Since the Child Care NEXT initiative began in 2021, the six state coalitions have built strong foundations to operationalize the core principles of Child Care NEXT, and their advocacy, policy, and revenue efforts in early care and education have achieved ambitious and transformative changes in their states’ child care systems.
COLORADO
Coalition: Growing Our Future (GOF)
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. Achieving this vision requires significant and sustained public investment. To that end, Growing Our Future seeks to influence statewide fiscal reform and advance progressive tax reform through statewide initiatives that work to fully fund care.
Child Care NEXT Lead Organizations:
Colorado Statewide Parent Coalition
Progress to Date Toward Their “North Star” Vision:
Growing Our Future has championed increased supports for caregivers across the child care continuum, including increased public investment in early childhood education and direct supports for caregivers. The coalition has also championed the inclusion of Family, Friend, and Neighbor (FFN) care providers in Colorado’s child care system. In 2022, the coalition was part of an effort that secured almost $100 million of federal relief funds appropriated for child care, with $7.5 million dedicated to the training and support of FFN providers. That year also saw the establishment of an FFN advisory group for the state’s new Department of Early Childhood. In 2024, the coalition advocated successfully for a refundable tax credit for caregivers across the lifespan that includes both licensed child care providers and FFN providers. The state also created a pilot program for unlicensed providers to seek license-exempt status and become an eligible child care subsidy provider. Growing Our Future has been working with groups across issues to advance a graduated income tax ballot initiative that would increase fairness in Colorado’s tax system and fund child care, healthcare, and K-12 education. To ensure that the initiative is grounded in lived experiences of families and communities, the coalition has engaged in deep canvassing and public opinion research and is currently working to mobilize the early childhood community across the state to support this initiative, with an emphasis on the leadership of families and providers.
Coalition Highlights:
Parents and providers play a significant role in the leadership of the Growing Our Future coalition, with the leadership team evolving over time from primarily organizational representation to a mix of parent and provider leadership and organizational. The coalition invests in this team’s capacity to advocate for child care and its connection to broader care and education policies, as well as tax and fiscal reform. Also, language justice is practiced across all communications and meeting facilitation to ensure that parents and providers from a diversity of backgrounds can engage authentically in the coalition’s work, including interpretation and translation into Spanish and Dari.
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. A transformed child care system in Louisiana would serve at least two-thirds of children under age 5 with working parents. This will require approximately $1 billion additional funding for the system.
Child Care NEXT Lead Organizations:
Louisiana Policy Institute for Children
Progress To Date Toward Their “North Star” Vision:
In the early years of the initiative, Geaux Far won significant increases in funding for early care and education: $84 million in 2022 and another $44 million in 2023. They also worked to pass a local millage increase in New Orleans dedicated to infant-toddler care, which will generate about $23 million of local funding annually that the state will match through the ECE Fund. In recent years, their wins have come from defending child care against funding cuts in a fiscally and politically challenging environment.
Coalition Highlights:
Since its inception, Geaux Far Louisiana has prioritized parent and provider engagement, with a goal of 55 percent of leadership roles being filled by parents and providers. Geaux Far has consistently exceeded this goal, with closer to 65 percent of leaders being parents or providers. The Geaux Far coalition has been responsive to the needs and insights of parents and providers in their community, including adding a pilar to their strategic plan based on community insights, and supporting creation of a father-led advocacy effort.
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:
Partnership for Community Action
New Mexico Early Childhood Association
Progress to Date Toward their “North Star” Vision:
Over the years, the New Mexico coalition has achieved major incremental goals that culminated in the Governor’s commitment in 2025 to implement universal child care. The journey started in 2022 when the state expanded eligibility for child care subsidies to and waived copay for families at up to 400% of federal poverty guidelines. The following year, the coalition worked to pass a groundbreaking constitutional amendment to dedicate annually a portion of an increased distribution from state’s Land Grant Permanent Fund to early care and education, which was estimated at $145 million in 2023. In 2025, the state increased the minimum annual distribution from the Early Childhood Trust Fund from $250 million to $500 million.
In the 2026 Legislative Session, the Child Care Assistance Program Act codified universal access to child care in state statute, with an additional distribution of up to $700 million per year, for the next five years. An additional $60 million for a wage and career ladder was also secured in the budget. Another major legislative success is the Regulated Child Care Zoning Requirements Act, which clears the path for more child care providers by streamlining zoning, and prohibiting local governments and HOAs from imposing fees or restrictions on child care homes and centers. The coalition continues to advocate for increased compensation through the implementation of a career and wage lattice.
Coalition Highlights:
Since its creation in 2021, the New Mexico Child Care NEXT coalition has recruited additional community-based organizations to become members to ensure that their work is accountable to parents and providers. These community organizing groups, including Ngage, Somos Un Pueblo Unido, and Partnership for Community Action, work directly with parents and providers to change systems and have successfully advocated to make implementation of a wage and career ladder the top priority for the coalition.
NEW YORK
Coalition: Empire State Campaign for Child Care
Campaign Vision: Our Campaign is Fighting for Universal Child Care.
Universal child care is free child care for all. It means that every child and family, regardless of income, immigration status, or zip code, can access high-quality, free child care that meets their care needs. It means that every child care educator makes a thriving wage that reflects the true cost of care. It means that child care is treated as a public good, rather than a private family burden.
Child Care NEXT Lead Organizations:
Alliance for Quality Education
Schuyler Center for Analysis and Advocacy
Progress To Date Toward Their “North Star” Vision:
In large part due to the Empire State Campaign’s advocacy, New York’s state investment in the child care system has risen from about $200 million from the beginning of the Child Care NEXT initiative to about $1.4 billion by 2025. With these funds, the state has been able to sustain COVID-era policies, such as expanding subsidy eligibility to families earning up to 85% of the state median income, and capping copays at 1% of income for families with earnings above the federal poverty level.
At the same time, the coalition has worked to socialize the idea of universal child care, first by cultivating legislative champions to introduce vision bills in 2022, securing public commitment from the Governor for the concept, helping to create the moment in which universal child care emerged as a top (winning) issue in the NYC mayoral campaign, and releasing a roadmap to universal child care in November 2025. In early 2026, the Governor proposed the largest single-year increase in investment in early childhood education in state history in her Executive Budget. The $1.7 billion investment, of which $1.2 billion would be recurring annual state funding, along with $500 million to support expansions to pre-K and 3-K, the launch of 2-K in New York City, and three universal child care pilot programs in communities outside of New York City. Many of the Empire State Campaign for Child Care’s core values – including our firm commitment to an equitable rollout to universal child care that prioritizes low-income families, and broad access regardless of immigration status – are reflected in the manner in which the state is structuring its expansion toward universal child care. One challenge that persists: achieving robust, ongoing investment in the child care workforce to ensure all members of the workforce are paid a thriving wage.
Coalition Highlights:
A core principle of the Empire State Campaign for Child Care (ESCCC) is to be broadly inclusive and representative of the child care community, especially by elevating the needs and voices of parents and child care providers. ESCCC is building bridges with constituencies who are deeply impacted by the crisis in child care access and affordability but not otherwise focused on child care – including organizations addressing child welfare, immigrant rights, civil liberties, and gender justice. ESCCC’s leadership structure has developed over time and is representative of its diverse membership, including both family child care and center-based early education providers, predominantly Black and brown women, who nurture children and families in their communities every day.
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, universal 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. The universal child care system would cost $7 billion annually and will be funded by a dedicated revenue stream.
Child Care NEXT Lead Organizations:
Progress to Date Toward Their “North Star” Vision:
Since the launch of the Child Care NEXT initiative, Child Care for Oregon has won major reforms, including expanding subsidy eligibility for undocumented children, capping copays to no more than 7% of a family’s monthly income, and paying providers based on enrollment instead of attendance.
The coalition has secured more than $200 million of investment in the child care system: $100 million in 2022 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; and another $99 million in 2024 to address waitlists caused by greater demand from families. That year, the legislature also allocated $72 million in a “special purpose account (SPA)” to be set aside for this program to address any additional deficit, appropriated $5 million to set up a CHIPS Child Care Fund to build new childcare infrastructure, and provide funding for those in construction apprentice programs to pay for childcare.
In 2026, when the state projected that the Employment Related Day Care (ERDC) program was projected to run out of funds entirely, the CCFO community and advocates raised their voices—and legislators listened. The coalition secured $67 million to keep ERDC running for thousands of Oregon children, parents, and providers who count on this program. They also helped pass Senate Bill 1507, recovering more than $300 million in state revenue by disconnecting from harmful tax giveaways to the ultra-wealthy that would have left working families to foot the bill. Finally, the coalition worked in collaboration with the state’s Child Care Caucus to pass House Bill 4057 to streamline our early childhood system and ensure families receive standardized information about our early learning and care programs.
Coalition Highlights:
Governor Kotek recently announced the Early Childhood Care & Learning System Roundtable and committed to making 2027 a child care year in Oregon. CCFO, whose members are part of the Roundtable, is ready to hold that commitment accountable — and build momentum with care advocates, parents, and caregivers to demand a universal, publicly funded child care system that truly works for Oregon kids, families, and providers.
The Child Care for Oregon (CCFO) coalition intentionally brought together organizations from outside the traditional early childhood space, convening culturally-specific organizations working on issues that intersect with child care, including immigrant rights, economic justice, racial equity, and workers’ rights. CCFO relies on the expertise of parent advocates, caregivers, providers, policy advocates, and community organizers to determine its incremental policy agenda that will ultimately realize the coalition’s north star vision.
VIRGINIA
Coalition: Virginia Promise Partnership
Campaign Vision: The Virginia Promise Partnership coalition is working to ensure all Virginia families have access to quality, affordable child care by 2030. Its 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.
Child Care NEXT Lead Organizations:
Virginia Early Childhood Foundation
Voices for Virginia’s Children
Virginia Interfaith Center for Public Policy
Progress to Date Toward Their “North Star” Vision:
Virginia Promise Partnership has successfully cultivated bipartisan support for child care funding in the past five years. In 2022, the coalition won more than $130 million for early care and education. In 2024, with resounding bipartisan support, Virginia’s Governor and legislature passed a biennial budget that provided over $1.1 billion for early care and education services, including historic state general fund investments. During this time, the state also established a Commission on Early Childhood Care and Education, which supports long-term fiscal planning and investments to expand access to and the quality of Virginia’s child care system.
Coalition Highlights:
Virginia Promise Partnership has evolved from a coalition driven by one organization to a coalition in which leadership is shared across policy advocacy, community organizing, and faith-based organizations, along with robust parent advisory and provider advisory committees. The structure of the coalition ensures that each stakeholder group is represented on the steering committee as well as on strategy-focused workgroups. VPP members shared that the core principles of Child Care NEXT helped provide the accountability needed to become a coalition in which power is shared across roles.
Working in their states – and learning together as a cohort – the 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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