A lack of high-quality, affordable child care reached crisis levels during the pandemic for parents looking to work more and fully participate in the economy. But that doesn’t mean new strategies to improve child care aren’t effective and progress isn’t continually being made across New England.

That’s one reason the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston and its Working Places team decided to start bringing together regional leaders we work with to spotlight their approaches and results.

Historically, the Working Places team, which I help lead, has focused less on specific strategies and more on helping local leaders advance their own approaches to building more inclusive local economies. We do this through initiatives the Boston Fed oversees, including the Working Cities Challenge, the Working Communities Challenge, and Leaders for Equitable Local Economies.

But in our work with 30-plus communities, we couldn’t ignore how efforts to get more people connected to their local economies – a core focus of the Bank – were being stymied by a lack of access to child care. This was keeping caregivers on the sidelines, despite their ambitions to work.

So, we hosted a webinar with more than 75 local leaders in mid-December that focused on how they can make progress in their communities, even while broader policy changes advance at varying rates regionally and nationally.

There were a lot of successes to learn from.

Local leaders making progress on aspects of child care access they can control

Boston Fed researchers have long studied the child care crisis, from its critical place in the workforce infrastructure, to how difficult it is for parents to find high-quality care they can afford.

Several systemic issues hold that problem in place, including the difficulty raising fees and keeping the mostly privately run sector affordable to parents. That makes it tough to pay teachers more, which leads to high turnover and affects quality.

Still, in communities across New England, local leaders are making strides to improve the aspects of the child care sector they can control, which has the potential to increase the number of affordable, licensed spaces for children.

Some of the agencies and promising practices highlighted during the webinar included:

• The child care incubator, which was created by Maine’s Coastal Enterprises Inc., a community development financial institution. Cynthia Murphy of CEI discussed the incubator, which trains people on the basics of building and sustaining a viable child care business
• All Our Kin, a national organization based in Connecticut, which develops methods to train, support, and sustain family child care providers
• Friends Center for Children, a New Haven, Connecticut, program that provides housing for child care workers to improve job quality and retention
• RIBA Aspira, our Waterbury (Connecticut) Working Cities Challenge team, which provides training to aspiring child care providers
• Our Leaders for Equitable Local Economies team from Fitchburg, Massachusetts, which built their own approach to supporting child care entrepreneurs using lessons learned by the Waterbury team.
• Let’s Grow Kids in Vermont, which helped drive passage of legislation that provides $125 million in state funding annually for the child care sector. Many were encouraged by this legislation and eager to learn from it

While it’s important to investigate and understand what’s working, progress depends on continuing the conversation. Local leaders need to get organized on the ground by engaging essential stakeholders, including child care providers, employers, and parents and caregivers who need child care. And they got some advice on how from two speakers at the webinar, Elizabeth Barajas-Roman of the Women’s Funding Network and the Boston Fed’s Sarah Savage.

Both emphasized how local leaders need to tell the story of how child care affects everyone – not just parents and caregivers – because access to child care is essential to a thriving, inclusive local economy. They also stressed the need to ground the conversation in data that shows the impacts on families and communities.

Lessons and tips for doing that can be found in this article on centering community voice. Further resource suggestions include Savage’s research at the Boston Fed and Barajas-Roman’s article, "Child care is a national emergency." And the Equitable Outcomes Wallet offers technical assistance around data and evidence-building.

We at Working Places invite New England leaders to continue to engage with each other on this critical issue. Please fill out this brief form to share how you're working to advance child care access in your community and how you'd like to stay connected.