#childcareforCA: End the Crisis in Child Care in California
CHALLENGE
Today, 2 million children and families are eligible for subsidized child care, but just one out of every nine children are actually enrolled in full-time subsidized care programs. California’s families are unable to access available care to support their real working needs. After years of neglect and inadequate funding and a pandemic that shuttered tens of thousands of licensed family child care homes and centers. In nearly every county throughout the state there exists a child care desert wherein there simply is no capacity to serve children from ages 0-4. This means that parents are unable to work, businesses are struggling to find workers, and more families are forced to live in poverty simply due to lack of access to care. This can be fixed with greater investment in child care by the California government.
SOLUTION
CAPPA [California Alternative Payment Program Association] hired Variant Strategies to create a campaign to raise awareness about the crisis in child care in California, and get California voters to sign a letter to legislators seeking increased funding for licensed family child care and increased provider rates to a living wage. The campaign Variant produced, #ChildcareforCA, is a video advocacy campaign including a compelling animated video that tells the story of Juliana, a single mother of two children ages 4 years old and 5 months old, who has to leave her job because she had no access to care for her 5 month old and the transitional kindergarten her 4 year old went to required that Juliana drive hours a day, which was not conducive to her restaurant job.
The video is the centerpiece of the #childcareforCA campaign, which lives on a microsite, www.childcareforCA.com, where you can find the video, a letter that calls on legislators to increase funding for licensed family child care centers and homes and to raise provider rates in the 23/24 budget, and a social media toolkit to help others spread the message. The campaign targets the general public to raise awareness, but it specifically targets the budget committees and leadership in both the state assembly and Senate.
OVERVIEW
Variant Strategies and CAPPA launched an innovative and important campaign to increase funding for licensed family child care and raise provider rates in California. Our campaign targets legislators who have not invested in early child care for working families and seeks to raise awareness among all Californians that California’s child care system is in crisis.
Ignoring this issue for so long has led to a complete system failure. Hundreds of thousands of struggling families, particularly those headed up by a single parent, have been forced to quit their jobs because care simply does not exist for their babies, and it continues the cycle of poverty.
Through the #childcareforCA campaign, we are trying to change that, by building support among legislators, specifically the budget committees and the leadership in both the State Senate and Member Assembly, to fund licensed family child care homes and centers and raise provider rates to a living wage.
Variant Strategies created the video, all outreach materials and assets related to the campaign, wrote the letter to legislators and all other written material, the microsite, and the strategy for this campaign.
Impact
The #ChildcareforCA campaign had a very successful launch event on 3/1/23 (recorded on Zoom) with more than a dozen Senators and Assembly Members making remarks, many with lived experience about challenges they faced with childcare. It opened and closed with our video. In the week following the launch, hundreds of people signed the email to legislators, over 20k views of the video, not counting those on the website, and the social toolkit was downloaded hundreds of times. This is just the first launch but the campaign and legislative advocacy will continue over the course of this congressional session. CAPPA now has the video, the website, the social media tools, and the infrastructure to launch this campaign before other hearings, and to do direct advocacy with legislators to raise funding for child care and providers in the next budget, which they plan to do.
Created by Variant Strategies for CAPPA.