When I’m feeling particularly hopeless about the entire national discourse, I find it helpful to focus on local politics, where it often feels like things really can actually change, and where the people who are trying to make the changes feel approachable but, often, no less inspiring. That’s why I’m so excited to share my conversation with Aly Richards.
Aly is the CEO of Let’s Grow Kids, and they’re on a mission to ensure affordable access to high-quality child care for all Vermont families by 2025. They’re not just on a mission to do that, they’ve actually done a lot of it. In June of 2023, the Vermont Legislature made history by passing a child care bill into law, with overwhelming support from across the political spectrum. This is a comprehensive bill that supports child care through subsidies in both directions, to families and also to child care providers. It’s a first of its kind for Vermont and for the nation, and it provides a model for other states to hopefully follow.
In this conversation, we talk about grassroots mobilization, about clipboards at county fairs, about knocking on doors and how important that is. We talk about the economics of change. We give the cold, hard capitalist case for child care and for child care subsidies. We talk about the importance of the quality of care for kids from zero to five, and we talk about what it means for child care to pay for itself, which it actually does if you take a long enough perspective. Get ready to be inspired.
Here are three highlights from the conversation:
What is the main problem that Let’s Grow Kids solves?
If you want to flip over to those doing the work, early educators do not make a level wage. Honestly, $15 an hour without benefits is the average in Vermont before our work going up here. That just gives you a sense—it’s an absolute crisis in affordability, access, and quality of an essential infrastructure that we have ignored, for some reason, in this society. That is the problem.
Another thing is it’s a market failure. And the reason why it’s a market failure is because parents cannot afford to pay more. Early educators cannot afford to make less. There is a solution. It is not rocket science, and it’s working in Vermont.
Also, the solution, I’m just going to jump right to the punchline is —
What do families do when they can’t access child care?
There are kids then falling through the cracks. You have to juggle, split shifts. What does that do for a family? Think about that. You don’t see each other ever when your kids are young.
Kids are falling through the cracks, families are falling through the cracks, the stress level is through the roof. We’re losing them in the workforce. What we know about this time in a child’s development is one thing. And then there’s the economic opportunity and workforce development piece. This is the smart thing and the right thing to do everything on the spectrum from child development and beyond.
How can someone get involved in the fight for access to affordable child care?
Find out who in your community or your state is doing work in child care. Is there a coalition? Is there an organizing group? Is there an early educator association? Who is doing it? If no one’s doing it, then you can raise your voice — call your national and your local legislator and say, child care is essential infrastructure. We cannot afford to live without it in this country or in your state. And by the way, it pays for itself over a lifetime and immediately, so look into it.
I really think that’s what we have to do is that we need to elevate this issue in our communities and nationally to a fever pitch and then push it through. If you’re a business, become a policy advocate. I really think that businesses have a unique ability to do this. If you’re a parent, raise your voice. Write an op-ed, talk to your neighbors. It’s good old-fashioned organizing. We’re seeing this in the electoral work. It’s true for social issues as well.
Full transcript
This transcript was automatically generated and may contain small errors.
If you want to flip over to those doing the work, early educators do not make a level wage. Honestly, $15 an hour without benefits is the average in Vermont before our work going up here. That just gives you a sense, absolute crisis in affordability, access and quality of an essential infrastructure that we have ignored, for some reason, in this society. That is the problem. Another thing is it’s a market failure. I’m actually in D.C. today for —
There are kids then falling through the cracks. You have to juggle split shifts. What does that do for a family? Think about that. You don’t see each other ever when your kids are young. We actually, we had a really amazing child care advocate in Vermont who came from Black River Produce, a business advocate, and he told the story of why he became an evangelist on this because he saw one of his employees pass their young child through the delivery service window between shifts from the mom to the dad, and they did a night shift and a day shift. They never saw each other, and they literally passed through the night through the delivery window. That’s what we are trying to avoid here. If you actually sat down and did this, you would never create the system that we have today. Anyway, that’s what they’re doing.
Kids are falling through the cracks, families are falling through the cracks, the stress level is through the roof. We’re losing them in the workforce. I’m sure we’ll talk more about this, but what we know about this time in a child’s development is one thing. And then there’s the economic opportunity and workforce development piece. This is the smart thing and the right thing to do everything on the spectrum from child development and beyond. When you ask, well, where are kids? They’re not in a safe, stimulating environment that we absolutely know they need to reach their full potential and success in life, which we can talk more about the data behind that.
But even chronic disease, executive functioning, critical thinking, the ability to have healthy relationships with others over a lifetime, actual propensity for/against addictive behavior. If you think about all the things that plague us down the road in our society, they are being baked or supported in zero to five. Then the question is, so where the heck are these kids at this most critical time? They’re not in the place that they need or want to be. That’s why it’s an infrastructure problem. In Vermont, a bunch of entrepreneurs, over many years, did some grant making, did some experimenting, and honestly, did some public policy work and said, “We’re not moving the needle. We need to pool our efforts. We need a focus campaign with a laser-like focus on the most ambitious but achievable thing that we can do.”
So we launched Let’s Grow Kids. Basically, it was a 10-year campaign. Really, honestly, it’s a movement, Emily. A movement for high-quality, affordable child care in Vermont for all who need it by 2025. Boom. That’s the road we’ve been on. We’re a one-stop shop. And remember, Vermont is a pretty small place. We have 650,000 people, and we can talk more about, so is it relevant or not? Again, I won’t bury the lede. I think it’s 100% relevant. We are actually showing not only when you get this right, the sky doesn’t fall, but it’s absolutely doable, and great things happen to your people in your economy when you do it. As a model here that is transferable in many ways from strategy to the outcome in Vermont, we marched along and basically said people, policy, programs. That’s how we set ourselves up.
So, people, over 40,000 Vermonters, again, that’s 6% of our population, they’re actively involved in this campaign in Vermont. They’re families; they’re early educators.
40,000 Vermonters, people power creates a public will. And by the way, I’ll just mention quickly, stepped over many years, we started with that brain science. Hey, what’s the value proposition? Do you know? And we polled, and people did not know. People did not realize zero to five was this incredible time, and there was such a crisis. Then we pivoted to emergency, that got people’s attention. Once we laid a foundation, we went to guess what, we are in a crisis level of access, affordability, and quality. And that resonated as you can imagine because everyone has a story, a parent, a grandparent, an early educator, an employer. Everyone connects to the child care crisis in America. All of a sudden, then, we had the value, we had the crisis, and that’s when we were able to pivot the solution. With these 40,000 people, we created this authorizing environment for policy change. The next big bucket, policy change.
I’m sorry to say, when you want to change systemic deep-rooted issues, there is no other way than policy of course, as you know. In this case, we worked for many years with this major coalition to just know what is it here, what is the policy change that fixes this? Like I said, early educators can’t afford to make less. Parents can’t afford to pay more. So you need public investment to fill that gap. There is no other way. It’s like if all of us said, Hey, we have young kids, let’s all pay out of our own pocket to make the school for them to pay for their teachers to pay for the rent, to pay for the HVAC, wouldn’t happen. You just cannot get around it without the public investment. We worked on the policy change.
And by the way, every state that’s doing this and the federal work on this, we all have come to the same conclusion: This is a low-risk proposition. You push money into the system, it goes to families, so it’s more affordable for them. It goes to early educators, so they have higher wages, and they can meet their operational needs. That’s how you fix this. And then we did programmatic work. People, policy, programs. We were on the ground with early educators, readying the system for investment to make sure policy change would stick, increasing capacity, creating economies of scale, doing shared services, substitute pools, all of that. That was our secret sauce. And it didn’t click, I would say, until we started talking about the economics. I hate to say it, right, this is good for humans, it’s good for kids. But until we made the cold, hard capitalist case and not just we business leaders in Vermont said, “Can’t do this, we cannot function if we don’t have a workforce. Child care is the biggest barrier. It behooves us to be a part of this.”
They made the economic case that this pays for itself immediately and three times over. So we actually passed last year in Vermont Act 76, the most expansive child care bill in the country. It’s working. We’re one year in, 1,000 new spaces, 39 new child care homes, especially in rural places, wages for early educators going up, 7,000 more Vermont families eligible for tuition assistance by October. It’s absolutely working. What did we do? We created a payroll tax, a 0.44% payroll tax, 0.44, less than half a percent of a payroll tax, 75% employer, 25% employee. The employer can pick up the whole thing if they want, and many are. It basically puts $125 million of new money into the child care system to do the things I just mentioned.
There’s this new awareness. People all getting together and saying, we got to do this, we got to do this, and everyone agrees it’s essential, it’s infrastructure, and it’s a market failure. And I don’t hear anyone talking about public investment. Basically, I’m just there as a broken record saying, “Hey folks, I hope we can agree that all these things equals public investment.”
And by the way, the beauty of that, I will say, I feel like we feel a deep responsibility, as those folks who are steeped in the research and the quality of this, to be the first people to defend quality. You do not get the outcomes without the quality. You don’t get the return on investment that pays for the capital that you’re fronting here without it. You need the quality for all the reasons we know. The good news is we don’t necessarily have to be there fighting for quality in an antagonistic landscape because it also equals access. That’s the beauty of this market is for anyone who understands this is infrastructure and wants to make progress on it, the quality and the access are linked because if you do not pay a wage to an early educator, there’s no way you can recruit and retain them. That’s the quality. It’s also the supply. That’s what we have found in Vermont.
I will just tell you, we increased the reimbursement rates. Like I said, we’re seeing 1,000 new spaces, new programs opening, satellites of current programs. That’s amazing. We’re going to hit a brick wall any minute because we’re having a workforce crisis in this nation. You better believe that’s hitting early childhood education where this has been historically underpaid, undervalued, under-respected labor. So we’ve done a lot to move forward on that in Vermont. Again, 20 years on the ground where early educators have been in the driver’s seat saying, “This is a profession; this is a business.” It has not been seen as either. So we’ve developed supports for both, supporting this as an industry and as a profession. And we are one of the first in the country to be moving forward to actually establishing a recognized profession called early child education. You may find this, too, in your work, what is the name of this, child care provider?
Why wouldn’t we do whatever we can as a community to support young families? It seems like a pretty obvious place we can agree on for supports. They’re starting out in their careers. We need them in the workforce, critical time in their child’s development. As we’ve said, there are no choices. Either they’re single-family homes, two people have to work to make ends meet. There’s been a huge silo shift in women working that we just have put our heads in the sand for some reason from some infrastructure perspective. That’s the thing. The other piece of pushback. Should kids be at home or not? Who cares? Let’s give families some choices here, and we’re all going to benefit from that.
An add-on to the pushback I get, Emily, a lot is I got through this phase, it was hard. I paid for my own kids or my wife quit the work to stay at home. I’m not going to pay for someone else’s kids. That’s the number one piece of pushback I get. And I just want to say, we had a really productive and positive conversation about that in Vermont. It was not contentious. It was not like us versus them. We had a really deep community conversation, and that’s where the business community really came in. Hey, look, you actually are paying for these kids. I’m not sure if you realize it. You pay taxes, right? You pay property taxes for their education. Well, mental health costs in Vermont through the roof. Opioid epidemic, through the roof. We pay dearly and in heartbreaking fashion for people when they fall into hard times. That’s much more expensive than helping them get a good start.
You sort of turn it on. Wait a minute. In Vermont, our special education costs in K through 12 have doubled over the last 15 years while we lost like 40,000 kids in that system. So the per child cost is going through the roof. Why? The vast majority of that increase is because kids enter kindergarten not ready to learn. They have not had social-emotional support; they do not have a foundation. So we’re going to be paying to support those kids over a lifetime instead of having them thrive to their full potential. So that’s the argument.
And the business community came in and said, “Guess what? In my business to grow and increase profit, I invest in myself. I do upfront capital improvements. We are asking Vermont to do that as a state.” We actually had this one seminal day early in January. I remember 10 people came into Senate economic development from all different sectors, a one-person contractor, a small restaurant, biggest solar company, a glove maker. We had them all come in, and they said, “This is my bottom line. If I paid a payroll tax, this is how much it would cost me in a year. I’d pay that back,” some of them said, “in four months, because I would get this one shift back because I could hire this person because they had child care.” They each basically explained it in a microcosm of, if I pay this payroll tax just like I do in my business, I benefit greatly.
Oh, and by the way, I’ll be paying more taxes. My employees will pay more taxes. The state of Vermont will have more organic revenue growth and my employees will all make more money. They’ll pay more taxes. It’s this virtuous cycle. I think what you’re seeing is we have a death spiral in Vermont and one thing is crushing another, crushing another. We got to cut ourselves out this. Increase population, increase our tax base, help our kids thrive, help make sure we give them the skills they need to not fall into our awful opiate epidemic. That’s the argument right against all of this sort of affordability and all the pushback we get, frankly.
It’s there because there are basic things that kids are not getting that they need to, like a stable home environment, enough to eat, somebody reading to them, somebody interacting with them. Those are the things that are really important. Sometimes I find it hard to communicate this because the sort of person who is often making the policy, doesn’t worry so much about the little things you’re doing. But for many people, we are not allowing them to provide things that really matter because they don’t have the time and they don’t have the resources. And that’s what this kind of thing is about.
You need a stable environment. You need a healthy relationship with at least one adult. You need to be outside some. You need to move your body. You need to have some healthy food. You know what I’m saying? You can tell I am an evangelist about this. I have dedicated my career to this because it’s so obvious the more you go into it. It almost makes you angry. Once we have this knowledge, we have this responsibility. And what is it going to take? Oh, just money for our kids, for our whole future. If that’s too cliché for you, dump it, go to the economic ROI, it’s amazing. It’s like none other you’ll ever see. That’s why you see people like Ben Bernanke talking about this. People are like, “Why is Ben Bernanke talking about child care?” Because it’s return on investment we have never seen before.
That’s why I think we have to shift our frames. Look, we made this investment in Vermont. Guess what? It’s working. It was not some crazy experiment. The business community wasn’t just tagging along. They helped lead it. Nationally, can we change the conversation on this? It’s not like, oh, great, I get it, I get it, I get it. Let’s do a dependent care benefit for our employees. I’m such a child care champ. I’m going to give them $5,000 tax-free. No, I’m sorry. This is infrastructure. You could probably pay the same amount into a subsidized system that would actually fix the whole thing.
So, quint-partisan, if that’s a phrase. This is a very nonpartisan, bipartisan, this is a unifying issue with real solutions that equals real results in a time that I think we’re hungry for that as a country. The problem is it’s because it’s so unifying, you can’t get a political win off of it. I cannot believe I’m saying that. We live in a world that because you can’t get a chip over the other party, you’re going to leave these kids and our economy behind. I’m very hopeful the feds will understand this is an economic imperative for our economy, and we’ll actually see some progress on this. I think the national business community could really, really help by saying, yes, I’m a champion. Yes, I get this. And then advocating for policy change and investment instead of just doing their own thing in their vacuum. I think that’s huge.
But what I will say is Republican states, Democrat states, conservative, liberal, et cetera, they’re calling us and saying, how did you do it? They’re getting copies of our bill, they’re getting copies of our strategy. Municipalities, cities, whole states. As I said earlier, every state that’s doing this is literally doing the same thing, finding revenue, pushing it into affordability and wages for early educators. I think that simplicity can build some momentum where we can break this loose. I think states should move forward on it, but I think the national government absolutely should come and make it easier for us. We are all agreeing on a lot of the policy principles too. We just need the money to come out.
And then I think it’s complicated in a couple ways. I don’t think we’re compromising a lot of quality or equity when you roll it out the way we are doing it in Vermont, and it’s actionable. Look, one big difference is that it’s voluntary. It’s not compulsory. The other thing is there’s so much variety in child development and family needs and preferences in this age. That’s why we find a mixed delivery system that offers flexibility is great, especially for rural America. A home-based provider for the youngest kids especially, a center, a school-based program, all good. There’s enough economies of scale that you’re not wasting money by doing it that way. You can scaffold shared services onto that, so you’re not wasting money, you’re not wasting quality, and it remains a melting pot as long as you are making sure your subsidies are most potent for the most vulnerable families, then it becomes a melting pot, which is great for quality.
I don’t think we’re compromising a lot. I think it’s much more doable. I think things like the fact that it’s voluntary, the preferences, to be honest, parents pay a little bit. And a lot of the pushback we mentioned earlier is, people should have skin in the game. So, in Vermont, our goal is that no family pays more than 10% of their income is a max. That’s a very reasonable sliding fee scale that I think a lot of people can relate to. Okay, makes sense. You’re paying something, but you’re not paying more than you can afford, and it makes it $125 million instead of a billion dollars in Vermont. So, it helps.
We elevated it to an essential priority coming out of the lips of our lawmakers. The way we did that was we got their attention when they were candidates, when they were running. They went to their communities, and they could not walk a block without hearing someone that they were accountable to saying, you must deliver on child care and housing. Those are the two essential priorities in a rural place like Vermont, child care and housing. We’ll elect you, but do not come home from the golden dome in Montpelier, Vermont, if you have not delivered on these. Then all of a sudden, we had this group of quint-partisan champions who are like, “Got it. I’m accountable to my constituents. I must deliver. Tell me what’s up on this.” So we had an educated and ready to rock crew of people that were ready to do some bold action that they knew would be controversial. Raising revenue is not for the faint of heart.
And guess what? We’re already seeing the primary, all of our child care champions got elected because we were there supporting them saying, thank you. You put your butt on the line to vote for this. Thank you. Those are the secret sauce elements. You can tease some CTAs in there. Find out who in your community or your state is doing work in child care. Is there a coalition? Is there an organizing group? Is there an early educator association? Who is doing it? If no one’s doing it, you can raise your voice and be part of this movement that I think it will take to make such huge transformative change in our states in this country. Call your legislator, your national and your local legislator, and say, child care is essential infrastructure. We cannot afford to live without it in this country or in your state, whatever. And by the way, it pays for itself over a lifetime and immediately, so look into it.
I really think that’s what we have to do, is that we need to elevate this issue in our communities and nationally to a fever pitch and then push it through. If you’re a business, become a policy advocate. I really think that businesses have a unique ability to do this. If you’re a parent, raise your voice. Write an op-ed, talk to your neighbors. It’s good old-fashioned organizing. We’re seeing this in the electoral work. It’s true for social issues as well.
For example, I wrote last month about a new study that showed that parental leave has a significant positive impact on the health of infants, specifically on the rate of contracting RSV. We actually have a podcast episode coming up with the writers of that paper, but, in the meantime, you can read all about it at parentdata.org.
There are a lot of ways you can help people find out about us. Leave a rating or a review on Apple Podcasts. Text your friend about something you learned from this episode. Debate your mother-in-law about the merits of something parents do now that is totally different from what she did. Post a story to your Instagram, debunking a panic headline of your own. Just remember to mention the podcast, too. Right, Penelope?
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