Some people are “kid whisperers.”

Every church, it seems, has at least one or two. They’re the ones who can step into the middle of any vaguely violent scrum of preschoolers and immediately, magically call every little person in the room to an enthralled, hanging-on-every-word state of rapt attention.

“I‘m definitely not that person,” says Karyn Becker. “But I can run a business.”

Karyn has an MBA from Harvard. She has a background in new product development—“Design Thinking” to be consultant-lingo specific. And several years ago, when Send Relief approached her Boston church with a ministry opportunity, she became an unlikely, yet perfectly-fit main character in a still-unfolding story about refugees and daycare. “I have a corporate background,” she says. “Even when I was young, God put me in a household where my dad started a small medical device business, and I would watch him fill out forms on our kitchen table. So I just grew up thinking, This is what people do. You see a need—you start a business.”

In the Beginning

In 2023, 1,300 refugees from more than three dozen countries were legally resettled in Boston. Statistics like that are what drive John Ames, director of the Send Relief Boston Ministry Center, to do what he does. John equips local churches to meet physical needs and share Christ with refugee families. “We help churches create Care Circles,” he says. “A Care Circle is essentially a welcome team. When a refugee family comes to the U.S., we organize and train people from our churches who will meet that family at the airport, then care for them and help them through the assimilation process for an entire year.”

That’s how Karyn Becker was first introduced to Send Relief. In 2021, she became a Care Circle leader at her church, Hope Fellowship in Cambridge. It was, at first, a role which required only the most basic of skills. “I was just a normal person in a local church doing things anyone can do,” she says. “You don’t need an MBA to make a friend or show people how to use the subway or get groceries. That’s really how I first got involved in refugee resettlement.”

Necessity and Invention

Back then, Karyn thought she knew what refugee families needed. “It was jobs—100%,” she says. “Getting a job with a hard-to-prove educational background while at the same time having to overcome at least some kind of language barrier—that’s tough. And yet, after working with multiple families, I learned that childcare is really the linchpin for everything. I could tell you so many stories about someone finding a job but then having to turn it down because they had a young child they couldn’t leave at home.”

That’s when Karyn Becker, the little girl who grew up thinking, See a need, start a business—the one who became a Harvard MBA and then took on a refugee ministry role that “anyone could do”—decided to do what God shaped her specifically to do.

“Karyn came to us and said, ‘What if we created a daycare?’” John Ames says. “She had this idea where it would not only care for refugee children, but also be a place where refugee women could get jobs. She put together a whole business plan, we took it to some Christian business people, and that was the beginning of Dovely.”

Property Value

Aside from the Scripturally significant name—“There’s recurring Biblical imagery of the dove being a physical embodiment of the Holy Spirit,” Karyn says—Dovely, launching in August 2025, will be operationally different from most other daycares in the area.

Massachusetts provides vouchers to help refugees pay for childcare, but “They’re essentially Monopoly money,” says Karyn.

That’s because those vouchers only pay 2/3 of what a private pay client would pay, meaning most daycares turn refugees away. Dovely, however, will not—not after Send Relief connected Karyn with Arbor Way Community Church. “We found this Send Network church plant that had just gotten its own property,” John says. “They wanted to be involved in refugee care, and they agreed to host Dovely in their building.”

“Real estate is one reason childcare is so expensive,” Karyn says. “But churches like Arbor Way are uniquely positioned to do this because they have a nursery. That’s going to enable us to provide good, affordable childcare and, at the same time, create good jobs for these women—jobs that can be a launchpad to whatever they might eventually want to do.”

Human Resources

Funding, location, business plan—the pieces came together more effortlessly than Karyn ever anticipated. She even stumbled upon a “kid whisperer” who will serve as Dovely’s director. “It’s wild,” she says. “God led us to a resettled family from Ukraine who were attending one of our Send Network churches. As it turns out, they’d run early childhood education centers in Lviv.”

The hope is this will be the first of many Dovely Daycares. “We’re going to learn some good lessons, and then we can take this anywhere,” Karen says.

Learn more about all the ways Send Relief equips churches to care for refugees.