This Childcare Program Is 100% Employee-Owned. Will It Help Retain Workers?
At Imagine Early Learning Centers, all staff own a portion of the company. Could this model be part of a solution to retaining childcare providers?
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Stephania Zamorano has been an educator in New York City for 15 years. Since 2021, she has worked at Imagine Early Learning Centers, a childcare organization that serves nearly 600 children across 12 sites, , in the New York metropolitan area. Zamorano described her time at Imagine as quite different from her past employers. She receives higher pay, experiences less stress and has something rare for early educators — ownership in the company.
Imagine operates as an Employee Stock Ownership Plan, or ESOP, giving staff the unique opportunity to become co-owners of the organization and participate in company decision-making. In a profession often marked by , minimal benefits and , the model stands out: Imagine is the only childcare program in the country that is 100% employee-owned through an ESOP, according to the National Center for Employee Ownership, a nonprofit organization supporting the ESOP community.
At first, when she became an employee owner, Zamorano thought, “whatever, I don’t own anything.” But once she participated in the company’s ESOP education programs to learn more about the benefit, she said, “I started to figure it out, and it feels great … like you’re the CEO of the place you’re at.”
Could this business model be part of the solution for some of the sector’s longstanding challenges that make it tough to retain staff? And as New York City explores pathways to recruit and retain the staff needed to expand childcare access with its , could Imagine’s approach offer inspiration?
Breaking down the ESOP model
An ESOP is a retirement plan that allows employees to build ownership in the company through shares granted over time. The longer an employee stays at the company, and the better the company does financially, the more workers earn. The value of the ESOP is realized when an employee leaves, retires or if the company is sold.
“It feels nice to own something, especially nowadays when you can’t own anything,” said Zamorano, adding that the ESOP is a critical tool for her future, particularly because she believes “social security is not going to exist” by the time she retires.
According to Laura Tulchin, Imagine’s chief executive officer, the nearly 200 educators at the company get a salary that ranges from $37,000 to $90,000 depending on seniority and tenure and have ESOP accounts with balances that range from $1,484 to $167,000.
The center, which has operated since 2002, became partially employee-owned in 2018 and it transitioned to 100% employee ownership in 2026. Because Imagine is fully employee-owned, any gains go directly to employees instead of to outside shareholders.
The ESOP model isn’t new: The . But it’s gained steam in recent years: Well-known companies like and are both ESOPs.
As of 2023, there were in the United States, with 15.1 million participating employees, according to the NCEO.
There’s evidence that the ESOP model has plenty of workforce benefits. According to research from the Institute for the Study of Employee Ownership and Profit Sharing at Rutgers University, companies that adopt an employee ownership model have when compared to non-employee-owned companies. More from the institute suggests that ESOP workers enjoy higher work autonomy, are more satisfied and feel less futility with their participation in workplace decision-making than non-ESOP workers.
That appears to be true at Imagine. “Whatever your position is here,” said Tijuana Jackson, a lead teacher, “because we’re an employee-owned company, you also have a voice in the direction of the company. That’s what I love.”
“What I appreciate about Imagine is they trust my insight … I help with the school aesthetics, I helped develop the curriculum for the week of the young child,” Jackson said, noting that lead teachers are also given a credit card to make direct decisions on classroom supply purchases.
Jackson’s experience is what Imagine leadership was going for when they transitioned to the model.
“Our hope is that we have a competitive advantage from a business sense, by centering our employees and being a more resilient, stable childcare company in an industry that is unstable,” said Tulchin.
To be a more stable business, Imagine hasn’t just worked to improve employee retention, but it has established a unique structure, which Tulchin describes as “multisite, not tiny and not a huge chain.”
And that makes a difference when it comes to the program’s ability to leverage the ESOP model. The childcare sector includes a mix of for-profit and non-profit models, with center- and home-based programs that range from small operations to large organizations.
Imagine’s size puts it in a unique spot, Tulchin said. “The culture is still the mom-and-pop personal feel with the benefits that come from a larger company, where we have a recruitment manager and finance person.”
Can this shared ownership model help attract and retain childcare workers?
As an ESOP, Imagine is in a better position than most to meet the demands of Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s initiative to increase access to childcare in New York City.
At the beginning of the year, the state and city of New York jointly announced the . The program is planned to roll out in phases with opening in the , 12,000 seats expected to be available in the fall of 2027, and by 2029, when the program is fully built out, advocates estimate that nearly 55,000 children will participate.
To create the spots the program promises, Lauren Melodia, director of fiscal and economic policy at the Center for NYC Affairs and one of the leading voices on the structural economics of child care in New York, said the city needs to address a core issue: retention challenges.
Melodia, whose area of focus is explained that childcare programs face significant staffing challenges and are often “forced into a situation where they’re hiring temps, early career people, training people up, hoping that they’ll stay with them long-term, then they move on to higher wages in the public sector.” This creates a vicious cycle, she added. Centers invest in training staff only to lose them to better-paying K-12 positions.
Leaders at Imagine are working to disrupt this cycle. According to Imagine’s annual employee survey, 83% of staff report being satisfied with their jobs, and 81% of staff say they see themselves working at Imagine in two years. Despite employees’ high satisfaction rate, the business still competes with the public school system.
Imagine gets its revenue from multiple sources, including a mix of private tuition, publicly funded child care subsidies and employer-sponsored child care agreements with government and university institutions. In a time of federal and state budget cuts and rising costs for families, childcare centers like Imagine are at the mercy of legislators and the economy, while public schools have less risk.
Even as an employee-owned childcare center with a diverse revenue model, Imagine isn’t immune to the challenges of running a childcare business.
The economics of childcare may prove challenging for ESOPs
The retention power of employee ownership lies in its promise of something wages alone don’t offer: wealth-building.
“It lifts you up to know that you own something and you want to make sure that it grows bigger and bigger,” said Zamorano.
Owning a share of a profitable business can greatly increase a worker’s wealth and financial security, but owning a share of a struggling business that doesn’t have a reliable cash flow cannot.
“The one factor that all successful employee-owned businesses have from their outset is that they are starting from a place of profitability,” said Tim Garbinsky, head of communications at NCEO.
For Imagine to make good on the growth of employee ESOP account balances, the company has to remain profitable enough to have cash on hand to reinvest after covering its financial obligations.
For many childcare centers, profitability remains a challenge. Melodia recognizes the business realities that could limit the expansion of childcare access.
“Small business owners are always facing risk,” she said. “Any childcare center is going to have a hard time guaranteeing job quality and job security if they’re not able to charge what it actually costs to run these programs, which none of them are able to.”
New York City leaders are looking at ways to enable providers who contract with them to charge what it costs, said Emmy Liss, the executive director in the Mayor’s Office of Child Care and Early Childhood Education. “We have to take care of the people who provide this essential service.”
Liss acknowledges that “folks who work in childcare programs face challenges when it comes to wages and benefits,” and that across the industry, teachers don’t make enough to “live and thrive,” and providers don’t have the resources to change the equation. It’s a problem that needs to be solved if care is going to be expanded across the city, and as more states like New York and New Mexico seek to provide residents with universal childcare.
In a field rife with workforce challenges, notably low compensation and poor benefits, the ESOP model offers providers an approach to building their wealth over time. But the model’s promise as a solution to the sector’s longstanding retention challenges hinges on reliable revenue — and for most childcare programs, that requires systemic change.
For Tulchin, the economic challenges are hard to ignore. “It’s still a very low-paid industry,” she said, and while the goal of shared ownership is to do right by employees, the math is difficult when workers are “living paycheck to paycheck, and the value that you’re talking about is 40 years down the road.”
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Andrea Steffes-Tuttle is an independent journalist writing about the economy, business and the care industry. She is based in Colorado, where she writes primarily for The Colorado Sun and The Denver Post. Her reporting centers on workers, families and communities often left out of policy conversations, with a particular focus on childcare infrastructure and labor. Her work has been recognized with multiple awards, including placement in the 2025 and 2026 Top of the Rockies Excellence in Journalism contest, sponsored by the Colorado Professional Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists.
