Our minister, Rev. Renford Gaines, (who later took the name Mwalimu Imara) and his wife, Harriet Gaines, met on August 26, 1968 with citizens from the local Black community to create an Afro-American Day Care Center. The objectives of the Center were to:

1)Provide babysitting services at a reasonable cost of Black families so that a mother and/or father might be able to seek gainful employment; 

2) Provide Black children with a basic pre-school education; and 

3)Provide an environment where loving, warm Black adults are present as models for Black children.

A proposal written in November 1968 also stated, “In addition [to those objectives] we would provide an environment in which the child will develop positive feelings about being Black. This is essential in order that the child grow into an emotionally healthy Black adult who is able to live an effective life in a predominately white society.”

The Gaineses and their fellow Day Care Center Advisory Board members set out the need for the center: In Champaign county at that time, 1,361 children were Black. 465 families received Aid to Dependent Children; 430 of these Black families were single-parent families. 150 of those families had a total of 225 Black pre-school children. 

Of the twelve licensed day care centers in Champaign County, only one center, the Burch Village Nursery School, served the Black community on an ability-to-pay basis. Burch Village was part of the Champaign County Housing Authority from 1951 until its demolition in 2005. After the Burch Village program was un-funded by the University, the school equipment and supplies were available without cost to the proposed Afro-American Day Care Center.

The University also sponsored six half-day programs for 3 and 4 year olds, half of which concentrated on Black children. The Advisory Board pointed out that the programs were subject to available research funding and that the community had no input into the curriculum. Also, they said that half-day programs did not serve the family needs of the community, though they did provide some enrichment for the children.

Quoting from the Afro-American Day Care Center proposal: "The full-day child care program will provide a nutritional program of one mid-day meal, plus morning and afternoon snacks. The program will develop materials especially suited to developing an appreciation of Black culture in Black children. The daily activities will be directed by a trained Black director-teacher, assisted by teaching aides. The activities will provide a balance between active and quiet play, indoor and outdoor activities. There will be dramatic play centered in Black mythology with Black heroic figures. The music, rhythms, and art experience will come from Black sources. An effort will be made in all program areas to increase the children’s ability to make cognitive discriminations with appropriate verbal responses."

From the Afro-American Day Care Center’s proposal, it seems that the Advisory Board might have been responding in part to a plan by the Economic Opportunity Council of Champaign County to spend $50,000 on a day-care center for 35 children. The proposal stated, “It is the opinion of Blacks in the community and some officials of the EOC that their day-care program will never leave the drawing board, at least not within the next several years. If and when it does, the Black community will have little or no involvement in its operation. Black enculturation would be out of the question. The proposed EOC program, in the opinion of the Black professionals in the area, is being used as a political gambit to relieve pressure in the Black community.”