Olympic track and field star Allyson Felix is helping moms vote in this election.

Felix, who has been an outspoken advocate for parents, is partnering with the nonpartisan organization Chamber of Mothers to raise awareness for child care support available to parents voting in North Carolina, New York and Los Angeles this election cycle. This summer, Felix secured the first Olympic child care center.

In North Carolina, Felix and Chamber of Mothers are promoting a program through the nonprofit Politisit that will of child care for parents heading to the polls. Parents just have to fill out a with information on what care they will need and how much it will cost. In western North Carolina, where Hurricane Helene caused massive destruction at the end of September, Politisit will reimburse up to a full day of care.

In Los Angeles, Brella, a child care center known for its flexible hours, will be offering for kids 3 months to 6 years of age. Similarly, in New York City and Westchester, will offer up to a full day of free care to caregivers who are voting.

, a marketplace for parents to find flexible child care in California, and , a platform for parents to find babysitters in New York, are also each donating $10,000 in child care services that parents can access by signing up through Politisit.

 is now also available for caregivers who want to book free care though Politisit and its partners. It includes additional free spots in Southern California, San Francisco, Houston, Chicago, New York, Brooklyn, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Maryland, North Carolina, Georgia and Alabama.

“This election, you don’t have to choose between voting and motherhood,” Felix said in a statement. “This election, you can do both.”

Caregivers, and especially single mothers, are one of the in the country. Many say they feel “defeated or that their vote doesn’t make a difference,” said Erin Erenberg, the CEO and founder of Chamber of Mothers. Others cite the challenges of standing in potentially long lines with kids or not being able to secure care as barriers that have kept them from the ballot box.

But this election cycle, when candidates have spoken about caregiving more than ever, efforts have ramped up to help parents take part in a consequential election.

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More than childcare providers across every county of New York were  of the  of federal dollars that President Joe Biden’s  injected into the industry. Childcare providers reported using the money to cover rent or pay worker wages, sustaining care for about 676,000 kids in the state.

“That helped us keep the doors open,” said Victor Vargas, a former teacher who operates a daycare out of his home in the South Bronx. His daycare, which has eight staff, benefitted from stabilization grants from the federal government as well as a workforce retention grant that the state set up using federal funds.

But the federal money ran out last September, leaving providers struggling with increasingly thin margins between their expenses and what parents can afford or state childcare subsidies will cover. Over the past year, 44 percent of New York childcare providers have raised tuition, and a third have lost staff, according to a new  from The Century Foundation, a liberal think tank, based on surveys and federal data.

New York has increased its own investment in the childcare sector in recent years, largely in the form of  to parents and tax credits to providers, but lawmakers and advocates have called for more funding — especially to increase the wages of the industry’s poorly paid workforce. 

This year, New York childcare workers are seeing a pay cut after the state budget delivered a lower wage boost to the industry than last year.

“The sector is completely flailing right now,” said state Senator Jabari Brisport, who chairs the chamber’s Committee on Children and Families and  that the state fund universal childcare.

Twelve percent of New York childcare workers live below the federal poverty level, compared to 5 percent of all workers in the state. The industry’s median wage is , making for some of the lowest paid workers in the state.

“You expect us to be able to hire staff, keep them here, and have them want to be here — because they’re getting what exactly as a reward? It’s not money,” said Vargas, “because we can’t compete with anyone else. It’s hard for us to be able to stay in the market.”

The industry was already shedding workers when the federal funding cliff hit. According to The Century Foundation’s analysis of federal , employment in New York’s childcare industry fell by 32 percent between 2019 and 2023. (That data excludes preschool teachers and teaching assistants.)

“In other sectors, like retail and food services, wages have gone up,” said Julie Kashen, the director for women’s economic justice at The Century Foundation and the report’s lead author. “Even if they train, and love working with children, people can make more money selling coffee, so they are leaving the childcare sector to do that. That means that eventually programs are going to shut down.”

The Century Foundation had previously warned that the September 2023 funding cutoff could lead 70,000 programs to close across the country. Some congressional Democrats and the White House pushed for a  of childcare funding to stave off the crisis, but it did not garner the votes to pass.

One year after the cutoff, the most scenarios haven’t yet come to pass, the think tank acknowledged in the report published Wednesday. But states are seeing a “downward spiral,” with providers raising prices in order to stay open and struggling to find or retain workers.

Governor Kathy Hochul, who dubs herself the state’s “first mom governor,” has called affordable childcare a key priority. In 2022, she  the state to spend $7 billion on childcare over the four years of her term.

“As a mother forced to leave her job because of the lack of accessible childcare, I am proud of the work we have done with Majority Leader Stewart-Cousins and Speaker Heastie to make this historic investment and the opportunities it will provide for working parents,” Hochul said at the time.

That pledge was “significant and welcome,” said Dede Hill, the director of policy for the Schuyler Center for Analysis and Advocacy. Thanks to recent expansions of the program, more than half of children in New York are now eligible for the childcare subsidies — though  actually receive them.

“Unfortunately, there is a real danger that the state’s failure to invest in the workforce is going to threaten the success of all of these other historic investments on the side of childcare assistance,” said Hill. “You can expand eligibility for tens of thousands of families, as the state has done, but that means nothing to a family if they can’t find a spot for their child in a program because there are not enough workers.”

Statewide, the number of slots that childcare providers are approved to offer is  as it was in 2021. Some parts of the state, especially poorer and rural areas, have lost capacity, while others have seen an increase. But many providers are operating below their capacity. In a March 2023 , 1,600 providers reported that they had nearly 30,000 licensed slots they couldn’t fill due to staffing shortages.

In 2023, Hochul and the state legislature agreed to spend $500 million in discretionary federal pandemic relief funds to provide  of up to $3,000 to 110,000 child care workers across the state. This spring, Hochul and lawmakers allocated the unspent remaining portion of those funds for a smaller bonus.

According to the governor’s office, more than 80,000 childcare workers received a combined bonus of more than $5,000 over the past two years. “We’re committed to strengthening child care programs, growing the workforce and continuing to expand access affordable child care for New Yorkers,” the office said in a statement.

Advocates had called on the state to invest its own money in the workforce and set up a $2 billion “Child Care Compensation Fund” in this year’s state budget.

The proposal was modeled after a similar program in Washington, dc, that provided $12,000 supplements to childcare worker salaries. A Cornell University  found that it would cost nearly $800 million to bring childcare workers to a minimum wage of $23.55 an hour — the median entry-level wage for preschool and kindergarten teachers in New York.

Both the Senate and the Assembly budget proposals included a smaller version of the fund in the budget, but Hochul rejected it outright.

“She was completely unwilling to commit new state dollars to fund this proposal. She was solely focused on finding ways to recycle the federal money and leave it at that,” said Brisport.

This story originally appeared in New York Focus, a nonprofit news publication investigating power in New York. Sign up for their

One-third of parents recently surveyed by reported their child care costs rose over the past year, following the expiration of the first batch of pandemic-era child care funding. Among parents of kids under age 5, that number is even higher (37%). 

Just over half of parents with very young children reported dealing with at least one significant challenge with child care over the past year, including unexpected provider closures and trouble finding child care options.

“This is all a result of this decade of disinvestment,” said Melissa Boteach, the center’s vice president for Income Security and Child Care/Early Learning. “And the pandemic laid bare and exacerbated that, but ultimately to solve the problem we need not just a patchwork to help address the cliff that we’re about to drive off of, but long-term and sustained, robust public funding that actually builds a child care system that serves families and the economy.”

The expiring funds were part of the 2021 , a $1.9 trillion economic stimulus package, which included roughly $39 billion in direct support for child care relief. 

Marking the largest investment since World War II, the funding was split into two buckets: The first $24 billion primarily went to providers to help them stay afloat during and after the COVID shutdowns and expired last September. On Monday, the remaining $15 billion expired, which provided additional funding to the existing Child Care and Development Block Grant program, the primary federal grant program that allocates flexible funding to states, allowing them to provide subsidized child care to low-income families with children under 13.

This funding helped to stabilize 220,000 child care programs, impacting 10 million children and over a million families, according to a of federal data by the National Women’s Law Center and The organizations also found that 29% of families faced higher tuition in the month after the first expiration of funding last September, with to affordable care.

This week’s deadline in particular will hit states’ child care systems, according to Boteach, who said, “Even in anticipation of this money expiring, some states are starting to roll back those improvements, which again means that — particularly for families eligible for a subsidy — they’re going to see anything from growing wait lists to higher co-pays to a shrinking supply, because providers aren’t getting reimbursed at the rate needed to afford to stay in business.”

Susan Gale Perry, CEO of , described the situation in Nevada, where eligibility for subsidized child care programs is returning to pre-pandemic criteria as relief funds wind down. “[This] means that families who have the least are going to need to be paying more for child care,” she said.

Across the country, she added, states were able to implement creative solutions with the help of pandemic relief revenue. “The bright spots that we’re seeing are states that are continuing to pick up some of those great ideas and move forward with them using state funds. So we know we need a solution that includes a combination of federal and state and private and parent fees to really make child care work the way it needs to for this country.”

The latest survey was administered to better understand the ongoing impact of these expirations. It was designed by the Law Center and administered by Morning Consult between Sept. 13 and 15, reaching 4,443 adults nationally, 970 of whom are parents with children 13 years old or younger and 413 of whom have kids 5 or younger. The margin of error is plus or minus 1.5% and larger for subgroups. 

Over one-third of parents surveyed reported some knowledge of the expiring funds and a majority of parents (61%) expressed concern about Monday’s deadline. Black parents were particularly impacted, with 71% reporting they are very or somewhat concerned.

A plurality of parents (42%) said that candidates running for office are not talking enough about the issue of child care. 

“This is a very big-line item in families’ budgets,” Boteach said, “and if they’re not hearing from candidates about what their specific plans are, that’s a liability for those candidates.” 

Despite vastly differing views about how to make parenthood more affordable in this year’s presidential race, both Vice President Kamala Harris and Republican vice president candidate JD Vance have supported of the Child Tax Credit. Harris’s economic agenda includes a proposal to raise the credit to as much as $3,600 and $6,000 in a child’s first year. Vance said he wants to raise the credit to $5,000 but opposes government spending on child care, arguing children benefit from having a parent at home with them.

Boteach noted that yesterday’s funding dropoff comes amid rising wages nationally for low-paid sectors. To remain competitive, child care employers would need to raise wages, even as they lose funding, saddling parents with the increased costs, she said. 

Ultimately, she noted, the costs of the “broken market” of child care “are borne entirely by parents — in the form of higher fees — and providers — in the form of poverty wages.” 

And often it’s women in the workforce who pay the ultimate price, she added: “Women are 90% of the early education workforce, and it’s disproportionately Black, brown and immigrant women. Women are [also] the ones who are more likely to be pushed out of the labor market when they can’t find affordable child care options.”