Home Grown is grateful to the Biden-Harris administration for proposing changes in response to both the needs of families to access affordable, quality child care and to the needs of child care providers to earn a family-sustaining wage for their critically necessary work offering high-quality child care. Our recommendations aim to ensure that all home-based child care providers, who constitute a vital part of the sector and serve approximately half of the children in care, can share in the benefits of the changes proposed by the administration and help meet the need for high-quality, accessible and affordable child care. Here we share our comments in response to the Department of Health and Human Services, Administration for Children and Families proposal to amend the Child Care and Development Fund (CCDF) regulations.
Alexandra R. Patterson is the Director of Policy and Strategy at Home Grown. Her work focuses on policy solutions that equitably distribute resources to home based child care providers and strengths based frameworks for understanding quality in home based child care settings. Her passion for early childhood is driven by a centering belief in access to quality education for all as a social justice issue.
Announcing the Enriching Public Pre-K Through Inclusion of Family Child Care (EPIC FCC) initiative
The EPIC FCC initiative seeks to support state, city, county and tribal government leaders in expanding the participation of family child care (FCC) educators in their pre-K systems or engaging FCC educators in these pre-K systems for the first time. Home Grown is committed to ensuring that home-based child care providers can fully participate in well-resourced early childhood initiatives, including pre-K. Learn more and apply.
Making Progress Through a Complex Issue: Imagining a New Family Child Care Licensing Approach
This family child care recommendation report provides in-depth insight into the challenges providers face in current family child care state licensing systems and recommended solutions to help design system reform using FCC provider perspectives and expertise.