve 101 square miles that make up Central and South Los Angeles, as well as the cities of Inglewood, Lawndale, Hawthorne and Gardena.

Our rough boundaries are the Santa Monica Freeway to the North; the Cities of Inglewood, Hawthorne, Lawndale and Gardena to the South; La Cienega Blvd. to the West; and Alameda Street to the East.

How long have you been around?
We have been in existence since 1980.

Do you only help families who are receiving welfare cash assistance?
No. We help all families in our service area, regardless of income, to locate appropriate child care that meets their needs.

We also help income-eligible families pay for child care. Most families who are eligible are either on or have received welfare cash assistance in the past.

We try to offer child care assistance to low-income families who have never received welfare cash assistance, but this happens based on the amount of funding that the State of California provides to us for serving these families. If it were up to us, we would try to help every family who needs it.