Everyone can benefit when our government agencies collaborate with community members, local providers, and business leaders to design and deliver services. The programs that help our children learn, prepare us for good jobs, ensure we can get and stay healthy, and keep us safe rely on strong partnerships to succeed. Strong collaborations make our government more efficient and innovative by enabling partners to share resources in ways that make sense, fostering the connections that allow communities to dream big—and to succeed.

At Third Sector, we are excited about working with policymakers,

Across the country, SNAP Employment & Training (E&T) and other workforce development programs often operate in silos. Each aims to support economic mobility but does so through disconnected strategies, funding streams, and eligibility requirements. This fragmentation makes it harder for job seekers, especially those relying on SNAP, to access coordinated, high-quality services that lead to lasting employment.

To address this challenge head-on, the National Governors Association Center for Best Practices (NGA Center), in collaboration with Third Sector, created the Policy Academy to Strengthen SNAP E&T Delivery. Designed as a structured, multi-state

Over the past four years, Third Sector has supported OEC in strategically allocating and managing federal relief funds to meet the needs of providers and families and, this past year, in preparing for the upcoming decline in federal stabilization funding.

The COVID-19 pandemic strained an already fragile child care system, worsening the impact of low wages on early childhood educators and high child care costs on families. To stabilize the child care sector, the federal government invested stabilization dollars in states through the CARES Act, Coronavirus Response and Relief Supplemental Act

Continuing in its fashion of forging pathways, our fourth blog explores how the CT OEC is attempting to centralize digital processes for licensing, accreditation, and other documentation to effectively support child care providers. 

There is an ever-increasing demand for vital government services to go digital. For everything from voter registration to filing a police report, citizens expect to engage digitally for at least some step in the process. The early childhood education and child care ecosystems in the United States, which employ roughly 500,000 workers nationwide and serve millions of families,

Previously, we explored how Connecticut has engaged parents to co-create a stronger statewide ECE system. Now, we’ll look at the other side of the equation—ECE providers—and see how Third Sector and Connecticut are designing new systems to support family child care providers.

For the last decade, Connecticut, like most of the United States, has had to address a child care shortage. Connecticut has chosen in recent years to address this shortage by fostering the growth and development of family child care (FCC) providers. Between 2020 and 2022, the number of FCC

Our first blog in the “Exploring Innovative Early Programs” series focuses on the Parent Cabinet, a pioneering effort designed to ensure parents have a direct voice in shaping the policies that impact their children’s future.

In service of its mission to “partner with families of young children to advance equitable early childhood policies,” the Connecticut Department of Early Childhood (OEC) established a statutory statewide advisory committee known as the Connecticut Early Childhood Parent Cabinet. This diverse, parent-led committee meets regularly to elevate the needs of families and advise the agency on