Neighborhood Villages Hosts Black Mothers Matter Event on Child Care and Racial Justice Featuring Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley

During Black History Month, a conversation about the child care crisis, centering the experiences and voices of Black mothers

BOSTON, MA (February 23, 2022) - Yesterday, Neighborhood Villages, a Boston-based nonprofit that advocates for solutions to the greatest challenges faced by the early education sector, hosted a virtual discussion on the impact of the child care crisis on Black children, families, and educators, centering the voices and experiences of Black mothers.

The event – Black Mothers Matter: Child Care is Racial Justice – was held during Black History Month and featured a conversation between U.S. Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley (MA-07), Dr. Renée Boynton-Jarrett, Founder of Vital Village Networks, and Dr. Michelle Sanchez, Principal of the Epiphany School, which was moderated by Latoya Gayle, Senior Director of Advocacy at Neighborhood Villages.

The event included a discussion about the Common Start Legislation, which would make high-quality early education and care affordable and accessible for all families in the Commonwealth and make long-overdue investments in raising the salaries of early educators, who are disproportionately women of color.

“Our nation’s broken child care system is one of the greatest drivers of racial inequality,” said Gayle. “In order to truly address this, we need to commit the public funds necessary to create a child care system that enables access for Black children, affordability for Black families, and fair wages for Black educators. We thank Rep. Pressley, Dr. Boynton-Jarrett, and Dr. Sanchez for joining us for this important discussion and for their ongoing work to address the deep racial disparities in our child care system.”

“We have been living under the weight of decades of policy violence, resulting in generations of marginalization, but we can legislate equity and justice,” Congresswoman Pressley said. “We can have universal child care, we can ensure that families have access to quality affordable child care, and we can pay our early education workforce a living wage. If budgets are a statement of our values, and people say they really value our children, then we must invest in them.”

“We cannot move forward until we address the legacy and history of racism in our society,” said Dr. Boynton-Jarrett. “Structural racism has contributed to an early education system that is failing everyone, especially Black families. We must invest in and rebuild this system so that everyone can pursue an education without barriers.”

“Early educators, nearly half of whom are women of color, deserve to be paid wages that reflect the critical role they play in our society: caring for our youngest children and allowing parents to work,” Dr. Sanchez. “We must break the cycle of expecting underpaid labor from Black women, and demand that our government recognize that funding to raise their salaries is necessary and important.”

This event is a follow-up to a July 2020 event that was hosted by Neighborhood Villages and March Like a Mother for Black Lives, and featured a live conversation on the critical need to elevate the voices of Black mothers and solve the child care crisis.

Black children, Black parents, and Black workers have been experiencing the consequences of our failure to invest in our broken child care system for generations.

By denying our early education and care system the public resources it needs, we tie a child’s education opportunity to a family’s ability to pay. The average cost of child care is $30,000 and for the many families who cannot afford it, their children are barred from entering early education settings that set them up to thrive. A more equitable high-quality early education and care system would help rectify the education disparities experienced by communities of color.

The child care crisis also impacts the ability of Black parents to work and to pursue employment opportunities and the higher earnings that accompany them. A recent study found that Black and multiracial parents disproportionately experience childcare-related job disruptions — such as quitting a job, not taking a job, or making a significant job change — at nearly twice the rate of white parents. Further, many Black families suffer the cost of care even more acutely because of the enormous racial wealth gap that exists in Massachusetts.

Solving the child care crisis would help promote economic justice for our early education and care workforce. Despite high tuition rates, early education and care providers struggle to pay their staff more than minimum wage. Early educators earn wages as little as $14 an hour, 15 percent of them live in poverty, and 44 percent are food insecure. Racial justice requires committing the public funds needed to support the cost of an early education and care system that pays its workforce equitably.

To see the full event, click here.

###

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.