Twenty years ago, the Town of Nantucket conducted a needs assessment of the Nantucket Community. The report found that the top concern was affordable housing, with good quality, affordable childcare finishing a close second. Many Nantucket families found they needed two incomes and struggled to find quality care for their children in order to enable both parents to work full time. Upon hearing this report, the late Bernie Grossman was deeply concerned for the island’s community and the effect a lack of childcare might have on Nantucket’s economy. Mr. Grossman called on veteran early childhood educator Anne Bradt, and asked her to sketch out what would be needed in order to develop a year round, full day, affordable early education and care center.
With Mrs. Bradt’s advice, Bernie turned to the business community and raised funds for the start-up of a childcare center that would be available for working families here on Nantucket. Mrs. Bradt was further called upon to take the reigns of this new program as Director, and nine months later Tom Richard, pastor of the Congregational Church, offered the church’s Sunday school room to Mr. Grossman and Mrs. Bradt as a temporary home for the new center. An original Board of Directors was made up of parents, church members, local business people and community members, including Allen Bell, Mimi Beman, George Butterworth, Maggie Detmer, Debbie Fraker, Grace & Bernie Grossman, Jane Lamb, John Manning and Liz Winship. Small Friends hired Ann Lamaitre as their head teacher and implemented a program to train young mothers to work at Small Friends as teaching assistants.
In May of 1988, the doors of Small Friends on Nantucket opened for the first time. The program opened with 18 students aged 6 months to 2 1/2 years. There were two teachers, two teaching assistants, and an immediate waiting list. That fall the Board hired more teachers, and Small Friends was able to accept 30 children for the coming year. With space already a pressing issue, Mrs. Bradt and Mr. Grossman set out to move a portion of the former middle school onto land they secured through a generous lease from the Nantucket Cottage Hospital. Space continued to be an issue and in 1992 Small Friends created a satellite campus in space leased from the Nantucket Housing Authority. In 1998, a forward thinking Board of Directors purchased a two acre parcel of land on Nobadeer Farm Road made available to them by the Nantucket Land Bank. Small Friends moved a donated building to the site, and after renovation in 2004 the children from the satellite campus moved to temporary facilities on Nobadeer Farm Road. This marked the first step in making the Nobadeer property the permanent home of Small Friends on Nantucket.
