Child Care Facilities Initiative
In November 2020, we celebrated a major victory: Multnomah County voters approved the Preschool for All (PFA) ballot measure. When fully implemented, PFA will provide free preschool for all 3- and 4-year olds in the county, though there is still significant work to be done to make this a reality. A September 2021 report (produced by SVP), Challenges and Barriers to Increasing Early Childhood Education Capacity in Multnomah County, detailed numerous, interwoven, and entrenched challenges and barriers for child care providers in Multnomah County that want to expand or establish new child care facilities. To address these needs and ensure that all children in the county have access to preschool, SVP Partners and collaborators recently launched the Child Care Facilities Initiative (CCFI), with the goal of shifting the Portland-metro child care facilities market to more efficiently and effectively connect supply and demand with minimal subsidies and interventions.
Rachel Langford was recently hired as the CCFI Lead to support SVP Partners and diverse stakeholders in accomplishing the initiative's goals through the launch phase. Rachel most recently worked for Home Forward, Multnomah County's public housing authority, where her focus was aligning housing and education services and supports for families, with a particular focus on early childhood system alignments. In that capacity, she served on the Preschool for All Infrastructure Work Team that created the facilities and infrastructure recommendations for the measure. Rachel says, “I was excited to learn that SVP was lifting up this aspect of the implementation of Preschool for All, as it is particularly challenging and will benefit from the focused attention this initiative brings. Helping shape and shepherd this part of the work is exciting, and I'm thrilled to be contributing to such an important effort.”
This work is important to Rachel and to SVP because quality preschool and child care are vital to a thriving community. Rachel shared, “We knew this when the effort to bring universal preschool to our region kicked off, and it came into even sharper focus during the pandemic. The business of providing early education and care to our youngest community members should not be so challenging. In order to meet our obligation to the community that Preschool for All created, we have to solve for the layered challenges and barriers that make acquiring and expanding child care facilities so difficult.”
CCFI will take a three-pronged approach to addressing the current deficit of needed facilities: research and information about facilities needs, modeling and demonstration projects, and convening of public agencies, nonprofits, and people from the private sector (like developers). Of the potential barriers, Rachel says, “We're hoping to untangle the web of challenges we've learned about first hand from preschool providers in our region – specifically those related to licensing, permitting and facility financing (e.g., currently no public funding for child care facilities exists). Systemic racism compounds and exacerbates these challenges for Black, Indigenous and other child care providers of color, who are vital to our child care ecosystem.” She adds, “In short, we don't want to institutionalize band-aids and workarounds for a dysfunctional system -- we are seeking meaningful systems change!”