Back for Season 3: ‘No One Is Coming To Save Us’ hits nationwide tour to discuss the child care crisis with local experts

America’s child care system is broken and still, more than three years after the pandemic began, no one is coming to save us. That’s why veteran reporter Gloria Riviera and local Boston mom, activist, and Neighborhood Villages’ Senior Director of Advocacy Latoya Gayle, have set out for season 3 of hit podcast No One Is Coming To Save Us (NOICTSU) to tour the country and meet the people who are doing the work to fix things themselves. Each week will bring listeners conversations that Gloria and Latoya have had on the ground with people who care about making child care accessible, equitable, and affordable.

In the season three premiere of Neighborhood Villages and Lemonada Media’s hit podcast, Gloria and Latoya provide an update on President Biden’s recent Executive Order on child care and preview state-level legislative child care reforms.

In April, President Biden signed an executive order directing 50 federal agencies to improve early education and child care. In his order, Biden directed those agencies to identify which of their grant programs can support child care for individuals working on federal projects and consider requiring applicants seeking federal contracts to create a fund to expand access to care for their workers. 

In the episode, Gloria and Latoya discuss what would our country look like if large corporations included child care as an important part of their infrastructure. They stress the importance of implementing policies that serve all families and not just the employees that can afford high cost care – much like many of the programs Neighborhood Villages works with. 

“​​There might be a lot of people that are working at Fortune 500 companies who can afford high cost care, I’m not even going to call it high quality,” stated Latoya. “They’re not mutually exclusive and that may not always be true but what I do appreciate about a partner that Neighborhood Villages works with is that they are thinking about equity and they are thinking about policy and how are policies being implemented that will serve all families, not only the families that work for Fortune 500 companies.”

Latoya also provides an update in Massachusetts, noting that the state legislature is on track to spend a record $1.2-1.5 billion on child care this year and there are also a couple of bills that Neighborhood Villages is closely tracking that would make child care more affordable for families. 

At Neighborhood Villages, we know that to create a system of affordable, accessible, and high-quality child care, we need to reach all voters and encourage them to support candidates that commit to child care reform. Referencing a common phrase by Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley, Latoya reminds the audience that “we can legislate harm and we can legislate good.” 

We know that if voters focus on communicating the issues they support to legislators, we can reduce the presence of child care deserts in communities where the amount of children needing care outnumber the available child care providers and make our child care system more equitable for everyone. 

In episode two, out now, Gloria and Latoya dive into the unique child care system in Tulsa where the Cherokee Nation pays relatives of children to care for and train them as their tribe’s littlest learners. In later episodes, the two also will cover Birmingham, where voters were able to get Republican lawmakers to support child care in a red state — driving home that children are not a red issue or a blue issue.

To hear more, listen to NOICSTU available everywhere you get your podcasts.