The Amazing Place Day Care Center
2519 Bayou Road
New Orleans, LA 70119
Phone: (504) 920-2980
Email:
Years in Business: 6 Years

After raising a family of her own and working in the New Orleans school system, Pamala Thomas knows what it means to take care of children. What she didn’t know and what Good Work Network showed her, was her own potential.

Ms. Thomas, who was born and raised in New Orleans and went to Southern University at New Orleans, worked with the public school system for ten years. In 2003, after some time working for the city and then in secondary education, she got up from her desk and decided to start a home-based child care center.

Starting with six children, Ms. Thomas’s center was given a Class A license in 2004 and grew to 14 children and then eventually to 22.

“And then Katrina hit,” Ms. Thomas said in a somber tone. “I evacuated to Georgia after the storm and then came back in 2006. When I first met Good Work Network I was trying to rebuild for the 22 in-home child care center and I immediately bonded with Good Work Network’s business counselors including Adele (London) and Patrick (Anderson).”

When asked about her entrepreneurial knowledge before working with Good Work Network, Ms. Thomas described it as pretty broad and mostly pulled from research that she did on her own time on the internet. Good Work Network was able to take Ms. Thomas’s broad business comprehension as well as her extensive familiarity in child care and use it to make real results for her business.

“I’ve taken every business training class they offer at Good Work Network,” Ms. Thomas said with a laugh. “I was knowledgeable about child care, but Good Work Network really helped me out with the finances. They also showed me everything I could do with my business and all the possibilities that the center could be.”

Good Work Network was also able to get Ms.Thomas in contact with enough funding to turn her home-based child care center into an off-site child care facility, The Amazing Place Day Care Center. This center currently serves 46 low income families in the area. Never doing advertising, The Amazing Place prides itself on constantly operating at maximum capacity based purely on word of mouth about the quality of their services. Ms. Thomas knows that without the dedication of Good Work Network, her center based model would have never become a reality.

“Good Work Network was more dedicated to me than I was to me,” Ms. Thomas said. “I would sit down after work to relax, but my phone would ring off the hook with calls from Patrick and Adele getting me motivated to take classes and build relationships with people. They directed me to new resources to do more than just rebuild after Katrina.”