Home Grown’s new values statement underscores the organization’s commitment to reimagining child care policies and systems through collaboration with home-based providers and the communities they serve. Read more.
Black and Brown communities have historically relied on home-based child care as a form of community cultural wealth and resilience even though this work has been consistently undervalued due to systemic inequities. Recognizing the strengths of providers and caregivers and investing in culturally rooted solutions can help shift the power in decision-making and help strengthen and support home-based child care.
At Home Grown, our work and focus are unchanged in 2025: We are working for a future where all children thrive and where the adults closest to our children, namely their parents and care providers, are valued and supported. Learn more about how we plan to persist in our mission.
Home-based child care providers share how they rest and care for themselves during the often busy and demanding holiday season.
In many states, family, friend and neighbor caregivers are exempt from licensing regulations and operate outside of publicly funded payment systems. The recommendations presented here emerged from focus groups conducted to learn how networks are responsive to the strengths and needs of the FFN sector.
This report explores the unique role and challenges faced by immigrant Family, Friend, and Neighbor (FFN) caregivers in Colorado, who provide essential child care for over half of the state’s children under age five. Despite their importance, these caregivers face significant obstacles in accessing federal support through the Child and Adult Care Food Program (CACFP), which reimburses child care providers for nutritious meals served to children. Many immigrant FFN caregivers, who are often license-exempt and care for children informally, face barriers to CACFP access, including fears of deportation, bureaucratic complexity, and language barriers.
In the U.S., immigrant stories can start differently but eventually resemble each other. In this blog post, we follow two immigrant FCC providers who come from different nations, but who both discovered that their destiny was inevitably tied to the success of child care in their communities.
Home Grown introduces the third cohort of provider leaders in our Leading from Home initiative. The members of this cohort represent providers and caregivers from diverse experiences, languages and identities.
Family, friend, and neighbor (FFN) providers represent the largest non-parental child care sector in the United States, with the numbers of providers and children in these care settings far outnumbering licensed family child care (FCC) or center-based settings. Yet despite the prevalence, little is known about the types of supports and resources that FFN providers
Many leaders credit home-based child care providers with raising them up and saving their careers. In celebration of FFN Appreciation Week, we spoke with three distinguished leaders in the child care sector to hear how their experiences with FFN care shaped who they are today.