Strategic Action to Change Child Care Forever!

Learn more about the exciting work happening across states and Tribal communities.

 

The ECE Business Collaboratory is an innovative national collaboration to support state, territory, and Tribal community efforts to coordinate their local child care systems. It’s a program of First Children’s Finance. (ECE is an acronym for early care and education.)

The Collaboratory, launched in the fall of 2020, offers connections, ideas, innovations, and investment and implementation strategies for communities working to strengthen their local child care systems.

Strengthening child care systems

We’re engaging teams in a shared effort to strengthen local child care systems.

Over the past 5 years, The Collaboratory has provided learning and convening opportunities, investment, and technical support as teams address local child care business issues, share best practices and ideas with their counterparts across the country, and implement effective, locally-tailored strategies for a sustainable child care system.

The Collaboratory teams are comprised of public officials, nonprofits, employers, funders, and child care operators and were selected through a competitive application process.

Previous participating teams include teams from Alaska, Colorado, Hawaii, Indiana, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Minnesota, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New York, South Carolina, Texas, and Washington, D.C. In addition to previously participating teams from various states, FCF is now collaborating with ten Tribes, including the Bois Forte Band of Chippewa, Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe, Flandreau Santee Sioux Tribe, Fond du Lac, Northern Cheyenne Tribe, Saginaw Chippewa Indian Tribe of Michigan, Seneca Nation, Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux Community, Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate of the Lake Traverse Reservation, and White Earth Nation, as part of our expanded efforts to support Tribal communities in 2023-2024.

Child Care Ecosystem

The Collaboratory is built around the Child Care Business Ecosystem (pictured) which identifies the essential elements of a strong, sufficient, and sustainable system of high-quality child care.

Such a system:

  1. Meets the practical, educational, and cultural needs of local children and families.

  2. Provides child care owners and staff with a viable business model, career pathways, livable wages and valuation of their skills.

  3. Enhances the local economy, community vitality, and civic life.

The Child Care Business Ecosystem serves as both an assessment and a planning tool for states, promoting innovation and flexibility to meet local needs. It was developed by First Children’s Finance through over three decades of providing financial and technical assistance to child care businesses of all types and sizes across the country.

© First Children’s Finance 2020 - May not be distributed, excerpted, or reproduced without permission.

About First Children’s Finance

The Collaboratory is an initiative of First Children’s Finance:

  • a Community Development Finance Institution currently working with 19 states.

  • the only national organization working at the child care Business, Community, and System levels.

  • that helps children, families and communities thrive by growing the supply and business sustainability of excellent child care.

  • that believes access to high-quality early care and education is essential for all communities, because human capital development is the foundation of individual success and the engine of regional economic growth.