50-State Early Childhood Policy Progress and Landscape Report

Advocates leveraged power for wins in 2025.   

The engine of policy change is strong, independent organizations who come together to build  powerful, diverse, and durable constituencies for young children. They are listening to, learning from, and centering the voices of faith leaders, businesspeople, health practitioners, parents, and teachers as theybuild collective power and demand for change. They are forming coalitions, building partnerships centered in equity, and maintaining bold visions focused on systems change, even when year-over-year policy change is incremental. And they are ensuring that legislators, governors, and state agencies hear directly from families what it is they need to thrive. 

Here’s how they did it last year.

West Virginia rallied to block a legislative attempt to harm Medicaid and leveraged that power to increase support for child care. A legislative committee advanced a bill to automatically repeal Medicaid expansion if the federal reimbursement rate for the expansion population were reduced. Advocates quickly mobilized opposition from patients, rural hospitals, Managed Care Organizations, physicians, faith leaders, and others. Working together, in less than a week, they convened a press conference, brought over two hundred people to the capitol, and mobilized hundreds of calls and emails opposing the bill. Facing widespread, sudden opposition in the GOP caucus, the bill was removed from the active calendar, stabilizing access to health coverage for low-income families. 

West Virginia advocates aren’t stopping there. To continue building grassroots support for child and family issues, they are providing stipends to local community partners to support organizing that amplifies local voices, builds stronger relationships, and educates policymakers about effective policy. And it’s working. A stipend recipient who used her grant to hold child care town halls with her local representatives reports that “we went from [a rep] saying he didn’t understand why we thought the government should pay for other people’s children to be in child care, to filing an amendment to a budget for additional child care funding. That was pretty spectacular. He listened. We really made an impact.” Read more about it here.   

New York state and city joined forces to garner a large, emergency investment in child care. In response to an unexpected shortfall in funding for child care, the Empire State Campaign for Child Care ran a well-coordinated, muscular campaign, attracting earned media, holding press events with lawmakers, and organizing a speak out with parents and providers.  

Advocates across the state worked together to secure $400 million in additional funding from the legislature–and then shifted to administrative advocacy to ensure the funds were rolled out to counties efficiently. They noted potential barriers, pushed for data to be publicly available, and developed a sign-on letter to deploy if needed. 

This effort led the Legislature and Governor to include an additional $400 million in funding for child care assistance in the final budget. It also created much greater understanding among state and city leaders that child care assistance is the backbone of child care in New York—and ensured that was a priority as New York City’s mayor-elect and the New York governor were developing budget priorities for 2026. 

This kind of coordinated, effective action doesn’t just happen. The Empire State Campaign for Child Care coalition intentionally engages parents and providers in all aspects of the work, and provides stipends to steering committee members who don’t receive a salary for their work. The new full-time campaign manager has helped the campaign be more disciplined and strategic, ensured frequent communications with membership, and create opportunities for members to give input about campaign priorities. Read here about another New York coalition working to end child poverty.   

Texas demanded additional funding for child care and got it—through people power, persistence, and good organization. Texas is a big state, and advocates took off last year on a 12-community Texas Tour to hear stories, understand challenges and successes, and build relationships with families, providers, and stakeholders. They fielded a survey to hear feedback on policy changes from over 1,000 child care providers from across the state. They elevated the voices and stories of families receiving child care scholarships by sharing their stories in op-eds, policy briefs, testimony, social media graphics, meetings with legislators, and in person when they were able to come to the capitol. Several parents submitted written testimony, and a family shared their story directly on the local news and in a video advocates created. In addition to parents and providers, a vital component of their strategy was to show aligned support by medical organizations, business leaders (including chambers of commerce), and faith leaders from varied regions of the state. All that people power came together for an ECE Day at the Capitol where hundreds of state leaders, child care advocates, and early education professionals gathered in Austin, with the rallying cry: Fund Child Care NOW! Providers and educators took on leadership roles and voices across the state were represented.  

The critical and time-consuming work of listening to and lifting up the voices of the community resulted in an additional $100 million in unspent TANF funds re-allocated to child care.   

North Dakota is building bridges during a time of division, with multiple and varied groups coming together to confront misinformation around vaccines through messaging and trust-building at the community level. Aiming to lower the temperature on vaccine controversy by focusing on broader community wellness, advocates invested in community conversations. Nearly doubling their coalition size in a year, they offered educational webinars, launched a Vaccine Advocacy Learning Community and a Multi-Partner Health Collaborative, hosted a Children and Families Wellness Fair, and created a video series featuring community leaders and a blog series highlighting personal health journeys. They worked with Indigenous groups, sponsored cultural events, and participated in a Tribal Leaders Summit.  

When a series of bills then threatened to weaken the state’s public health foundation by eroding trust in immunizations, widening vaccine access disparities, overburdening health infrastructure, and hindering efforts to protect families from preventable illness, advocates had already laid the groundwork for widespread action. They collaborated with a multidisciplinary team of stakeholders to educate legislators and community members about the negative impacts of the bills, and their defeat preserved evidence-based practices that keep North Dakota families healthy and safe. Read more about North Dakota’s vaccine and community wellness work here and here.  

Advocates also built power for wins in the future.   

Big policy wins don’t happen overnight. They are built over time by adjusting to setbacks and continuing to push forward steadily.  

Virginia is making significant progress toward a comprehensive Paid Family and Medical Leave (PFML) policy. Advocates have built a broad, diverse, expanding coalition of supporters—including health professionals, small business owners, parents, and worker advocates—and elevated public awareness of the issue. They are intentionally centering families through a Parent Advisory Council that informs policy priorities, provides testimony, does media outreach, and meets with lawmakers. They have galvanized deeper partnerships with faith leaders, early childhood educators, and business leaders through roundtables and town halls. The sustained energy and organizing have laid a strong foundation for success, and public awareness and support for PFML are at an all-time high. 

Legislation has passed both chambers of the General Assembly in two consecutive years, only to be vetoed by the previous Governor. Through policy research, storytelling campaigns that amplify voices from varied racial, geographic, and economic backgrounds, and grassroots mobilization that ensures policymakers hear directly from the communities they serve, PFML became a defining issue in Virginia’s 2025 gubernatorial race, and the stage is set for a win next year. 

By uniting parents, providers, and policy advocates, Virginia is building power and changing the narrative around what the state’s youngest children and families need to thrive. 

Arkansas is building a stronger constituency around state and federal Medicaid and SNAP policy changes. They ran a digital media campaign to raise awareness and garner public comments on Medicaid work requirements, and hosted an educational webinar and a town hall to conduct outreach about the harmful impacts of state-proposed work requirements. Advocates are also trying out creative strategies for educating and engaging the public and legislators, including short-form videos, social media tools, graphics, maps, and dynamic data charts, which has resulted in stronger engagement. Advocates are building collective power among parents and other members of the community through a Medicaid storytelling project—educating lawmakers by lifting up the voices of people on Medicaid and those facing barriers to coverage.  

Advocates are finding that their approach to Medicaid and SNAP work is building a bigger bench. Nonprofit partners who have stayed on the sidelines are increasingly joining in the advocacy work, serving as resources to Congressional leaders, and co-hosting town halls in all four Congressional districts that shared how proposed federal budget cuts will harm children and families in Arkansas. 

Georgia is making big strides for the smallest kids, building up the state’s infant and early childhood mental health system of care through a partnership among legislators, state agency leaders, university partners, clinicians, and educators that grows awareness, builds public will, and secures funding and policy changes. The Georgia Infant-Toddler Coalition—comprising more than 70 organizations and agencies—gathers and amplifies audio, video and written stories from families and the infant-toddler workforce, amassed signatures for a Congressional letter opposing cuts to key federal programs for infants and toddlers, andorganizes weekly “Switchboard” calls to share intelligence. Advocates and state agency partners are developing a caregiver advisory group to integrate and amplify parent voice on infant mental health and sponsored a televised public awareness campaign for Children’s Mental Health week.  

Advocates have accessed provider expertise by surveying them about challenges they face billing Medicaid and sharing those results with Medicaid Managed Care Organizations, leading to an incremental policy win on the way to achieving the big vision—one MCO has now eliminated many prior authorization requirements for physical, speech, and occupational therapy, as well as mental health-related codes. 

Louisiana is uniting to “Geaux Far” for young children and families. Advocates organized more than 1,300 people to demonstrate their power during lastyear’s legislative session, such as Geaux Far Day (a playful, Cajun-inspired spelling of “go”), Day Without Child Care, Early Ed Day at the Capitol, and the first-ever Dad’s Day at the Capitol (an idea inspired by fathers in the coalition). To support all these Capitol Day participants, the Ready Louisiana Coalition and Geaux Far Louisiana ran advocacy trainings for business and organization leaders, and for parents. Advocates provided weekly updates on state and federal actions, printed advocacy booklets explaining the legislative process in Louisiana, and sent “what to know before you go” communications with video instructions.  

With this people power at the ready, Louisiana advocates can ramp up fast to take action. For example, building off of Dad’s Day at the Capitol, the Geaux Far Louisiana coalition advocated for and passed legislation establishing a Task Force on Fatherhood Engagement that will develop recommendations for each state agency to promote the full inclusion of fathers in their children’s upbringing, informed by dads and fatherhood-focused organizations that work closely with the community. Read more about Louisiana’s engagement work here. 

Alaska is growing the tent of activated partners who are ready and able to bring solutions to the legislature. Alaska is geographically huge and demographically diverse, making it difficult, time-consuming, and expensive for community voices to be heard at the state legislature in Juneau. Microgrants to small community organizations across the state, coupled with advocacy trainings, are making it easier to overcome Alaska’s obstacles, creating a win-win for effective advocacy. Child and family issues get more attention and are becoming more  popular across the state, and the local expertise means the right spokespeople can make the case to legislators. Thanks in part to the training and microgrants, child and family advocacy action from small, local organizations has skyrocketed at the legislature over the last decade.  

Want to read about more early childhood advocacy in action? Check out how…  

Maine’s Right from the Start coalition protected the state investment in early learning.  

Montana is building genuine, trusting partnerships with Indigenous communities.  

Oregon is building policy agendas on a foundation of parent and provider voices.   

Nevada, Maryland, and Hawai’i are fostering parent leadership.  

Missouri is connecting legislators with voices from the community.  

South Carolina is informing systems-change with community feedback.  

…and even more.