Three Strategies for Child Care Power Building
Elliot Haspel analyzes three ways to build political power that ensures every child has access to safe, affordable, quality child care.
Photo by Caleb Angel.
by Elliot Haspel
At the end of March, I wrote about how child care got scraps in the federal CARES Act, demonstrating again how weak the sector is politically. More than two months later, the sector is literally on the brink of collapse. Although the fissuring may have finally gotten so wide and loud that Congress has no choice but to act, that action is still far from assured. I’ve gotten several queries about what power building can look like in practice, and I wanted to highlight a few examples of actionable strategies. I’ll note that parts of these are easier to execute than others, and that several would likely need philanthropic investment to get kick-started -- though I can think of few higher-leverage uses of philanthropic dollars.
Organize diverse providers into Chamber of Commerce-like entities
Child care is an odd beast in that it is about 90 percent privately run, but mostly through small ‘mom-and-pop’ programs or small chains. The large chain providers - Kindercare, Primrose, and their ilk - combine to serve less than two percent of the total number of young children in regular external care. In total, there are well over 200,000 individual licensed centers and family child care homes (by contrast, there are only around 100,000 public schools serving a much larger population), to say nothing of the unlicensed set. So, like the existence of for-profit child care or not -- I personally would like to see it phased out -- it provides an important opportunity for power building.
While provider child care associations do exist (the Early Care & Education Consortium in an national example, representing the large chains among others), they suffer from the same relative lack of financial firepower as other child care advocacy groups; ECEC’s federal lobbying expenditures in 2019 were only around $200,000.
There is another model, however, where private businesses - even those that are competitors - come together into a force to be reckoned with on the local, state, and national level. They are called Chambers of Commerce. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is actually the nation’s biggest lobbying entity, spending over $77 million(!) in 2019. Chambers are a type of non-profit known as a 501(c)(6), or a ‘business league.’ The IRS defines it thusly:
“A business league is an association of persons having some common business interest, the purpose of which is to promote such common interest and not to engage in a regular business of a kind ordinarily carried on for profit.” Importantly, business leagues are expressly allowed to lobby and engage in political activity. (fun fact: the NFL is technically a 501(c)(6)).
On a recent webinar co-hosted by the foundation I work for, Ted Lempert, President of Children Now in California, talked about why Chambers are so good at what they do. Lempert noted that within the business community, there are “lots of different siloed business interests, each working on a particular thing. But what the Chamber does incredibly effectively is bring it together [so that] this is the 'business agenda'. And if you don't do parts of this, you're not pro-business. That's a very, very powerful frame with policymakers, and no one would suggest to the Chamber of Commerce that they should break apart. That they should have a tax group, and a tort reform group, and a regulatory group ... no, you need a Business group ... it goes back to power.”
(It’s worth noting that some child care businesses are part of existing Chambers - for instance, the Bend, OR Chamber houses a child care initiative - and child care sometimes gets wrapped into other economic development efforts like the San Diego Workforce Partnership. It’s not an either-or, although child care certainly has unique needs given its strange position as a mostly privately-delivered public good)
The development of more umbrella “child care Chambers,” if you will, would be welcome -- it could provide the basis for crafting an overarching ‘child care agenda’. These entities could draw from family child cares, centers, and religiously-based providers, and they could fund their political activity through membership fees, events, business supports, and other offerings.
Build union-like organizations for early care & education practitioners
Similar to the owners/directors, early care and education practitioners have very little collective political power. One way to change this is through unionization or other forms of union-like associations.
Among other things, unions have an incredibly valuable skill set of organizing and mobilizing for change. Individuals don’t generally become early childhood educators because they’re highly political; they do it because they love working with children. Union organizers, on the other hand, employ a sophisticated toolbox of carefully honed strategies to help those on the ground find and use their voice. In Ireland, for instance, it was when the nation’s largest union took on child care -- putting the dedicated resources of multiple organizers on the case -- that the issue took off and earlier this year became a huge national electoral campaign topic. That effort culminated in a 30,000-person march and quasi-strike (half of the country’s child care facilities were closed). That doesn’t happen without community organizing know-how and elbow grease.
There are a few examples of U.S. state-based child care unions. Most recently, 40,000 family child care providers in California won the right to collectively join a union (in this case, affiliated with the SEIU), calling themselves Child Care Providers United. This group represents its members by advocating with the state for measures like improved subsidy reimbursement rates, access to direct deposit for subsidies, and increasing subsidy eligibility. Dues are reasonable even for a low-paid profession: for the Los Angeles chapter, membership plus an optional contribution to the political action fund only runs $20 a month.
Collectivist practitioner power does not have to be in the form of a classic union, and they certainly don’t need to be restricted to educators from one type of child care setting. Associations could be set up as 501(c)(4) advocacy nonprofits and/or as 527 Political Action Committees. These types of organizations can be very powerful: the National Rifle Association is a 501(c)(4).
Similarly, unions aren’t the only ones who know how to do community organizing. Several grassroots community organizing groups that focus on child care are part of a project known as the Raising Child Care Fund. One of the groups, ISAIAH, based in Minnesota, recently “worked with other early childhood advocates to generate over 4,000 emails to state legislators to call for help for child care programs, such as the mostly Somali-owned centers that they organize, that have lost families, closed, or are caring for children of essential workers. According to our contacts, some legislators said ‘that they received more email relating to child care provider relief than any other single issue in the early days of the COVID19 crisis.’ The state then created a $30 million Child Care Emergency Relief Grant program on March 26th.”
Whether a traditional union, community organizing group, or a c4/527 practitioner or parent association, building up these types of membership entities -- particularly those with a willingness to get ‘down and dirty’ in terms of political actions, endorsements, and contributions -- is essential for building up the field’s power. A national association of child care practitioners that draws on a significant number of the 2+ million members of the sector could be nothing less than game changing.
Create coalitional “kids movements”
Child care advocates ironically leave a great deal of power on the floor by keeping the focus only on child care. This may seem like an odd comment -- after all, don’t health care advocates focus on health care? -- but the problem is not the lane, it’s the too-narrow guardrails. Lempert, a former California state assemblyman, explained that with children's advocacy, you have:
"Some folks working on paid family leave, I gotta work on child care, other folks work on preschool, other folks work on foster care, other folks work on home visiting. Think about how other interests do it. When I was in the legislature, I had a 98 percent labor voting record, and labor was livid at me. Because I wasn't there 100 percent. So labor brought all the issues together -- either you're with us or you're against it ... this is how power works. [There’s a thinking among child care advocates that] ‘Oh, I've got to fight for scraps, I can't team up with paid family leave or the kids’ health groups.’ It's that thinking that hurts kids. That's not how other interests operate. Other interests operate from a position of power. Think about how much that could help child care.”
The concept of a unified “kids movement” or “children’s movement” builds power -- and political cover -- through coalition. If being “pro-kid” means that a candidate must both pledge to support children’s oral health coverage and significantly increased child care funding, it puts them in a bind: they may be uncertain about pledging more public dollars for child care, but who can be against children’s oral health coverage? If they want to avoid the “anti-kid” label, though, they have to back the whole package (this of course only works if there are entities with enough resources and clout to cause political pain through that label: hence strategies (1) and (2)).
“If the child care field wants to improve its political standing, it’s going to have to get over the discomfort and embrace the power of multi-issue coalitions. If that stance loses some friends on one side of the political spectrum, then that is the cost of doing business.”
There has been some historical squeamishness for child care to engage in these other children’s and family issues, though of course it varies by organization. As Lempert pointed out, some of that stems from a ‘Hunger Games’ mentality. There is also politics at play. Take the example of paid family leave. In a vacuum, it’s nearly impossible to argue that robust paid family leave shouldn’t be part and parcel of any equity-based child care agenda (as noted by another webinar panelist, Erika Washington of Make It Work-Nevada, you have to address “multiple things happening at the same time to break the cycle of poverty.”) From a child development standpoint, it’s the first leg of the race; from a women’s rights standpoint, it’s bile-inducing to consider that one in four new mothers are forced back to work within two weeks of giving birth. But paid family leave, for better or worse, sits on the left side of the political aisle. So paid family leave remains a bit of a hanging chad: not fully on the agenda, not fully off, important in any event.
If the child care field wants to improve its political standing, it’s going to have to get over the discomfort and embrace the power of multi-issue coalitions. If that stance loses some friends on one side of the political spectrum, then that is the cost of doing business. As the classic therapist question goes, it’s worth asking ourselves about the current strategies: “How is that working out for you?”
Happily, as these examples hopefully demonstrate, we have the ability to choose a different, more powerful path forward.
Elliot Haspel is a former elementary school teacher and early childhood policy analyst who writes about early childhood and K-12 education policy. He holds an M.Ed. in Education Policy from Harvard’s Graduate School of Education. Elliot’s work has been featured on The Washington Post, The New Republic, Romper, The 74 Million, and other sites. He resides in Richmond, VA with his wife and two young daughters. Elliot’s book, “Crawling Behind: America’s Child Care Crisis and How to Fix It,” was published in November 2019.
Elliot can be reached at ehaspel@gmail.com, or follow him on Twitter at @ehaspel.