A new D.C. program will distribute $32 million in grants to the city’s licensed child care facilities as they recover from the financial toll of the pandemic.

Launched by Mayor Muriel Bowser and the Office of the State Superintendent of Education, the Back-to-Work Child Care grants will focus on serving the neighborhoods most impacted by the pandemic, by offsetting costs to keep facilities open at full capacity and maintaining additional spots for families in need of care. According to D.C. Kids Count, wards 7 and 8 are home to the highest populations of children in the city.

The grants will also be directed to facilities that serve children participating in the city’s child care subsidy program, which pays for all or part of an eligible family’s child care costs. In a press release announcing the grants, the city pitched the program as an effort to help families re-enter the workforce.

“With D.C. now fully open, this investment will ensure that more working families, particularly women, can return to work by improving the number of high-quality child care slots in the District,” Bowser said in the release.

The Low Income Investment Fund, a nonprofit focused on community development, will be administering the grants, as well as supporting child care businesses with marketing, enrollment, and other needs. The grant program will stretch over three years: $7.9 million will be awarded in the first year, $15.8 million in the second, and $8.3 million in the third.

The Back-to-Work program is the latest effort by the local government to help the city’s child care providers recover from the pandemic’s financial devastation. In the spring and summer of 2020, 358 licensed facilities in the city had closed (either permanently or temporarily) while just 111 remained open, according to an NBC 4 analysis. The same analysis showed that with kids staying at home, and some families struggling to pay child care tuition, providers were often met with a difficult decision: Ask parents to continue paying, or lay off staff. These decisions fell the hardest on small operators, who lacked a safety net of savings and survive on tuition payments.

According to the city, 90% of child care facilities in D.C. are now open, and the number of vacant spots at licensed child care centers District-wide is higher than before the pandemic started. Even so, the economic fallout sustained during the pandemic has made it difficult for child care programs to bounce back fully, and despite the availability of spots District-wide, enrollment remains below pre-pandemic numbers. By making child care more accessible and affordable, the grants are hoping to simultaneously bring more parents, specifically women, back into the workforce.

The program comes on top of other government-subsidized grants, like the D.C. Child Care Stabilization Grant, which gave money from the American Rescue Plan to more than 400 licensed child development facilities in D.C., and the Access to Quality Child Care Grant, which gave facilities grants for expanding their services. Earlier this year, the D.C. Council passed legislation that would send thousands of child care workers in the city — who are predominantly Black and Latina women — payments between $10,000 and $14,000. It was part of a broader, years-long effort to boost the wages of child care workers.