Mighty, Mighty Bosses
Florida Executives Apply Peer Pressure to Advance Early Childhood
“We as a nation are taking parenting seriously for the first time,” economic researcher Martha Gimbel recently told The Washington...
Boosting California’s Early Childhood Capacity
Sacramento Council Member Eric Guerra Fights for Kids
The son of farmworkers, Eric Guerra remembers tagging along with his mother while she picked figs for a dollar per...
“This is a moment for difficult conversations,” says Dr. Robert Blaine, who recently became senior executive of the Institute for...
Legislation that includes what an early childhood advocacy group says is an “historic investment in early childhood” has been signed...
There’s an African proverb that’s now universally popular, and it says, “It takes a village to raise a child.” Governor Pritzker and I realize that the child care industry is part of the essential foundation that helps our children develop intellectually and emotionally. The industry allows working parents to focus on being productive on their jobs.
Yesterday, New Mexico voters made history: they overwhelmingly approved a constitutional amendment that makes theirs the first state to guarantee...
More Bad News for Child Care: The Importance of Not Looking Away
Our Broken Child Care System and How to Fix It, Part 2
In this three-part series, Dr. Laura Justice—executive director of the Crane Center for Early Childhood Research and Policy at The...
When the Pritzker Children’s Initiative (PCI) launched a first-of-its-kind Prenatal-to-Age Three State Grant Competition late last year, 42 of 45...
Dr. María E. Enchautegui had noticed a pattern. Puerto Rico had a very low labor force participation as compared to...
Fixing a Broken Marketplace
Talking Childcare with Elliot Haspel
Sometimes what seems like idealism at first can actually be canny realism. Case in point: Elliot Haspel’s recent book Crawling...
The trauma of COVID-19 is widespread but not evenly distributed. Some communities are suffering more than others. The Commonwealth of Virginia has seen encouraging numbers lately, but of course it is not out of the woods. A recent Town Hall for Richmond-area parents featured...
Mobilizing Communities So All Children Make the Grade
Pop Up Neighbor events, community, collaboration, mobilization
Even without advance promotion, when word got out that the SuperMatt Laundromat in Sarasota, Florida, was offering free laundry all day, neighborhood residents formed a steady stream of customers.
Not only was laundry-and-all-the-fixings free—a boon to low-income families who can ill afford the $35 to $50 a week they spend trying to keep their kids in clean clothes—the food bank was there with abundant food to restock their pantries.
Best of all, there were books—lots of books—and plenty of volunteers to read to children while the adults did as many loads of laundry as needed. When the children left, books went home with them.
