In Mississippi, Advocates Fight for Childcare Despite Austerity

Mississippi has not been a leader in the growing movement for public childcare, but with momentum rising across the country, things are starting to change even in states without a history of investment.

Mississippi represents the experience so many states had during the COVID-19 era. The influx of federal childcare stabilization funding and the subsequent wind-down of that funding spotlighted how critical a functioning childcare system is to working families’ ability to participate in the labor market. This reality led to a historic investment of $15 million of state funding into Mississippi’s childcare subsidy system in 2026, opening up a larger conversation in the state about the importance of growing this investment.

Matt Williams works for an organization at the forefront of the fight in Mississippi to make sure that momentum is not wasted. We spoke about what it looks like to fight for public funding for social services in a particularly challenging environment, the centrality of childcare as an anti-poverty issue, and one creative way the movement fought for—and won—additional funding recently.

Mississippi has a long way to go to improve their public childcare system. But the active fights there and in states with similarly austerity-driven politics show just how untenable our system has become—and how ready so many are for change.

Matt Williams: I’m the director of research with MLICCI. I am originally from the Gulf Coast of Mississippi, and went to college in a coastal town in the state. My first year of college was Hurricane Katrina, so my college experience was marked by disaster recovery. This really oriented me to the world as it is.

The things I experienced growing up in Mississippi made me aware of inequity and how unevenly wealth is distributed. I studied politics, and worked for a while for a public interest law firm in the state, doing advocacy and lobbying for things like Medicaid expansion and public education. But for the last 10 years I’ve been at MLICCI.

We are an initiative made up of childcare providers and parents participating in the state’s federally funded childcare assistance program. We organize parents and providers to directly participate in the policymaking process, and we center single moms’ lived experiences. We center the experience they have participating in our state’s childcare assistance program, and we also engage and center their experience with other public systems in Mississippi—their experiences with the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), their experiences with Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), their experience with our federally funded workforce development system, things like that.

The results are impossible: Parents struggle to afford childcare, and providers struggle to stay open.

We also work directly with childcare providers. Many in Mississippi are small, privately owned centers, and these are predominantly women-owned enterprises. We work directly with providers, mostly women responding to a community need, but who operate on razor-thin margins due to limited funding for childcare subsidies. And they operate in local economies with low-wage jobs that require parents to have childcare, but offer them no paths out of poverty.

The results are impossible: Parents struggle to afford childcare, and providers struggle to stay open.

But children need these programs. We see our childcare work as anti-poverty work, and we see childcare as an equity issue both for parents and providers. Our mission is to make childcare more affordable, to improve outcomes for single moms in the labor market, and more.

Matt: Yes, and I’m going to be speaking primarily about Mississippi’s Child Care and Development Fund (CCDF)¹ program, through which families get subsidies, because that’s our main advocacy focus—improving access to CCDF.

Our primary focus right now is increasing revenue for the program. The program was able to grow in recent years, partially because of COVID stabilization funding from the federal government, and participation peaked in 2024. It was really good for parents and providers.

But then, as the COVID funding was winding down, they started projecting that the end of that funding would lead to thousands of children losing subsidies in 2025. We knew this would shutter much of the industry, force parents to make impossible choices, and force children to leave safe, nurturing environments.

When it comes to state investment, it’s important to know that Mississippi has historically not invested in our childcare subsidy beyond the required state match.² But throughout 2025, with all the reports coming out about the impending funding cliff, we were advocating and raising the alarm enough that the state legislature invested $15 million into our childcare subsidy program—the first time they went above and beyond the required match.

At this time, after the federal stabilization money had sunsetted, our state was reporting a shortfall of about $60 million. So even though this funding helped some waitlisted children, it wasn’t enough to close that gap.

To make matters more challenging, the state framed that $15 million as a one-time investment. But we continue to communicate the message that this is all a policy choice.

Matt: Mississippi has figured out a way to maximize the allowable transfer from our state’s TANF block grant to our CCDF program. That has opened up $26 million dollars for CCDF. It doesn’t work in every state, but for some states it could be a creative way to uncover more funding for childcare subsidies.

This represents our political reality in Mississippi. We knew that we were facing an uphill battle, and so we had to start to look for other ways to give families the relief they need. For a long time, we’ve looked at all the available options for states to utilize unspent federal TANF funds for childcare. It’s a policy framework we’ve seen other states successfully implement.

So we put together research and analysis to push forward a framework to figure out how to do this. We decided to focus on TANF because at the time, Mississippi had a balance of $156 million of unspent TANF funds. And there wasn’t a plan for that money.

There is some really important context here for other states to understand: We are fundamentally an anti-poverty organization, so we absolutely want our state to increase the amount of TANF funds they use for basic cash assistance.

We also believe our state can do that and have adequate revenue to invest in childcare. We are of course very supportive of improving TANF, but the reality is our cash assistance program is dysfunctional, and it’s highly unlikely to change anytime soon. And the reality is that we’re in a resource-constrained environment.

So we started to advocate for unspent TANF money to go toward childcare, working directly with people at our state agencies who are administrating these programs. We shared technical policy briefs with all the nuts and bolts, and connected state agency leadership to leadership in other states who had done similar administrative changes. We had an absolutely incredible press conference and rally in April 2025 with childcare provider partners across the state, children, and parents. We gathered 100 childcare providers in June for a meeting where we hosted our childcare administrator. We had national experts come in to talk to people about the viability of our recommendation.

Finally, in May 2026, we won—the Mississippi Department of Human Services announced it would adopt the framework we had put forward in exactly the way we had recommended. It’s important to note that the state only allocated $5 million, which is a long way from the $60 million we need. But this win establishes a financing framework that the state is implementing for the first time, and one Mississippi can continue to put available TANF money into going forward.

So as you can see, a lot of the childcare advocacy we do in our state ends up being at the administrative level, because it allows us to get around the reality of the low appetite for increasing state funding, and the challenge of passing legislation. In other words, this new TANF financing mechanism didn’t require legislation to pass it.

Matt: Absolutely. This strategy made sense in our state context and it is a strategy that will not make sense in every state context. If a state has a really robust cash assistance program, and increasing TANF spending on childcare would take away from that, we would not advocate for this strategy. If your assessment is that you can improve the cash assistance program, you should do that.

But some states tend to build up unspent TANF balances. So if your assessment is given our political context, we would succeed at investing this money in childcare, but we won’t succeed at reforming our state’s cash assistance program, then this could be one strategy to get support to families in the short run.

The other factor in Mississippi is that TANF cash assistance is only $260 a month for a family of three—one of the lowest in the country. And childcare subsidies, like cash assistance, put cash into the pockets of families.

It’s not a perfect solution. It is very state dependent. And we’re going to be constantly reassessing; if this calculation changes in the future, we may shift what we’re advocating for. But for right now, this made the most sense.

We also have seen a TANF embezzlement scandal in Mississippi, where federal TANF funds went to politically connected people instead of families who needed it. In contrast, we can confirm that childcare subsidies will be going directly to parents, kids, and providers. This is a win for families, especially single moms.

That is all to say, our process here was all really, really intentional, in order to determine if this made the most sense for the people of Mississippi. I would recommend other states be just as methodical if they look into this strategy.

Matt: While we always are guided by our North Star that every single mom with young children has access to affordable childcare, we must also be pragmatic and make progress where we can.

Advocating for increased public funding in Mississippi is always an uphill battle, depending on the perception of who will benefit. Ideology that is oppositional to funding public assistance tends to dominate debates more than ideologies that prioritize addressing chronic needs, such as the well-documented need for more affordable childcare.

When we look at the lack of funding for childcare and the punitive policymaking in anti-poverty programs, it becomes clear that our moral compass needs fixing.

It also must be said that gender and race shape attitudes around eligibility policies and funding decisions, which often lead to punitive eligibility rules and less funding. Our view is that budgets are moral documents. Therefore, when we look at the lack of funding for childcare and the punitive policymaking in anti-poverty programs, it becomes clear that our moral compass needs fixing.

Tenacity, constant assessment of the landscape, being nimble, and building trust with policymakers is necessary to advance policies that increase public funding in an environment like ours. Small wins can be built on. Big wins must be closely guarded.

While the initial investment in this new TANF funding strategy we helped advance is inadequate, the adoption of the strategy gives us another revenue stream to monitor and target for investment. In this way, it is long-term work requiring a long-term strategy. We see signs that our state is open to additional investments of TANF funds soon. While we are far from our revenue target, we have a new foundation to strategically build upon. 

Matt: Childcare providers are the experts when it comes to CCDF policies. Single moms who participate in the CCDF subsidies are experts in CCDF policy. That is fundamentally how we look at it. We can offer tools like policy analysis, but how do we know what’s going on if we don’t ground ourselves in the everyday reality of people interacting with this program?

So we’re intentional about grounding our work in the community with policy advocacy. And we’re really intentional about childcare providers, community partners, and parents setting our policy agenda.

That means we have to stay connected to providers and parents. We do that through our employment equity for single moms program,³ and through our childcare leadership team, which have been going on for a long time. Providers and parents participating know what’s needed and how the system can improve, so we work alongside them and learn from them.

An example of how that works: Every time Mississippi is revising its CCDF State Plan, we organize childcare providers and actually solicit input through survey tools and direct participation in meetings to capture reactions from providers on the policies that will impact them.

Same goes for our focus groups with parents, where we conduct interviews with parents to understand what their experiences are, and then use this as qualitative data to form policy recommendations that we then submit and advocate for. We also facilitate recommendations that providers and parents want to make directly to state administrators.

Every time our state changes a policy or updates the policy manual for the childcare payment program, we hold a space for providers to know what’s coming and get their input, and we connect that to what we’ll be advocating for. And we couldn’t imagine doing this work any other way.

In this recent last year and a half advocating for more revenue, we organized parents who are able to say, this is the impact of losing my subsidy. I lost my job; this was the impact socially-emotionally on my kid of leaving my program; I had to disenroll from a training program the state wants me to be in. And then we’re able to lift up these stories to policymakers.

And childcare providers can offer so much data. They can say, I had 35 kids in my center, and I lost 12 kids after that funding wasn’t renewed. That’s how we get statewide data to take to policymakers.

This is long-term work that we have to consistently do and grow over time. Every time there is a state early childhood council meeting of governor-appointed system leaders, I’m showing up and bringing in those experiences of parents being impacted by that policy. The media is another space where we bring real stories of parents, to really tell the story of the absurdity of some of these policies.  

Matt: Mississippi and many other states need more public funding for childcare subsidies because the demand is so huge. There are north of 150,000 children who qualify for CCDF in Mississippi, which means their parents are working and need access to affordable childcare, but right now less than 20 percent of eligible children are served.

In our January 2026 report of childcare provider survey findings, we learned that 75 percent of children whose parents lost a childcare subsidy after April 2025 exited their care arrangements. This finding underscores how access to a childcare subsidy makes access to childcare possible for low- to moderate-income parents. We see affordability as the biggest issue in childcare, and the solution is more funding for subsidies and policies that promote participation and retention in childcare.

Right now, our state needs to increase investment in direct spending on childcare and to find other sources of revenue, including state funds, that can be used to meet long-term childcare needs. We also need to reduce the administrative burden in the Child and Adult Care Food Program (CACFP) at the federal and state level so more childcare centers can participate and draw down federal reimbursements for food costs—right now, the majority of childcare centers in Mississippi do not participate in CACFP because of paperwork and other administrative hurdles.

Childcare centers are as critical as hospitals, schools, and all of the infrastructure most of us rely on each day. We need to confront this reality and build the political will to increase revenue for childcare subsidies—because if the delivery system continues to erode, so will our state’s workforce. 

We also need to align childcare and workforce development more intentionally at the systems level in our state. We think coordinating these systems and advocating for policymakers to develop a combined Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA) and CCDF State Plan would create synergy and help break down siloes to better align eligibility policies and funding.

It is also critical at this moment that employers and the business community, which benefit each day from parents receiving a publicly funded childcare subsidy, weigh in on public funding for subsidies and the importance of childcare as a work support.

Childcare centers are as critical as hospitals, schools, and all of the infrastructure most of us rely on each day. We need to confront this reality and build the political will to increase revenue for childcare subsidies—because if the delivery system continues to erode, so will our state’s workforce. 

Matt: State funding is a huge challenge in Mississippi. Parents are languishing on waiting lists for subsidies and providers are on the brink of closure. We see a federal solution as the most likely way to move toward a system that is funded enough to meet the childcare needs of all low- and moderate-income parents.

We need a substantial increase in federal funding for the Child Care and Development Block Grant. But that alone won’t be enough, either.

Ultimately, it will take establishing the political will to make childcare a public good and to coordinate and maximize every federal, state, and local dollar we can to help more parents afford childcare.

We need to think inside and outside of the box, and build a new box while we’re at it. This includes looking at all the ways current rules could be changed to allow more flexibility in how revenue sources like federal workforce development funds can be used to address childcare needs.

We are seeing funding strategies coalesce in other states and cities if the political will is there. If elected officials are really listening to parents who need to survive in this economy, let alone thrive, and if they heed the chorus of experts who say early childhood education is immeasurably beneficial to our society, then we would expect to see a robust system that ensures infants, toddlers and school-age children can learn while their parents earn.

So, the question is, why are the elected officials not listening and how do we change that?

We know the problem. We know the fix. We need the political will.

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