Project Overview
Third Sector led the design process for Massachusetts Department of Early Care and Education’s Commonwealth Cares for Children (C3) grant, a monthly payment to providers to stabilize operations as a result of COVID-19 disruptions. Technical assistance included stakeholder engagement, designing a workforce bonus and restructured, equitable funding formula, which stabilized the programs and helped keep child care accessible to all Massachusetts families no matter their race, background, or circumstance.
Most of us in America believe that all children (ages 0-5 years), no matter their race, background, or circumstance, should have the freedom to play, learn, and thrive in safe, nurturing environments. But for too long, our nation has failed to provide an adequate supply of affordable, high-quality early childhood opportunities leaving parents and caregivers with limited choices and young children without the tools they need to thrive.
Huge swaths of our nation provide no child care services at all - “child care deserts.” Child care workers are among the lowest-paid working people in the nation. The system’s failures are particularly acute in Black and Latino communities where the system has failed for a long time to adequately provide services and chronically underpays its Black and Latina women workers.
The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 had a devastating effect on every aspect of the American economy, but the impact on the child care system was particularly acute given the existing problems in the system. By 2021, more than 125,000 child care workers lost their jobs and thousands of child care facilities shut down, including an estimated half of the nation’s Black- and Latino-owned centers. To stabilize the industry, the federal government in March 2021 passed the American Rescue Plan Act, which included nearly $15 billion in flexible Child Care and Development Block Grant (CCDBG) dollars and a child care stabilization grant fund of nearly $24 billion to be distributed to all the states.
In 2021, Massachusetts partnered with Third Sector to develop a funding formula for its child care stabilization grants and to develop and implement an ongoing continuous improvement process to analyze, review, and respond to lessons learned from the grants’ data. This project built on earlier Third Sector work with Massachusetts. Third Sector engaged child care providers and other key stakeholders in the process of developing the new formula for the federal funds, which would operate alongside the existing state funding formula. Third Sector deployed its Outcomes Focused Technical Assistance model (OFTA) to guide the Massachusetts Department of Early Education and Care (MA EEC) leadership and their communities in designing a data-driven model that determines funding amounts to providers and analyzes system-wide impacts of these funding decisions.
It was important to the state that the new formula advanced equity for all of Massachusetts' young children, no matter their race, background, or circumstance. Third Sector leveraged the CDC’s Social Vulnerability Index (SVI) to advance equity in the state’s formula. The amount of funding a provider is eligible for is determined in part by the SVI of the community where the program is located. SVI takes into account 15 data points that collectively reflect the systemic barriers to success facing a neighborhood. In this way, Massachusetts can prioritize child care providers serving historically marginalized communities that are disproportionately likely to be child care deserts. The formula also takes into account the percentage of children in a given area who are receiving subsidies.
In July 2021, Massachusetts launched the Commonwealth Cares for Children (C3) funding approach, with a second round launched a year later in July 2022. As of March 2023, about 90 percent of all licensed early education and care providers have gotten a grant through the program, making the program a major success. The program dispersed all of its funds by December 2022.
In March 2023, Governor Maura Healey proposed increasing early child care funding for fiscal year 2024 by 25 percent over the previous fiscal year to nearly $1.48 billion with about $475 million going specifically to continuing C3 grants. The legislature ultimately appropriated that amount in its final budget, which Gov. Healey signed into law in August 2023 establishing ongoing state funding utilizing the equity-adjusted formula Third Sector developed as a better way to stabilize and sustain the state’s child care support system for about 200,000 children a year. This funding is in the governor's proposed FY25 budget, further demonstrating the state's ongoing commitment to the program.
Early Childhood Development
| Project Name | Scope | Location | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| Enhancing Governance Structures for the Connecticut Parent Cabinet | State | CT | Active |
| In 2021, the Connecticut Office of Early Childhood (OEC) launched the nation's first Parent Cabinet. This influential team of parents and community leaders is collaborating on the design of (and will influence) policies that impact children and families across the state. In this next phase, Third Sector will support OEC and its Parent Cabinet members by analyzing the effectiveness of systems, mapping critical internal and external communications processes necessary to establish an effective feedback function, and instituting a robust governance timeline and framework to ensure that current organizational efforts and leadership expertise are sustained beyond the inaugural years of the Parent Cabinet. | |||
| Performance-Based Contracting at Washington DCYF | State | WA | Closed |
| Third Sector worked with the Washington Department of Children, Youth, and Families to implement Performance-Based Contracting standards across the agency's more than 1,200 contracts to improve services for clients and achieve improved outcomes for outcomes for children and families. | |||
