The six inaugural Child Care NEXT state teams have built strong foundations for operationalizing the core principles of Child Care NEXT, and they showed recent advocacy, policy, and revenue efforts in early care and education that demonstrate a commitment to ambitious and transformative changes in their states’ child care systems.
COLORADO
Coalition: Growing Our Future
Campaign Vision: Our vision for transformative change in Colorado is simple: caregiving, in all the ways it happens in children’s lives, is essential, and should be respected, prioritized, and funded accordingly.This includes both respecting and supporting caregiving within families, and ensuring every family in Colorado has equitable access to affordable, high-quality, developmentally, culturally, and linguistically appropriate child care in the setting of their choosing.
Child Care NEXT Lead Organizations:
Colorado Statewide Parent Coalition
Progress to Date Toward Their “North Star” Vision: Almost $100 million of federal relief funds appropriated for child care for FY23, $7.5 million of which is dedicated to the training and support of FFN providers; Established FFN advisory group for the new Department of Early Childhood.
LOUISIANA
Coalition: Geaux Far Louisiana
Campaign Vision: We believe in an equitable, unified early childhood system centering racial equity and ensuring families access to seamless, high-quality early child development, health, and educational services. This includes: 1. An Equitable Early Care & Education (ECE) System; 2. An Equitable Early Childhood Health & Wellbeing System; 3. An Equitable Governance & Implementation System; 4. Sufficient & Sustainable Funding; and 5. An Informed, Accessible & Inclusive Network
Strategic Plan: https://www.geauxfarla.org/resources
Coalition Members: https://www.geauxfarla.org/coalition
Child Care NEXT Lead Organizations:
Louisiana Policy Institute for Children
Progress To Date Toward Their “North Star” Vision: The state appropriated $84 million for early care and education for FY23, including $25 million to expand child care and $40 million for the ECE Fund, which matches local investments.
NEW MEXICO
Coalition: New Mexico Child Care NEXT
Campaign Vision: Each and every New Mexico child, prenatal to age 5, and their families will have equitable access to quality early learning opportunities to support their development, health, and wellbeing, ensuring that they are ready to success in kindergarten and beyond. This includes: 1. Funding – Leverage the once-in-a-generation opportunity to build our child care systems through the alignment and coordination of sustainable and innovative funding sources; 2. Access to high quality care – Increase equitable access to affordable, high quality child care that is culturally responsive, and built on the strengths of our caregivers and broader communities; and 3. Workforce – Transform the child care workforce from low wage employees to esteemed professionals, while preserving the diversity of the workforce and valuing experience and competencies.
Child Care NEXT Lead Organizations:
NM Child Care and Education Association
Progress to Date Toward their “North Star” Vision: The state expanded eligibility for child care subsidies to and waived copay for families at up to 400% of federal poverty guidelines; Passed constitutional amendment to dedicate annually a portion of an increased distribution from state’s Land Grant Permanent Fund to ECE, which was $145 million in 2023.
NEW YORK
Coalition: Empire State Campaign for Child Care
Campaign Vision: A child care system that is free of means testing: no income, immigration status or parent activity requirements. We envision a child care system that compensates educators and program providers equitably and adequately, on par with their public school counterparts. We strive to build a system that is culturally- responsive and is coordinated and aligned with the many systems families and children rely upon to thrive, including home visiting, early intervention services, pre-school special education, afterschool, and pre-K. This system recognizes and funds child care as a public good, not a private service.
Campaign Principles: https://www.empirestatechildcare.org/principles.html
Coalition Members: https://www.empirestatechildcare.org/member-organizations.html
Child Care NEXT Lead Organizations:
Alliance for Quality Education
Schuyler Center for Analysis and Advocacy
Progress To Date Toward Their “North Star” Vision: In the 2023 state budget, New York invested $500 million for Workforce Compensation and Retention, which will be paid out promptly through providers to the workforce through the stabilization grant portal created during the pandemic, and will be funded by remaining pandemic dollars. The state also expanded subsidy eligibility for families who earn up to 85% of the state median income, the maximum level allowable under the Child Care and Development Block Grant (CCDBG). Additionally, copays will be capped at 1% of income over the federal poverty level — a significant step towards making child care free for a significant number of families and much more affordable for most families. The state will begin to pay for up to 80 absences per year per child on child care assistance (up from 24 absences annually), essentially adopting payment based on enrollment. Finally, a small pilot program has been created to cover children whose immigration status disqualifies them under CCDBG through facilitated enrollment.
OREGON
Coalition: Child Care for Oregon
Campaign Vision: Child Care for Oregon is a coalition of nonprofit organizations, labor unions, community advocates, parents, caregivers and providers working to build a comprehensive child care system in Oregon. We envision a child care system that is equitable, affordable, culturally-relevant, inclusive, developmentally appropriate, safe and community-led. This new system must be developed by and for the providers and parents who know the most about child care, especially those who identify as Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Pacific Islander, and/or people of color.
Campaign Principles: https://childcarefororegon.org/plan
Coalition Members: https://childcarefororegon.org/coalition
Child Care NEXT Lead Organizations:
Asian Pacific American Network of Oregon (APANO)
Progress to Date Toward Their “North Star” Vision: Since 2021, the Child Care for Oregon Coalition has made structural, policy, and funding progress towards their vision of universal child care in Oregon. The coalition spearheaded a movement to establish a new state agency, the Department of Early Learning & Care, that consolidates all of the state’s child care and early learning programs under one agency. They also passed critical policy reforms to Oregon’s child care subsidy program that benefit parents and providers, like expanded eligibility for undocumented children, capping copays to no more than 7% of a families monthly income, and paying providers based on enrollment instead of attendance. In 2022, the coalition secured a historic $100 million investment in child care to raise provider rates, financially support child care providers in opening or expanding their businesses, and providing recruitment and retention payments to the child care and early education workforce.
VIRGINIA
Coalition: Virginia Promise Partnership
Campaign Vision: the coalition is working to ensure all Virginia families have access to quality, affordable child care by 2030. It’s four big goals are: (1) All families in Virginia can access affordable child care regardless of income; (2) Families can choose the child care they need, where and when they need it; (3) All child care programs have the resources to offer high-impact experiences; and (4) Early educators are better compensated and have more skill-building opportunities.
Roadmap: Choice. Quality. Access: Reaching New Horizons in Child Care for All Virginia Families
Coalition Members: https://www.vapromisepartnership.com/coalition_members
Child Care NEXT Lead Organizations:
Virginia Early Childhood Foundation
Progress to Date Toward Their “North Star” Vision: The state appropriated more than $130 million for ECE for FY23 and FY 24, including $73 million to expand eligibility for child care subsidies and increase payments based on cost methodology, $46 million to expand the Virginia Preschool Initiative, and $7 million to expand the Mixed Delivery preschool program. During the 2023 legislative session, the Governor and House proposed an additional $20 million to expand ECCE services in their budgets while the Senate included $40 million plus $80 million in contingent funding for child care subsidy. Budget negotiations paused due to potential recession/financial uncertainty but a compromise is anticipated in late June, following the state primaries. In addition, a new bill was passed into law establishing a Commission on Early Childhood Care and Education. The Commission will support accountability as well as long-term fiscal planning and investments to expand access to and the quality of Virginia’s child care system.
Working in their states – and learning together as a cohort – the first six Child Care NEXT states are well positioned to demonstrate to the rest of the nation how strategic, equitable, and system-wide change in child care can transform families, communities, and whole states.
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