The initiative’s director, Jocelyn Rodriguez, adds that child care also improves family economic stability, ensures healthy child development, and increases the ability of parents and caregivers to work and earn more. Early Learning Nation magazine spoke to Rodriguez and explored how the initiative taps into the dynamism and wisdom of trusted community-based organizations to inform systems-wide change.

Mark Swartz: How does investing in early childhood programs reduce poverty?

Jocelyn Rodriguez: Robin Hood operates from the core belief that your starting point in life should not determine where you end in life. The data shows that there is no better investment than ensuring accessible and affordable high-quality child care for all New Yorkers. By catalyzing improvements in child care across the five boroughs, we’re ultimately impacting the $1 billion dollars of public funding.

MS: What previous experience do you bring to this initiative?

JR: I am a first-generation New Yorker and a proud daughter of immigrants. Most of the child care workforce are women and immigrants, which is personal for me. So this community is my community. This initiative is a huge part of why I’m here at Robin Hood and helping to push forward this work. Prior to coming to Robin Hood, I worked at several multi-service community-based organizations serving New Yorkers living in poverty, and I had the privilege of leading one of the city’s local child care resource and referral organizations.

One misconception facing the sector today is that many people think of centers as the only place where child care is offered, and it’s important to remember that the home-based or family child care sector is where more than half of the children and families receiving subsidized care are being looked after. They’re also the programs that are likely to offer extended and nontraditional hours of care, and offer cultural compatibility with the families in their communities. Despite their critical role in the sector, they’re also often the ones that have the lowest wages amongst educators.

MS: What are the core challenges that have emerged so far?

JR: More than 300,000 infants and toddlers in New York City live in poverty. There is one child care slot for every five infants. Over half of families in New York can’t afford child care. And the pandemic has exacerbated compensation challenges. There are families every day that have to choose between going back to work, going back to school, going for training and job training, paying bills and child care. This disproportionately impacts women.

MS: This is an issue that affects the whole city.

JR: Absolutely. If people can’t find or afford a safe, nurturing place to send their children while they work, then they can’t live in this city. And without quality child care, New York City cannot stay vibrant. It cannot function.

MS: How are you tackling these problems?

JR: The city has identified 17 priority community districts in their blueprint for child care. One exciting grant Robin Hood is partnering with city government on is piloting voucher determination and eligibility in three community-based organizations serving northern Manhattan and the Bronx. Families will be able to go to their local trusted organizations to help them from start to finish with child care access and enrollment.

MS: How does the initiative define “quality”?

JR: We are always wrestling to balance quality and access and affordability without treating them as mutually exclusive choices. I think the most basic definition of high-quality child care is care that’s advancing the cognitive, social-emotional and the overall well-being of young children — which assumes physical health and safety.

MS: What do you look for in a child care setting?

JR: We need children to have consistent, secure and healthy relationships with caring adults. We want language-rich environments. We want developmentally appropriate and culturally appropriate language-sustaining practices. We want literacy-rich environments. We want appropriate curriculum, and supportive and innovative professional development for the caregivers on how to do that with fidelity.

Swartz: How is the partnership with New York City taking shape?

Rodriguez: We are taking important steps to drive collective impact on a collective issue. That means making sure that the folks responsible for implementing, driving, regulating and administering this work in New York City are on the same page when it comes to supporting communities and New Yorkers living with low income. This initiative also partners with shelters, academia and direct service providers to catalyze improvements in how our public dollars are spent every year with regards to child care.

MS: How will the initiative impact policy on the state and federal levels?

JR: Robin Hood’s policy team plays a crucial role in field-building and shaping policy developments for the child care sector. The FY25 state budget process presents a significant opportunity to build upon New York State’s previous historic $7 billion child care investment by prioritizing raising wages for child care workers. We encourage lawmakers in Albany to explore solutions that pay these critical workers a living wage. It’s our best shot at stabilizing the sector in the long-term, and creating a functioning system that works for parents and caretakers alike.

Nearly all the money she makes, she explains, goes back into the business: for supplies, playground equipment, toys and staff. After expenses, she estimates she took home $30,000 last year.

“Not much for a small business owner,” she said. One of her two employees is her sister-in-law, who has spina bifida and limited feeling in her lower limbs, which makes her prone to infections and occasional hospitalization. When she is out, Gale can’t afford to pay her, nor does she have the staff and paperwork capabilities to apply for disability or job assistance. “I care about her, and she genuinely cares about the children,” Gale said.

What Gale faces, like so many other child care providers, are the demands of running a small business with . Roughly 30% of infants and toddlers go to a home-based program, and estimates from Home Grown show that 1.2 million paid carers work inside their home, like Gale. And that the day care industry is highly fragmented, with nearly 90 percent of the establishments being single proprietorship day care providers and educational professionals — like Gale herself. Unlike other peer competitive countries, most of this country’s child care is unsubsidized, so it’s up to parents to pay the full cost while transferring some of the high-cost burden to the employees, many of whom make poverty wages. On top of that, the owner of the child care center is expected to manage the staffing, payroll, marketing, communication and benefits on top of everything else.

One of the most promising innovation areas we found in our on-going child care research is the growing number of technological and financial tools available to help the business side of the child care industry run more smoothly and efficiently — which can ease the time burden on owner/providers and potentially lower costs for parents and providers. While such innovative efficiency fixes can be very useful to individual child care centers, they are not a substitute for substantial public investment. Full enrollment, better marketing or payroll assistance can boost market efficiencies, but it will take real federal investment, year over year, to help families cover costs and boost child care educator wages, or robust family-supportive and safety net policies that would allow home-based providers like Gale to have her employees take paid sick leave without hurting her bottom line.

Key finding: Some of the most promising, scalable innovations are those that seek to centralize administrative roles and allow child care centers to focus on providing quality care, not back office functions. This can help lower costs for parents and overhead, keep family homes and small child care centers sustainable, and raise the low wages of child care workers.

Solutions that increase the pay for child care without adding costs to parents

Mirza is a fintech company that works with employers to subsidize the cost of child care so their employees aren’t forced to drop out of the workforce. The employers give a zero-interest loan, between $5,000-$7,000 per year, that an employee puts toward child care and can repay over three years, or get chunks of it forgiven with retention and attendance incentives. This program allows parents to afford quality child care without taking income away from the providers. Mirza integrates with an employee’s payroll provider so that monthly loan payouts and repayments happen automatically.

“It’s actually a care subsidy disguised as a loan,” said Siran Cao, the company’s co-founder. Since many parents are having children during some of the peak career-building years, stepping away from work comes at a much higher cost. “That is a period where the opportunity cost of leaving the workforce is missing some of that career acceleration.”

Mirza is in the process of launching with U.S. companies and Cao expects to do so in the summer and fall of 2022.

Solutions that match families with providers and provide back-end office supports

Probably one of the most talked about solutions for making child care more accessible and affordable without the addition of a significant federal or state investment are those that work with existing child care centers to centralize administrative costs, and take on some of the administrative burdens, including personnel, placement, covid-19 mitigation, and external communications and marketing.

Winnie, Wee Care and Wonderschool offer such administrative support. All three conduct an online marketplace for day cares — connecting families with open spots — with the goal of allowing providers to operate at peak capacity and spend less time on administrative tasks. The low-margin industry of child care operates most effectively when all spots are filled, so these companies are doing a service to improve access and lower operating costs for the providers.

Innovations at a glance

Wonderschool is a two-sided marketplace meant to help parents find child care options and offers a child care management system for day-to-day operations. This CCMS provides online enrollment and enrollment management, tuition processing, financial recordkeeping tools, a CACFP food program solution, daily attendance tracking, a parent communication and engagement tool, and an online community for providers.

The child care providers — 80% of which run home-based day cares — can self-select which level of Wonderschool access they want and need, with prices ranging from $2 a month per child to access the Wonderschool child care management system, to up to a 10% revenue share for opting into a higher tier of service with marketing and enrollment support. In some cases, a sponsoring agency like a government agency or child care network will purchase Wonderschool access and make it available to the child care providers within their communities. Two examples include the program and the program. Wonderschool also offers a New Supply solution, in which new child care programs are supported in setting up, getting licensed and onward into operations.

“Technology solutions provided by the Wonderschool platform help keep administrative costs low, efficiency high, and programs fully enrolled and profitable; these are all key components of running a sustainable child care business,” said Mia Pritts, Wonderschool’s VP of Strategic Partnerships.

Winnie matches families looking for day care spots with licensed providers using publicly available state data. While Winnie is free for any provider to use (the founder Sara Mauskopf gives the analogy of Yelp, where anyone can claim a page), subscribers of Winnie Pro pay $199 per month and receive prominent placement, lead generation and a better web presence with more customizable features.

By keeping the centers at capacity, or close to capacity, they are helping to increase the profit margins. Mauskopf’s own research estimates that if the average cost of day care is $844 per month (with some locations being much higher) Winnie Pro subscribers net a return on their investment by keeping spaces filled just two weeks faster.

“With this audience, we are able to help child care businesses fill their open spaces on average 2 weeks faster than if they did not use Winnie to list their open spaces,” said Mauskopf. “Given the average cost of day care in the U.S. is , or $844 per month, when Winnie helps a center fill a space two weeks faster that’s $424 they’ve made, or $225 after the cost of the subscription.”

WeeCare also serves as a marketplace for parents and child care centers – both home-based and day care centers. Participating providers are considered “Wee Care Directors” and by participating, are better able to fill their child care centers to capacity.

Similar to Wonderschool, Wee Care offers back-end support, including accounting, marketing and a web presence. WeeCare estimates that such administrative tasks being outsourced saves 20 hours per week for the child care provider. The company collects a percentage of the enrollment feeds from any leads generated, though a spokesperson for the company said they’ve been reducing that fee as the majority of their growth revenue comes from creating an employee child care benefits program.

Solutions centralize administrative costs and services for multiple centers

Neighborhood Villages serves as a de-facto school district for five child care centers in the Boston area. This nonprofit operates as the back-end support for the centers, providing a family coordinator on the ground to help with wrap-around services, such as housing or food support for a family in crisis, and a central office function to assist with personnel, administrative functions and issues as they arise, such as creating a comprehensive Covid testing system. (Read more about Neighborhood Villages in ).

Solutions to make licensing easier

Questions of licensing currently vary widely across states. The process can be onerous, though it can matter a great deal when it comes to the quality metrics and subsidy reimbursement rates. Licensing too, gives a record of the child care space, which can in turn make it easier for families to find available care options. But for many families who rely on non-traditional child care—particularly home-based child care or Family, Friend and Neighbor care—the licensing process can be too much of an administrative hassle without enough upside.

Groups like , based in Massachusetts — a state with strict licensing requirements for child care — will help a child care provider navigate the licensing process free of charge for two years, then collect a referral fee for any placements made after those two years are up.

Innovations in this area focus on using the same forces that make private companies and services profitable and efficient — technology, data management, systems design — to improve affordability of child care. Each of these innovations is designed to improve upon the existing system, in which each child care provider is going it alone, and represent an infrastructure improvement rather than a total overhaul. There is a logic to this: substantial change is far more difficult and requires a great deal of political will and public investment.

It’s important to be cautious about developing or perpetuating false optimism that if only a child care center had a better website, or backend payroll system or full enrollment, the child care crisis would be over, that child care would be a more equitable and affordable good.

These innovations help, and they should be applauded in their efforts for making improvements, but by no means should they be considered a substitute for robust public investment and child care infrastructure, the same way our country’s policies and tax dollars support K-12 education. Until the day comes when early care and education receives the investment and support as a public good like K-12 education, these new technologies are making providers’ jobs easier, one improvement at a time.

Read other parts of this series here: , .

“I bribe them within an inch of their life in order for them to keep quiet,” Morgan said. Morgan is a bone marrow transplant coordinator, her husband also works in health care, and she has the later workday start at 7:00 am. The daycare, however, doesn’t open for another half hour. And this is the earliest option available anywhere close to where they work and live.

Tari Brodsky, a nurse practitioner in Long Island, New York, said that every mom she knows who works at the hospital has had this same struggle. Daycares tend to run between 7:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m., but Brodsky, who works 12 hour shifts, has to be at work at 7:00 a.m. and isn’t finished until 7:00 p.m. When her twins were young, she worked the overnight shift, hiring a babysitter to come in the afternoon for four hours while she slept. Now, she works on Sundays, so that her husband can be home with the kids and she doesn’t have to struggle to find coverage.

Morgan and Brodsky both recounted these stories in an interview with Better Life Lab. But they aren’t alone in having this predicament. Traditional child care hours don’t work for all families, including families who have sporadic or inconsistent work. Nationally, only are open during nontraditional hours, which can mean anything from starting early, long shifts, overnights or weekends.

Families are different. They work different schedules. They need and want different things. And that changes over time as jobs change, life circumstances change or children grow up. In researching child care innovations on the state and local level, and echoed by a report from the , we found there is not a one-size-fits-all or “silver bullet” solution for how child care delivery should operate. But we do know that innovation surrounding nontraditional schedules and child care deserts are needed to increase supply and meet demand.

Key Finding: There is no one-size-fits-all solution to child care needs. Innovation surrounding nontraditional schedules and child care deserts are needed to increase supply and meet demand.

To improve supply, meet demand and provide support for a wider variety of families, innovators in the child care space are doing more to support home-based, family-based or Family, Friend and Neighbor care. Currently, such informal care settings , can be more easily set up and can be a better match for families who work non-traditional schedules or who are seeking a specific cultural match.

These “informal care providers” as many are referred to, can be licensed or unregulated, depending on state and local business regulations. Many have not received formal business and marketing training, yet are tasked with running a business as part of their child care. They may lack splashy marketing materials and brand-name recognition of center-based care. And several innovators spoke of a bias in home-based care, that it is perceived as less worthy or less valuable than center-based care. Innovators in this space are working to change that perception and show that home-based care plays a crucial role in child care delivery.

Other benefits to the family child care centers include:

• Children of multiple ages can stay together
• There can be a shared cultural or linguistic connection
• They can be more easily set up in traditional child care deserts, , and when quality child care for many people just doesn’t exist. In many cases, this model can be a better fit for a family, depending on their needs and priorities.

Home Grown Child Care – supporting informal care as a quality child care option

“There is a bias around home-based childcare,” explains Natalie Renew, director of , which connects funders with child care providers, provides resources to home-based child care, and advocates for providers to policy makers. Home-based child care centers are typically less resourced and less visible than center-based child care centers, especially those centers connected to existing institutions, like a school system. They also receive fewer funds under the federal child care subsidy system, even for doing the same work as child care centers.

The current child care system uses quality metrics as part of a process to calculate reimbursement rates for providers who accept subsidies. These systems, too, disadvantage informal care centers. “The typical framework for quality is based on teacher qualifications, room arrangement and indoor environments,” Renew said. “When we talk to families who use home-based care, we learn that they are defining quality differently: intergenerational relationships between parents and families; flexibility; small groups; consistent routines; feeling of safety. These perceptions of qualities — while valued in the literature — are not present in the quality metrics.”

, too, supports what Renew says regarding families’ preference for unregulated home-based care. “A lot of prior thinking is that this was a second choice, but it’s not what families want. But now families are saying we want unregulated home-based care,” said Renew. They want kids to sleep in their own beds and eat meals with people in their immediate community.

“Because our framework is so oriented around the activities, and the way we define quality in the context of centers, a narrative has developed that this is a lower quality of care,” Renew said. “The standards as written are modeled on school and center-based operations. It looks different in home-based care. There is a routine: the natural routine of the family. And that is what builds stability for learning and curiosity. The desire to superimpose that center-based model creates unfair and unjustified burdens on the providers, and they don’t get appreciated for the incredible assets that exist in home-based care.”

Another problem with the existing subsidy system is the paperwork required for providers to accept funds. For a small, informal-care provider, the administrative burden can be too great. Ashli Carlock, a home-based provider in Nebraska wrote about the process in a : “It’s nerve wracking. You know you’re going to get paid something, but you don’t know what that will be exactly… You’re trying to calculate in your mind paying bills, keeping food stocked for kids, meeting your own personal needs, and paying a part-time employee.”

All Our Kin, Supporting Family Child Care Providers as Educators

Another group working to expand the role of family child educators is the Connecticut-based , a nonprofit that trains, supports and sustains family child care providers. “We built this organization to recognize that family child cares are left out of conversations and devalued,” said Jessica Sager, founder of All Our Kin.

Because family child care centers tend to be used and are , Sanger believes they have been devalued by systemic racism, which has rendered family child labor as worthless. “Children can succeed in any setting with stable, nurturing care,” said Sanger. That stable, nurturing environment isn’t restricted to the domain of child care centers, which can benefit from having more resources for reaching families.

What we need: better reimbursement rates, quality metrics and availability

Improving the current child care delivery system to meet the needs of more families and in more places will require improving the current reimbursement rates and availability of informal child care. Currently, informal care can vary widely from state to state with myriad licensing standards and subsidy reimbursement rates. For example, in Massachusetts, anyone watching a single, non-relative child in their own home requires a child-care license. In South Dakota, a caregiver can watch without requiring a license.

Additionally, both the quality metrics and subsidy reimbursements among states and informal care can vary widely. Renew has been outspoken for efforts to encourage decision-makers and others to recognize the value that home-based child care brings to children’s development, families and communities overall. A key way to support that care, she says, is to improve compensation for it.

There has been an influx of venture capital funding for innovations that make child care delivery more manageable and affordable, such as Wonderschool, Wee Care and Winnie, which connect families looking for child care with a provider. But while some may take into account licensed family-care providers, most are still concentrated on traditional child care delivery systems, particularly day care centers. While child care centers are an effective child care option for many families, they do not work for all families, especially those in child care deserts or those who work nontraditional hours. In addition, daycare centers often charge a set rate regardless of the number of hours used. For families that require only part- time or sporadic child care (such as those working unpredictable hours), the center-based care is not an ideal fit and .

To be sure, even an influx of home-based child care providers will not be enough without the shift in perceptions, quality standards and subsidy reimbursements that put such providers at a disadvantage. Elevating home-based providers requires a change in our country’s way of thinking about child-care delivery, and one that is immediately needed to support a growing workforce.

Read .

But in the past decade, demographics in the state house and attitudes around child care have drastically shifted, and Vermont is one of the first states to seize on that opportunity to push for universal child care. There are now state laws codifying a study on implementation and financing (likely paid for by an income task for the workforce). Innovators in the child care space are watching Vermont closely because their efforts have gotten so far in codifying universal child care into law through the state legislature. New Mexico, by comparison, is using executive action and giving to accomplish something similar.

that treating early care and education as a public good will benefit families, children, democracy and society. Vermont’s promising goals notwithstanding, our current national patchwork system still relies on an individualistic approach, where families are left to fend for themselves in finding and paying for expensive child care, early educators earn poverty wages, providers are underpaid and operate on razor-thin margins, and the quality of care suffers for young children at a time when their developing brains need it most.

While we have a way to go for the kind of public investment and public-private partnerships to make quality early care and education truly affordable and workable for all families, there is ample innovation in the field that stands to improve different facets of our child care delivery system. It’s a complicated problem with neither substantive federal investment nor a robust care infrastructure, building a high quality, universal early care and education system will require innovative and creative solutions. Right now, states are lone actors in making sweeping changes with little federal support or public investment. While private sector solutions are useful, they are not sufficient for widespread change.

This 5-part series will explore those innovative and creative solutions. Upcoming articles will focus on innovation, including diversifying types of child care to meet families’ needs; underserved communities; pay increases for early educators without adding costs to parents; and subsidies and provider payment models. This series will be part of a larger report on child care innovation slated for release by in autumn, 2022.

This following is not an exhaustive list of innovations. It is meant to illustrate select innovations for various pain points in the child care delivery system, absent further federal investment, and to inspire more action.

Building the Public Case for Child Care Investment

Vermont’s Push for Universal Child Care: In May 2021, after years of coalition-building, Vermont passed legislation to lay the blueprint for universal child care. Vermont still faces a major hurdle in funding the universal child care program. H.171 puts in place two studies: the first on how to make the program accountable and efficient, and to decide which agency will regulate it and how. The second is a revenue study, designed to map out the costs and payments. Yet this is the furthest a state has come to adopting universal child care into law. For states looking for an innovative way forward on child care, Vermont can serve as a blueprint. Read more about in this feature.

New Mexico’s Year of Free Child Care: In April 2022, New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham announced that the state will cover the costs of child care for the majority of its residents, up to 400 percent of the federal poverty level, through June 2023. According to estimates from , this new benefit will make child care free for 30,000 families. This makes New Mexico the first state to offer no-cost care over such a broad range of incomes. New Mexico has also expanded their subsidy program in innovative ways, to be discussed more in Part 5 of this series. Until then, read Bryce Covert’s article: “”

Supporting and Encouraging Private Investment in Child Care

serves as a nonprofit accelerator for entrepreneurs in the early childhood space. It has created a to showcase these innovations with the hope of drawing investment and attracting attention from policymakers, funders and journalists. The group also can collaborate and work with one another via a Slack channel. The goal is to get the early education and child care field to look like most other ones in terms of private investment, explained founder Matt Glickman.

is a private investment company that provides early investment to companies that fit within one of the three themes to support women and working families: career, care and consumer.

Are such innovations enough? These innovations can help spur funding and they can help individual states improve their child care options. But the national child care crisis is too large for a silver bullet solution, even one that has passed state legislatures or received generous Series A funding. (Series A financing refers to an investment in a company after it has shown progress in building its business model and demonstrates the potential to grow and generate revenue. It is considered seed capital since it’s designed to help new companies grow.)

“We cannot out-innovate our way out of paying workers $12 an hour,” said Elana Berkowitz, a founding partner of Springbank Collective. “We need every kind of investment and we need more of it: private investment, government investment, employer benefits. No one should have to shoulder the entire burden of this sector, which is utterly strapped.”

Investment helps. Even as fields such as health care and education have seen a thriving market for private funds for innovation, early child care has lagged behind. Groups like Promise Venture Studio and Springbank Collective, among others, aim to close that gap, create a thriving ecosystem for innovators, spur investment and use the accelerator process to make it happen quickly.

Private sector solutions require less political will and can be scaled to encourage more change nationwide. But private innovation cannot be the only answer. Research by Better Life Lab found that child care is too fragmented and complicated to be solved by a single innovation, no matter how well funded. Reliable, stable funding is crucial to keep child care operations open. This is true of both center-based and home-based care. The margins within the child care market are too thin for most providers to offer basic benefits, including paid family leave and paid sick days. For the majority of Americans who live in states that do not provide such benefits, the burden falls to the families who pay tuition and the care workers who go without.

Absent federal investment for universal child care, it will be up to states to lead the way, like Vermont and New Mexico, which have already acknowledged that quality, affordable and accessible child care is essential for their workforce and economy. such as New York, have drastically increased their budgetary spending on child care, and Connecticut lawmakers have advanced a state budget to include a one-time rebate of $250 per child, up to $750 per household. States that can demonstrate an effective universal child care system may become the blueprints for future state efforts, similar to the which started in a handful of states and has since grown to 11 states plus D.C.

But states can struggle to maintain funding streams to allow for universal child care, as states are required to balance their budgets and not take on a deficit, unlike the federal government. One of the first steps in creating a state-supported child care system is identifying the sustainable funding streams, said Elliot Haspel, author of Crawling Behind, and a top voice in child care and early education. “The states can’t just rely on American Rescue Plan Act money or the state having ‘a good budget year.’”

Haspel added, “States have traditionally been these laboratories of democracy, they serve that role well. With the political realities at the federal level, states have more of the burden to bear.”