Neighborhood Villages and Strategies for Children Urge Legislature to Prioritize Grant Funding for Child Care in FY23 Budget
Child Care Providers from Across the State Participated in a Panel Discussion Today
BOSTON, MA (April 7, 2022) - Highlighting the many benefits of the direct-to-program stabilization grants provided to early education and care providers during the pandemic, Neighborhood Villages and Strategies for Children are urging the Massachusetts legislature to prioritize this grant funding for the child care sector in the FY23 state budget and to appropriate $480 million dollars to extend the program through the fiscal year.
Lauren Kennedy, co-founder of Neighborhood Villages, and Amy O’Leary, executive director of Strategies for Children, hosted a virtual panel today with providers from across the state in which they discussed the Massachusetts Commonwealth Cares for Children (C3) Stabilization Grant program as a key budget priority for families, educators, and early education providers.
The provider panelists were Anna Goodkind, director of the Family Cooperative in Watertown; Ellen Dietrick, senior director of learning and engagement at Temple Beth Shalom in Needham; Laurie Smith, director and owner of Pre-K-Kidz and Pre-K-Tots in Athol; and Llanet Montoya, a family child care owner in Worcester. Nearly 100 other child care providers and advocates tuned into the event.
The conversation highlighted how C3 grants have stabilized the early education and care field as a whole and why they must remain available to all licensed providers in the state. The organizations are specifically urging the legislature to include $480 million in the FY23 budget to extend the C3 Stabilization Grant program through FY23 and to maintain eligibility for grant funding for all licensed child care providers.
“During the pandemic, these grants had an almost immediate impact on the early education and care field: within months, they stabilized the sector’s capacity, prevented program closures, and enabled investments in quality and educator pay,” said Lauren Kennedy, co-founder of Neighborhood Villages. “The C3 funding formula has proven to be a successful model for supporting providers and promoting greater equity in our early education system. We are urging that this funding be prioritized in the state budget, which will allow for early education and care sector growth – not just survival.”
“We are in the midst of a childcare staffing crisis that is the result of years of chronic underinvestment and low wages,” said Amy O’Leary from Strategies for Children. “As a result, the workforce that cares for our children and serves as the backbone of our economy has been depleted. The Commonwealth will continue to lose its early education and care workforce to the many other sectors able to offer higher wages and more generous benefits unless we address educator compensation. The Commonwealth Cares for Children Stabilization Grant is our most promising effort to date to address educator compensation and begins to lay the foundation for a strengthened and reimagined system.”
Since July 2021, the state’s C3 grant program has supported thousands of child care programs across the Commonwealth with crucial direct-to-provider grants. Prior to the launch of the C3 Stabilization Grant program, 1,359 programs closed between March 2020 and June 2021. From July 2021 to December 2021, only 453 additional programs closed. Ninety-eight percent (98%) of programs that closed between July 2021 and December 2021 did not receive C3 funding. Only seven programs that took C3 funding closed.
To learn more, see our fact sheet and blog on the C3 stabilization grants.
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Neighborhood Villages, founded in 2017 by Lauren Kennedy and Sarah Muncey, is a Boston-based systems-change non-profit that advocates for early education and care policy reform and implements scalable solutions that address the biggest challenges facing providers and the families who rely on them. For more information, visit https://www.neighborhoodvillages.org/our-work.