Plan to overhaul child care in CT — Too ambitious, or not enough?
The COVID pandemic exposed the fragility of Connecticut’s child care sector — as well as its vital role in the economy.
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The COVID pandemic exposed the fragility of Connecticut’s child care sector — as well as its vital role in the economy.
HARTFORD— The Connecticut Office of Early Childhood has announced that it has launched “CTCARES for Family Child Care” to provide support to licensed family child care providers during the COVID-19 public health emergency and beyond. The initiative is made possible with approximately $830,000 in support from nonprofit organizations, including the Connecticut Early Childhood Funder Collaborative, 4-CT, and other philanthropic groups — and financial support continues to grow.
STAMFORD, CT -- The Children’s Learning Centers of Fairfield County has received a grant of a $35,000 from the United Way of Western Connecticut. The grant will provide critical funding to enable families to access high-quality early childhood education at the the Children’s Learning Centers. The United Way said it is working to help families it describes as Asset Limited Income Constrained Employed, or ALICE.
DANBURY, CT -- While many of the providers in the Cora’s Kids network were not operating during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic because their clients lost jobs or were afraid to send their children to care, 32 of the 35 providers in the network are now open and ready to begin accepting children into their programs. Cora’s Kids is part of the DanburyWORKS initiative, whose mission is to improve equity and the quality of life in the City of Danbury; United Way of Western Connecticut provides backbone support.
NEW YORK, NY -- There is near-universal consensus that early-childhood education programs can break cycles of poverty and lead to lasting upward mobility. But funders say they have always been fragile, and have only become more so due to COVID-19. Early care and education do not receive much public investment compared to K-12 public education. The result is a patchworked system—if you can call it a system—kept afloat by various sources of revenue. Most early care and education providers teetered at the financial edge, with a month or two of reserves on hand even before the crisis. Weeks of closure have likely led to permanent closures for thousands of child care centers.
HARTFORD, CT -- The Connecticut Office of Early Childhood today announced that it has launched “CTCARES for Family Child Care” to provide support to licensed family child care providers during the COVID-19 public health emergency and beyond.
Connecticut Voices for Children released a second crisis response report, as part of a series of reports, that outlines what the state can do to support children and families during and after the COVID-19 crisis.
The Center for Law and Social Policy (CLASP), a national, nonpartisan, nonprofit organization advancing policy solutions for low-income people, has developed a Justification Briefing and Fact Sheet with state-by-state estimates of public funds needed by the child care industry during the pandemic to sustain the viability of our providers.
NEW YORK, NY -- Imagine, for a moment, a future when the coronavirus pandemic is at last behind us. Stores are reopening, people are leaving their homes and workers are returning to their jobs. However, because Congress did not provide for the thousands of child-care providers across the country that desperately needed assistance, the vast majority have been forced to close their doors forever.
Home Grown and the Reinvestment Fund have developed a toolkit to help sustain and strengthen the home-based caregivers and providers in communities across the country.
HARTFORD, CT -- The Connecticut Early Childhood Funder Collaborative sent a letter to the CT Congressional delegation urging their support for emergency funding to address the impact of the coronavirus on young children, their families, providers and communities.
In 2019, several long term CT Early Childhood Funder Collaborative action items became reality. In addition, other efforts including cross agency collaboration and state/philanthropic coordination continued and were strengthened.
For members of the Early Childhood Funder Collaborative