Los Angeles Puts Caring Cities Findings into Action

By: Rachel Bocarsly, Senior Program Manager, Community Investment for Families Department, City of Los Angeles

In 2023, CHANGE partnered with three member cities on the Caring Cities project, a global research effort grounded in dialogues with local communities of care. In the City of Los Angeles, the Community Investment for Families Department conducted focus groups with child care providers and used their feedback to help shape the policy decisions of its Child Care Policy and Equity unit.

Background

The City of Los Angeles established the Community Investment for Families Department as an anti-poverty department driving opportunities for Angeleno families and neighborhoods to build community wealth. As part of its mission, CIFD created our Child Care Policy and Equity unit in 2023 to expand Angeleno families’ access to affordable, high-quality child care.  

In the United States, where child care is delivered through a mixed system of public and private providers, childcare affordability and availability are a major barrier to the economic mobility of women and families with young children. Hotspots of child care scarcity spread and cluster around low-income communities. Child care programs, commonly owned by women of color, have faced a mounting existential threat from poverty-level wages, slim operating margins, and declining enrollment. While fighting off closures in communities across the country, providers have called for increased public investments as experts warn of breakdowns to family, workforce, and economic stability absent swift systematic reform. 

Alongside Bogotá and Buenos Aires, we undertook the Caring Cities project in 2023 to center caregivers in the City of Los Angeles’s fight to strengthen the equity, quality, and sustainability of its child care landscape.

Caring Cities Process

In partnership with CHANGE, our team designed the Los Angeles arm of Caring Cities to give child care providers a direct platform with local policymakers and child care stakeholders.

In focus groups and one-on-one interviews in May and June 2023, we asked providers about their needs, experiences, and feedback on Child Care Policy and Equity initiatives under development. Participants were invited to participate through a partnership with local Resource and Referral (R&R) Agencies, publicly funded organizations that connect families to child care, and compensated through Caring Cities funding.

CHANGE provided support throughout project conception and execution by designing and facilitating provider sessions, managing the project timeline and communications, analyzing research data, and leading the synthesis of the Caring Cities report. CHANGE also provided coaching on leveraging participatory research in policy settings and offered peer learning through facilitated calls with Bogotá and Buenos Aires.

Findings & Applications

CHANGE and CIFD distilled five findings from the focus groups and interviews:

1. Child care providers are devoted to the children and families they serve, and desire greater visibility and respect for their labor.
2. Providers identified the need for increased pay as the number one challenge facing their businesses.
3. Providers often feel like they are navigating business operations alone. They are excited by opportunities for guidance and mentorship.
4. Many providers want to grow their businesses and serve more families. There is a strong interest in efforts to clarify and streamline processes for starting and expanding child care programs.
5. When providers thrive, they leave a lasting impact on communities.

Through the Caring Cities project, we have integrated provider voices into our strategic approach, funding priorities, and initiative development. Providers’ call for improved communication, tailored supports, and pay reform affirmed key focus areas in our Child Care Policy and Equity strategy. Their call for increased visibility spurred us to design a public awareness campaign centered on the importance of child care and the value providers bring to our community. In our ongoing work, we have also used provider input to add a section on expanding existing programs to a forthcoming toolkit that will guide providers through licensing and permitting processes. Prioritizing pay reform, our team recently shepherded the development of a resolution passed by the Los Angeles City Council in July 2024 that urged the State of California to meet a critical deadline in revising its subsidy reimbursement model. CIFD is currently preparing to facilitate a second resolution on the implementation of the new model. 

We have also deepened our ties to the community. Locally, CHANGE’s participatory research approach led us to establish new collaborative relationships and feedback loops with our communities’ providers. In collaboration with the R&R agencies, we are designing recurring opportunities for child care providers to provide feedback on our progress and guide future efforts. In May 2024, we traveled with CHANGE to share our Caring Cities experience with community and government leaders at the Feedback+Denver Summit. 

Group calls with Caring Cities partners also connected CIFD to global peers. We learned important lessons from Bogotá on connecting child care to the broader caregiving continuum, and from Buenos Aires on the role of publicly funded, locally integrated care spaces in building community trust and family support networks. 

Learn More

For more on our work with CHANGE, read the Los Angeles chapter of the Caring Cities report and join us on September 12, 2024 for a CIFD webinar on key learnings. Find CIFD and the latest on our Child Care Policy and Equity unit on the CIFD website.