A key hub for child care services in northern Michigan is getting a fresh start after more than a year of behind-the-scenes upheaval.

Networks Northwest announced last month that it had taken over as host organization for the Great Start to Quality (GSQ) Northwest Resource Center, which had previously operated under the umbrella of United Way of Northwest Michigan (UWNWMI). UWNWMI shut down permanently in September after more than 50 years of operations.

GSQ is responsible for setting quality standards for “early care and education programs” throughout the state. A collection of 10 GSQ resource centers then use those standards to evaluate child care programs in their regions and provide support services to help those programs improve.

Locally, GSQ has also been a major player in multiple notable child care initiatives, including Tri-Share, a now-statewide initiative originally piloted in the Grand Traverse region in 2021; and Child Caring Now, an advocacy group that worked for years to address the biggest roadblocks to child care expansion in northern Michigan.

According to Networks Northwest CEO Janie McNabb, the future of the local GSQ resource center has been up in the air since last September. That’s when UWNWMI “decided not to renew” contracts it had with a quartet of child care initiatives, including GSQ.

By that point, Networks Northwest – a workforce, community, and economic development organization serving the 10 counties of northwest Lower Michigan – had been working with UWNWMI on child care issues for more than two years. The two entities came together over a 2023 grant from the state’s Early Childhood Investment Corporation (ECIC), intended to create coalitions and regional plans around addressing the child care crisis. As recently as spring 2025, both organizations were still speaking with The Ticker in tandem about that project.

Then, something changed.

“In September of 2025, the UWNWMI board decided not to renew the Regional Child Care Coalition contract [with ECIC],” McNabb tells The Ticker. At the same time, UWNWMI also bowed out of three other child care contracts, including with the Grand Traverse and Leelanau Family Care Networks and the GSQ Northwest Resource Center.

As co-lead on the Regional Child Care Coalition, Networks Northwest had no trouble taking over that contract from ECIC, and has been the sole administrator of that grant work since October 1, 2025.

The Early Child Care Networks contracts couldn’t be as easily reassigned, because Networks Northwest hadn’t been involved in the same way. “But we did apply for them, and we ended up picking up those contracts around February of this year,” McNabb says.

As for the GSQ Northwest Resource Center, McNabb says Networks Northwest “wasn’t quite ready to take that on” as of last fall.

“We still had a lot of strategizing to do about where our lane is, since [child care] is a whole new kind of programming set for us,” she explains.

Instead, an Ann Arbor-based organization called Child Care Network stepped in as a one-year host for the Northwest Resource Center. The handoff caused a “slight interruption” of service that McNabb says lasted about 20 days, but otherwise kept the local GSQ office together, retaining the staff and continuing the same services to northwest Michigan.

The 12-month grace period gave Networks Northwest time to “carve out a lane” for how child care could fit into its operations, McNabb says, and the organization threw its hat in the ring when ECIC put the GSQ Northwest Resource Center contract out for bid again earlier this year. Now, as of October 1, the resource center is officially under the management of Networks Northwest.

Asked about the shutdown of UWNWMI , McNabb says Networks Northwest was not kept in the loop after the two organizations stopped working together on the Regional Child Care Coalition. She says the abrupt cancellation of the various child care contracts last fall immediately made her “worried” about the stability of the local United Way chapter.

“They hadn’t replaced their CEO, and I just didn’t know what was happening,” McNabb says, referring to the May 2025 departure of Seth Johnson, who had led UWNWMI since fall 2019. “That’s when I started to have conversations with my leadership team about potentially taking over some of this child care work.”

Although UWNWMI didn’t announce its closure until September 18, The Ticker was getting news tips in early August that the local branch had already shut down amidst financial issues stemming from the United We Smile dental clinic. United We Smile closed abruptly in January after a little more than two years in operation.

Asked about the rumors, UWNWMI Chief Finance and Operations Officer Melissa Cartwright told The Ticker in a brief August 9 email that the organization was “working through a transition following the closure” of United We Smile. The announcement of United Way’s closure came 40 days later.

Tax documents from 2025 show $7,878,707 in revenue and $8,028,496 in expenses for UWNWMI, for a net loss of about $150,000. The organization’s expenses had skyrocketed in recent years, from $688,729 in 2021 to $3,880,507 in 2024, the first full year of operations for United We Smile. Total liabilities also grew substantially in that time, from $173,618 in 2021 to $4,729,903 in 2025.

Despite lingering question marks around UWNWMI, McNabb says Networks Northwest is actually a “perfect fit” to carry the organization’s child care efforts into the future.

“These services being under our roof – and connected to our Northwest Michigan Works program – I think will be really beneficial,” McNabb says. “We already have an early childhood education apprenticeship program through Michigan Works. We have our business services team, who can help child care providers hire and retain staff. And then, through our community development department, we have programming where we're assisting local governments with updating master plans and zoning ordinances to be more child care friendly. So, there’s a lot that we can offer.”