Introducing the Nourishing Care Community of Practice

Home Grown is committed to supporting state advocates as champions for food, care, and economic stability for children, their families, and their child care providers. At this critical moment, with food and basic needs costs on the rise just as federal food and child care benefits are simultaneously reduced, we see an opportunity to bolster advocates in their ability to ensure access to every possible program and benefit available to vulnerable children and families.

To this end, Home Grown has established and will lead the Nourishing Care Community of Practice (CoP) for state policy advocates who work across care, food, and economic stability issue areas like Child Care Development Block Grant (CCDBG) funding, SNAP, WIC, the Child and Adult Care Food Program (CACFP), and others. Participants are assigned to teams based on their state or city and will learn more about specific policies related to care and food, consider how to address policy and administrative issues, share effective strategies with each other, and develop actionable policy roadmaps for change in their states and regions.

With generous support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, teams from states across the country will spend the next eight months learning about the intersection of food justice and care, including innovative models that show promise for bolstering food access for home-based child care providers (HBCC) and the children they serve. Home Grown hopes to replicate and scale recent innovations in this work.

Several teams already represent innovation in this arena, although they continue to raise the bar so that more children and families benefit from their work. For instance, California, New Mexico, Kansas, and Pennsylvania allow family, friend and neighbor (FFN) caregivers to participate in CACFP. While the policy is in place, few caregivers are aware of and/or able to access the program. Vermont recently allocated state funds to address operational shortfalls among CACFP sponsors that were impacting HBCC ability to access this entitlement program. This legislative win, while important, didn’t fully meet the intended goal of ensuring HBCC providers can access CACFP.

Using templates and resources provided by Home Grown, with support from national expert consultants and Home Grown staff, CoP teams will map their CACFP and CCDBG systems and child care landscape, identify challenges and gaps, develop a set of policy changes, and formulate an action plan for advancing those policy changes. Opportunities to share experiences, raise questions, and float ideas to other teams will support the facilitated peer learning experience.

Home Grown received nearly 30 applications and has formed eight teams with members from 20 child care and food justice organizations. While the expertise in CACFP is especially strong, membership includes five CACFP sponsors, participants also include food and care advocates, former HBCC providers, nonprofit administrators, and communications professionals. The diverse set of teams and the organizations therein includes:

Nourishing Care is a multi-year, national project that seeks to advance systems and policy change by working in partnership with local communities, care providers, and parents to address barriers and policy limitations; create policy and systems change; innovate funding streams to increase access to healthy culturally relevant foods; build community capacity for advocacy and outreach; and shift the narrative. Home Grown is partnering with Tribal Child Care Agencies, the National Black Child Development Institute and the Colorado Statewide Parent Coalition on this initiative and we look forward to sharing progress with the field.

Specific to the state CoP launching this September, Home Grown will generate case studies, share lessons learned and continue to support team progress as they implement their action roadmaps to build communities of abundance.

The Nourishing Care Community of Practice will begin September 2026 and run through April 2027.

Teams: