Lessons from Childcare Providers, Organizers, and Policymakers on Building an Effective System

The Roosevelt Institute has spent three years collaborating with California labor partners to research fast-food industry labor, the promise of public banking, and childcare organizing. At the end of February, we brought together 25 leaders from across California’s childcare landscape for a day of strategic conversation. Unions, advocates, providers, worker centers, researchers, county implementers, statewide coalitions, national intermediaries, and funders gathered at UC Berkeley’s Institute for Research on Labor & Employment to explore how community-based organizing and policy research can align more strategically.

Childcare Is a Labor Issue

The first part of the day (led by one of us, Lena) focused on childcare organizing as a guiding example for how movements and researchers can better work together. The challenges facing families and childcare workers in California mirror the challenges seen across the country: low wages, high costs, and an unstable supply of care. The cost of building a real childcare system will be significant. But expense is not an argument against action, especially when the value of childcare to families and the broader economy is clear.

“We need to think about labor, childcare, and public revenue in the same breath,” Lena said, whose recent Roosevelt report explored the intersection of movement and policy more closely. Drawing on years of on-the-ground experience, participants brought field-tested perspectives that converged around a shared understanding: The childcare crisis is not only a market failure. It is a labor issue. Families and workers alike continue to absorb the consequences of chronic underinvestment in care as critical infrastructure.

For providers, being in rooms like this is in itself an act of commitment. According to Nancy Harvey, a family childcare provider in West Oakland and member-organizer with California Childcare Providers United (CCPU), “It’s really hard to get providers to come out to events like this because we are so busy doing the work that we can’t even lift our heads.” Providers, though overextended, remain committed to shaping solutions for the field, and their perspectives helped ground the day’s discussions in the realities providers regularly confront.

Families and workers alike continue to absorb the consequences of chronic underinvestment in care as critical infrastructure.

Nancy reflected on how family childcare providers, who are disproportionately women of color like herself, have been persistently dismissed as “just babysitters,”—even when they hold professional credentials, years of experience, or college degrees. Childcare is treated as nice-to-have assistance, not foundational infrastructure—and providers’ labor is considered supplementary rather than essential to a thriving economic community.

Nancy’s path reflects a long battle that has transformed isolated providers into a political force. She first became a provider-organizer when an organizer knocked on her door decades ago. She soon joined a 16-year fight that culminated in a 2019 victory, when California family childcare providers won the right to unionize and bargain collectively with the state. As Nancy said, “It took a lot of door knocking, a lot of phone banking, [and] walk-a-days where we had legislators come into our childcare [centers].”

As in other industries, organizing builds power that extends beyond the bargaining table. As trusted caregivers at the intersection of work, education, and family life—and as the core of the childcare sector—providers are uniquely positioned to shape public debate when they organize. Attendees agreed that turning organizing power into durable change requires coordinating labor strategy, public investment advocacy, and implementation. With that alignment, local wins could become lasting public infrastructure.

Revenue and Implementation: The Next Challenge

Worker organizing is only part of the puzzle. Revenue and implementation are also key to standing up a stronger childcare system. Advocates and organizers in Alameda County have been working to address this challenge at the local level. Kristin Spanos, CEO of First 5 Alameda County, spoke about that work during February’s convening. A new tax passed by Alameda County in 2025, following a successful ballot initiative, provides $155 million a year in childcare funding. But as Kristin noted, fully funding the county’s early childhood system would require close to $1 billion. That gap underscores the limits of relying solely on innovative local ballot measures and county investments in sustaining a comprehensive system.

This prompted discussion among attendees: Where will the money come from? With California facing a structural budget deficit, some advocates are advancing proposals to draw more from concentrated wealth and corporate profits, including deploying revenue from wealth tax proposals to fund universal childcare.

But Kristin noted that winning revenue is only the beginning, not the end, of the discussion: “Implementation is the beast.”

Because a comprehensive system requires many funding streams, administrators often have to perform what Kristin described as technical “surgery,” navigating restrictive funding, regulatory limits, and organizational change to create the conditions and levers to achieve envisioned outcomes for the good utilizing public resources. This is a space where trusted policy partners have the opportunity to align fiscal design and administrative systems, something the Roosevelt Institute has argued for at the federal level.

From Wins to Systems

What emerged from the discussion was a shared recognition that building a real childcare system will take more than isolated wins. Organizing has helped providers secure long–fought for rights and shape the debate about care work. Local revenue measures show what communities are willing to invest. Durable change will require those efforts to move in step with thoughtful policy design and practical implementation.

When organizers, researchers, and public officials work in closer partnership, they can turn hard-won victories into institutions that last. That kind of coordination is difficult work, but it is how fragmented programs begin to look more like the public infrastructure families and workers have long needed.