Improving Job Quality for Early Childcare Care Professionals

One of the most essential factors in shaping the well-being of families and communities is access to quality childcare. Across the U.S., families rely on early childhood care (ECE) professionals to care for their young children but also to support their development during the most critical years of their lives.

However, our childcare sector has been chronically underfunded for years. Educators in this space love their work and often subsidize classrooms with their own money and work long hours with low pay. This reliance on their passion rather than fair compensation is especially unbalanced, as over 90 percent of early care professionals are women and more than a third are people of color.

Investing in quality jobs for early childhood educators is not just about strengthening a workforce. It is critical to ensuring that families have access to high-quality and reliable care options.

For the last two years, Shift Work Forward has collaborated with four communities to improve job quality, support self-employed providers, and advance policy solutions that strengthen the childcare workforce. The goal for this initiative is a more resilient, equitable childcare system — one that values educators, expands access for families, and recognizes childcare as essential workforce infrastructure.

Our four Network Partners in Akron-Cleveland, OH; Baltimore, MD; Des Moines, IA; and Pittsburgh, PA, convened ECE professionals in their respective communities and centered their voices to better understand barriers and needs. For many, this was the first time educators were directly asked what they wanted to see improved. Early childhood educators in classrooms are frequently overlooked, and traditional attempts to gain feedback from them are usually limited to formal surveys with no clear indication of how their responses are being incorporated into change.

Additionally, many of our partners created new spaces for workforce and childcare professionals to come together for the first time.  Some specifically worked with centers and others with home-based care providers. Cross-cutting themes included providing business supports, addressing mental health challenges of educators, and finding peer-to-peer community with other ECE professionals.

The second phase of our Shifting the Childcare Industry initiative kicked off in March 2026. Building on our past efforts, our work remains focused on centering the voices of early childhood care educators and implementing job quality improvements to build lasting systemic change. Additionally, we’ve applied our learning from phase one and are diving deeper this round to:

• Strengthen Sustainable Business Models: Support more childcare centers and family providers to adopt cost-saving and fiscally innovative practices that will lead to preserved or expanded childcare slots and potentially increased staff compensation.
• Elevate Educator Voice and Advocacy: Expand peer-led spaces where educators can share their experiences and shape more fair and supportive workplace policies and practices, including self-advocacy training to amplify educators’ voices locally and statewide.
• Engage Employers and Promote Shared Responsibility: Work with employers in local business communities to understand how the childcare crisis affects their workforce, and to co-create practical solutions.

We’re pleased to share that the initiative has expanded to include Chicago, IL and Louisville, KY; existing partners from phase one will also continue in this phase of work (Akron-Cleveland, OH; Baltimore, MD; Des Moines, IA; Pittsburgh, PA). We look forward to sharing what we learn as this work accelerates over the coming years.

Stay tuned for updates and learn more about our work: https://shiftworkforward.org/our-work/address-systemic-barriers/