St. Mary’s Center for Women and Children last week celebrated the opening of its new early childhood facility, the Carolyn Lynch Children’s Center, which means to offer affordable and accessible childcare to families experiencing homelessness.

The effort to put the center in place was enhanced greatly by a $1 million donation from the Lynch Foundation and by the reaction of St. Mary’s and the foundation to the spike in the need for more childcare in local communities during the pandemic.

As of Monday this week, there were 37 infants and toddlers enrolled at the Cushing Avenue facility.

“We visited back in 2021 and saw the vacant space for early education,” said Victoria Prudden, the Lynch Foundation’s chief operating officer. “Early education has been one of our major focuses for the last three decades and we saw this opportunity to reopen the space, and after the pandemic, there had been such a decrease in early ed that we knew that this was something we couldn’t pass up.

“A high-quality early education is so important to the foundation because within a child’s first five years, 90 percent of their brain develops.”

Peter Lynch, a legendary stock market presence at Fidelity going back decades, started the foundation with his late wife, Carolyn.

“The daughter of a teacher and an administrator, Carolyn was a tireless advocate for children, particularly those most vulnerable,” said Alexis Steel, the president of St. Mary’s Center. “Her work across the city of Boston is incomparable and the amount of families that she has impacted is unmatched today. It is a privilege to honor Carolyn’s legacy by naming the state-of-the-art Early Education Center for Children, the Carolyn Lynch Children’s Center.”

Steel said the lack of affordable childcare means that many single moms whom the center serves cannot afford to work and also pay for childcare. Children experiencing homelessness, she added, have three times the rate of confronting emotional and behavioral challenges, an issue that the Lynch Foundation’s Early Education Initiative has sought to address since 2011.

According to its website, the initiative is “a comprehensive strategy to support the launch and redesign of early childhood programs across the Archdiocese of Boston’s Catholic Schools.” The initiative, it says, supports more than 120 classrooms across 23 schools.

“This is so good for children,” said Katie Everett, executive director of the foundation. “It strengthens their social and emotional skills through practice and intentional opportunities, and gives the parents a safe place to have their child so they can go to work.”

Dorchester City Councillors Frank Baker and Erin Murphy attended the ribbon-cutting and both spoke about how their early years were helped by centers like St. Mary’s.

Murphy was born on the site when St. Margaret’s Hospital occupied the space, and she had her first child there. “When I saw that it didn’t turn into condos, it saved something to give back to the community,” she said. “It’s such a wonderful place.”

After Peter Lynch and his daughters were invited on stage at the ceremony and thanked by the Center for the donation, he joked with guests about what the center offers its children:

“It’s amazing how these children by second grade, they’re in the top quartile,” he said. “It’s incredible. They know colors, they get naps, they know letters. They know what a rhombus is. I still don’t know what a rhombus is.”