From COVID Testing to Formula, Our Scalable Model for a Better Child Care System

Here at Neighborhood Villages, we implement innovative, scalable solutions that address the biggest challenges facing early education and care providers and the families who rely on them.

To demonstrate exactly how this works, we’ve built infrastructure around existing child care programs in the City of Boston as part of a program we call The Neighborhood. In partnership with five early learning centers across the city (East Boston Social Centers, Ellis Early Learning, Epiphany Early Learning Center, Nurtury, and Horizons for Homeless Children), we pilot and test programs created to transform the early education and care delivery system, inclusive of how it operates and what it provides to families, providers, and educators. Through this initiative, we provide centralized support — from workforce sourcing to funded staffing positions — to this network of early learning centers across Greater Boston.

 What we successfully test in The Neighborhood, we scale statewide. In partnership with local and state government, we operate public programs that build the capacity of providers, invest in early educators’ professional development, and promote health and wellbeing.

In multiple cases, we've taken Boston-based solutions and scaled them statewide in partnership with the Commonwealth's Department of Early Education and Care. One of these programs was the comprehensive COVID-19 testing program that we administered for the early education and care sector. Through this first-in-the-nation testing program, we provided testing to about 3,800 child care centers and Family Childcare Homes from Nantucket to the Berkshires — and we've built up both strong infrastructure and operations expertise when it comes to sourcing, fulfillment, and distribution.

Using our Family Navigator model, we also provide infrastructure support to facilitate family access to wraparound services, including food and nutrition, to promote the health and well-being of children and families facing adversities. Amid the national shortage of baby formula, we knew families and child care centers were struggling. Using the same logistics and fulfillment partners we used for testing, we were able to secure a reliable source for formula and recently delivered 700 pounds of it to our partners centers across Boston to provide to the 850 families they serve. We also worked with the Baby Formula Equity and Acquisition Fund in Worcester to put them in touch with a distributor to buy formula.

Neighborhood Villages staff delivering formula to child care centers

This centralized distribution approach has taken pressure off of centers and off of parents as they scramble to access formula. It has also taken pressure off of food banks and formula exchanges, as these hundreds of families are no longer among those in need of formula.

Our long-term goal here at Neighborhood Villages is to demonstrate how building stronger infrastructure for the early education and care delivery system would result in the provision of high-quality, family centric, and culturally competent early education and care. Through our work, we’ve proven that the infrastructure we’ve built in The Neighborhood can be used for anything and that it’s incredibly efficient in delivering much-needed services, including in times of crisis. 

We were able to pivot off of one needed support (testing) and directly apply the infrastructure to other uses (formula). This work shows how our child care system can — and should — be restructured to deliver not only high-quality early education and care, but also integrated social services that meet the full scope of needs of children and families.