Over the past few years, Lynn McBee has been fortunate enough to be a part of a few winning teams in ChildCareGroup’s highly competitive annual Great Adventure Hunt fundraiser. The event is a mix of challenging brainteasers, scavenger hunts, and escape room-like puzzles for teams to work their way through and see who can finish first.
“Most teams have a diversity of ages and backgrounds,” McBee said. “We all think differently, so when you have all those different voices at the table trying to solve the puzzles, you have to draw upon your knowledge. Your whole team has to be engaged. It is so fun and unique. I’ve never been to anything like it.”
The puzzles are crafted and created each year by Joe Mannes, president of SAMCO Capital Markets and husband of ChildCareGroup CEO Tori Mannes.
The 2025 event will be held at Dallas Union Station and co-chaired by McBee, workforce development czar for the City of Dallas and president and CEO of the Young Women’s Preparatory Network, and Calvert Collins-Bratton, chief relationships officer for Communities Foundation of Texas.
The popular annual event differentiates itself from other nonprofit fundraisers in more ways than one. “You need to have your wits about you because these puzzles are like brain teasers,” said Collins-Bratton. “You and your team get up, move around, and work together as a group.”
Founded in 1901, ChildCareGroup takes a research-based ‘2Generation Approach’ to support children and parents, featuring early education programs and other core programs that focus on family sustainability. The organization has impacted nearly 40,000 children and parents below or below the poverty line.
Last year, its Great Adventure Hunt raised $300,000; it aims to raise $400,000 at the upcoming edition.
The co-chairs say they can draw parallels between the unique fundraiser and how ChildCareGroup works with children and parents. “It’s age-appropriate play,” Collins-Bratton said. “In preschool, children are doing a lot of puzzles because they’re expanding their horizons. It’s metaphoric because puzzles apply to many adults’ lives.”
“It’s the engagement piece,” McBee added. “ChildCareGroup engages the parents and takes them on the journey. And everybody has to be engaged in the puzzle playing. It’s a very hands-on childcare provider. It’s very intentional and working with the parents. The more you can have the family involved in the journey with childcare, the better it will be for the child and the parents.”
Collins-Bratton said she calls upon her own experience of hunting for childcare for her two children, citing the impact it has directly on women, the workforce as a whole, and the trickle-down effect on future generations.
“It’s the greatest barrier into the workforce, and it disproportionately affects women,” she said. “As we want to get more women into the workforce and trained with various skills, they will be sidelined if they don’t have reliable, quality childcare. [ChildCare Group] is a lifeline for them. Because now they have somewhere safe, reliable, and high quality to take their kids, and it sets them up for educational success upon entering kindergarten.”
McBee echoed those sentiments, pointing out that more companies are beginning to make strides in retaining employees through childcare allowances or having them available on-site. “We have so many jobs, opportunities, and open positions,” she said. “If [childcare] is the thing that is keeping someone from staying in a job, or the company being able to reach capacity in their human resource departments, then we have to figure out how we solve it.
“You can train someone to have a sustainable, living wage job, and the childcare could be $1,500 a month,” McBee added. “And so, what do they do? … It has become a pressure point because they have to have a place for their child.”
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