Portrait at Harvard Law School Library by Grace Gulick
Co-Founder of Neighborhood Villages
“We still treat childcare as every family's individual problem to solve. We know that this is a collective issue that impacts not just individual families or individual children but society as a whole.”
By Heidi Legg
Gathered last spring in a modern restaurant overlooking the Boston Common with Boston women of all ages, brought together by Linda Henry, Managing Director of the Boston Globe, founder of HubWeek, owner of the Red Sox and one of Boston’s leading voices, I met a young woman who wants to formalize the way we raise American kids. She thinks the current system is broken, disperse and holds women, and more and more men, back from having a vibrant career and financial security.
The energy is the room was kinetic, the radiant type. Linda was interviewing the author of Wolf Pack, Amy Wamback, two-time Olympic gold medalist, FIFA World Cup Champion and the message that permeated the air was how women are strongest when we support other women. Afterward, there was time for the women around the tables to connect. The young mom sitting next to me, while sleep-deprived, seemed entirely put together and to the point. She had me at “derailed careers” and explained why she had created Neighborhood Villages to help young mothers and parents of young children thrive in today’s modern economy. Unbeknownst to me until we exchanged cards, I was speaking with Lauren Kennedy, a graduate of Harvard Law and married to U.S. representative from Massachusetts 4th Congressional District and current candidate for Senate Joe Kennedy.
Lauren and Joe, apparently policy wonks with a shared crush, met in Elizabeth Warren’s class at Harvard Law School. Their narrative is already written. Lauren’s ideas around formalizing the necessary and emerging field of early childhood caretakers are one being buoyed today by foundations, early childhood experts, and schools like the Harvard Graduate School of Education. For many of us who bore children and gave up years of our careers trying to juggle the two, it is deeply personal.
The quandary is quite simple: for women to work and keep their careers, someone has to take care of the children in those first five years of life before public school begins. While cries for the obvious need have waxed and waned over history, the solution has remained elusive. Without a solution, most child-bearing women have had to relinquish their careers or adjust their ambition and as a result, fall behind in compounding financial security and rising in the ranks of their chosen fields. Many families relish the opportunity for a parent to stay at home but in these competitive and expensive times, as urban living continues to absorb more of the country, raising a family on a single salary is now a luxury item. Add to this the most basic tenet of feminism, choice. We are supposed to have choices just like men.
Women should have the choice to stay at home or stay in the workforce and without a support system of extended maternity and paternity leave that we see in more northern cultures and affordable and high-quality childcare for infants, toddlers, and pre-school children, women are left behind. Childcare between birth and age five, even 5.9, for families waiting for public kindergarten (birth to age four for districts with pre-K) remains each family’s responsibility.
Pew Research reported that 70 percent of moms with kids younger than 18 were in the labor force in 2015, and that number is growing. Mothers are the primary breadwinners in four in 10 U.S. families today. In 46 percent of households with two parents, both parents are employed full time. That is pretty much half of the families in America where both parents are working full time. There is little support left for the parenting let alone healthy eating.
A policy wonk with an engineer’s brain, Lauren took the time to describe her concept. We met first for coffee at Flour in Harvard Square where Lauren walked me what she dreams will become a leading prototype for other states across the country. Her nonprofit, Neighborhood Villages she started with Sarah Siegel Muncey has $1 million to try and create a prototype in three Massachusetts neighborhoods: Dorchester is already up and running and East Boston will be ready by the close of 2019.
There is something very likable about Lauren. Raised in southern California as Lauren Birchfield now married to one of America’s most fabled northeast families, she is direct and earnest while also carrying a cavalier California attitude that suggests she is here to try something bold and open to pivots.
Lauren, what are you trying to build?
We co-founded Neighborhood Villages as two frustrated working moms – who entered the fray of many different people who have been here before us – with frustration around why we haven't solved for childcare given everything you've just shared about what it's like to be a family today. Whether you're a single-parent household or dual-parent household, we are in the workforce and yet we still treat childcare as every family's individual problem to solve. We know that this is a collective issue that impacts not just individual families or individual children but society as a whole. So we stepped forward to push a public policy agenda but also to dive deep into communities and ask how can we best support childcare options in the city of Boston. Our pilot programs go like this: We find a partner Child Center, a partner community health center and other community-based programs to work together. We see how can we create an ecosystem that doesn't just solve for childcare but creates a whole family resource hub whereas a busy parent you feel like your childcare center or a childcare center in your community could be a one-stop-shop.
My kids are now teenagers but even 17 years ago, I was shocked at the dramatic shift in how it affected my career over my husbands. I was like “What?” Why haven't we had any progress and what makes you think that this time that we could get further?
I think we have a growing recognition that our workforce has diversified. We read everywhere that it's harder and harder for families to grasp the American Dream.
Household economic stability feels less stable and more like the bottom could fall out at any moment and a lot of that boils down to what your childcare arrangement looks like and how that impacts where you can work, when you can work, and what your employment opportunities look like.
Not to forgot the transportation challenges in Boston when the T breaks down or travel times to and from schools and childcare.
Exactly, especially when you're also traveling with your two-year-old. “Isn't that fun when you're on foot.” As you noted, the percentage of women in the workforce or percentage of dual-parent households where both parents are also breadwinners [has increased]. So maybe we are at a different time, not necessarily than we were 15 years ago when you had kids, but perhaps certainly back when we fought this fight in the 70s when we were close to getting universal childcare. While we had the economic data to support it back then, cultural norms hadn’t changed. Now I think we stand in a very different era. Women expect to be able to go into the workforce and they expect to be as competitive as their peers. And we need to recognize that childcare plays a big role in whatever your career path.
I was surprised by that Pew number with 46 percent of American families where both parents work full time. Perhaps the sheer numbers we have now to help understand how it's changed and the reality we were all experiencing is now on paper. You are a bit of a policy wonk. You know what to do with those numbers and how do you move the needle. How is that helping you with your prototype?
We are asking people to dive into childcare as a market. How is it that childcare is delivered? Where does the breakdown happen that you find families in a position where they're asked to pay twenty thousand dollars for one infant for one year? An average cost in Massachusetts for childcare in a family with multiple children is closer to thirty-five thousand dollars. That's college tuition you didn't have 18 years ago.
How did we get here? We have to go then look at the root causes of where the breakdowns happen. Where we believe it fundamentally lies is that there aren't enough resources in the childcare system.
We don't even have a system. What does exist?
We have childcare providers who rely on very important subsidies coming in from the federal state governments to ensure that lower-income children are able to enroll in quality programs. We have private pay coming in from families who either may not be eligible for a subsidy or who are asked to contribute in addition to their subsidy and then those who are upper income and paying full freight. That isn’t even enough to provide sufficient resources to do things like pay educators more than minimum wage, which is the average salary of a childcare provider and educator.
Are you speaking specifically about childcare providers for children between the ages of birth to age four or age 5?
Yes. The average salary for somebody who is working in a childcare center as a teacher is a minimum wage. Childcare centers lack resources to invest in higher salaries for their educators. Lack of training and a base entry pay, being able to tie wages to ongoing professional development and advancement or the number of years in the field. Even if you're charging twenty thousand dollars a year [per child] that's still not enough.
What do teachers in the system make once a child enters kindergarten in the state-run system?
I wouldn't be able to quote exactly what you would make say as a Boston public school teacher if you were a pre-K or a kindergarten teacher. But it is substantially more than. [The average 2013 preschool teacher salary in Massachusetts was $34,410 according to the ECLWD. Preschool teachers entering the workforce averaged $23,640, while those with experience made $39,790 on average.]
The other element is when you join the Boston Public Schools, you also have access to full benefits. The market is fundamentally broken because it doesn't work for families because it's too expensive. It short changes our children. Everything that brain science tells us now is that ages zero to three are just as important if not more as the education that comes later in life. We are not doing all that we should be setting children up for educational success.
American Economist James Heckman has data out of Chicago that says there is a 13 to 1 return on children who have access to early learning programs over the lifespan. In addition to the cost for families, it doesn't work for childcare providers either. Whether you are trying to run a childcare center and don't have the resources to invest in the school that you would like to be running, all the way down to that individual educator who may be living in poverty. How do we think societally? How do we think systemically about making a serious investment in zero to four, zero to five, zero to six early-education and reduce the cost to families but also improve the quality of the educational program that their children are getting?
I'm heartened because as you and I have discussed, there are many very clever people looking at different ways to support this early childhood space like early childhood expert Jack Shonkoff, M.D. at the Center for the Developing Child at Harvard, other new efforts like the Commonwealth Children’s Fund founded by Melora Myslik Balson and Lydia Magliozzi Icke, and then Stephanie Jones and Nonie Lesaux at the Saul Zaentz Center at the Graduate School of Education at Harvard. You have a specific prototype and approach. Can you describe your prototype in more detail?
As we go into neighborhoods, we take a community-based approach to supporting childcare networks or community-based resources.
We need to start with a family-centered design and a community center design. What works best for the family? The family wants to know that their child is in a quality learning environment where they're going to be individually known and loved. It’s not just about parents getting to work. It's about feeling good while you're at work.
This is such a key piece as a parent.
We know that it improves your productivity when you don't have stress over your childcare arrangement. That's step one. Step two is: what are the different resources that we can bring to a childcare center to support that childcare center’s investment in ongoing quality improvement and instructional coaching and instructional growth? What we bring in as partners as Neighborhood Villages are three different things.
The first is we run a Workforce Development Fellowship to try to bring new educators into the field and to support current educators as they look to obtain advanced licensure accreditation, an associate's degree, or a bachelor’s degree.
You're basically boot-camp training for people who want a career taking care of kids in early childhood zero to four or five?
Yes. And it's despite the fact that these educators deserve to be paid more. It remains a field that people are very interested in going into. We would like to support not only a career pathway but also ongoing investment so you feel valued as an educator and as valued as if you were teaching the fourth grade. There's a workforce pipeline piece of this which is important because childcare providers, particularly childcare centers, will always say that maintaining their staff is a huge issue because there is not enough talent to bring into the field.
That’s number one and we will preface this by saying none of this is rocket science right. We're excited to be able to shed light on something and encourage ongoing investment.
The second resource we bring to the partner childcare center is an operations manager. It’s not particularly sexy. But we recognize that in K through 12 operations, what goes hand-in-hand with a healthy school structure and educational programming is operations. We would never expect your fourth-grade teacher to be educating students and doing laundry at the same time. Right? We don't want our principals spending 20 percent of her or his day doing scheduling, food service, delivery laundry drop off and pick up.
If we bring in an operations manager to a childcare setting, we can free up the time of the center director and the lead educators to use their day to invest in ongoing instructional coaching and ongoing quality improvement and sitting on the ground with a bunch of babies letting them color and get their hands dirty and paint and build these incredibly important social-emotional skills that will set these children up to thrive. By bringing in the operations manager we take the laundry, the cutting up of fruit, the cutting up of construction paper, off their plate. We take it for granted in the childcare sector that an educator who's working with a 6-month old or with a classroom full of toddlers should be doing these things. We need to value them as teachers. If we have an operations manager we really can work hand-in-hand to create an exciting and thriving environment.
I look at these people who are looking after these precious early childhood years and I think they've got to be exhausted. I mean they have like 14 toddlers all day long. I was exhausted on my own at home with two!
With the operations piece, we can think about this as an opportunity to improve the job satisfaction of an educator in the classroom. We know that there are challenges around teacher retention. If you can take some of these things off of the teacher's plate and they find joy in the day to day, can we keep them in the classroom and keep them in the field for a longer period of time while we work at the policy level to get enough resources to build a true childcare system that supports educators as professionals and pays them a more appropriate salary.
The third piece is bringing on board what we call a family navigator. The family navigator is meant to be onsite at the Childcare Center as a touchpoint for families not just enrolled in the childcare center, but really for the greater community. Our theory goes like this: As a parent, you have limited hours, you are working for the majority of the day, you want to be able to joyfully parent in those hours outside of the workday. If we know you are coming to the childcare center to drop off your child and pick them up at the end of the day, what can we provide to you at that site that frees up an hour or two in your evening?
Give me examples.
We are presently in the Epiphany Early Learning Center in Dorchester. We are excited to be expanding into the East Boston Neighborhood in partnership with the East Boston social centers and we are prospecting another partnership with some anchor childcare providers in the Roxbury Community as well. What we've brought to Epiphany is a family navigator who is responsible for deeply knowing families in a way that you trust. Her name is Maria. We want you to trust her in a way that you're willing to say, “I am worried that I'm not going to make my rent so I've gone off a certain medication. Or I am food insecure on the weekends. I can make it work during the day but by Sunday afternoon there's not much left in the cupboards. I think that I may be struggling with maternal depression, and even if it's not depression, I'm feeling extremely isolated.” What Maria is there to do is say “All right. Let's make a plan. I am here to take this off of your plate and set you up with different resources that are already right here in your community and might already be here on site at the childcare center.” We are forging relationships with Fresh Truck who come to the Early Learning Center for families to be able to take home healthy fruits and vegetables or we work closely in Dorchester with the Codman Square Health Center and they have a relationship with the Daily Table. Food is one area. To something like relationships that we're building with for-profit companies who are looking to expand their imprint into philanthropic initiatives, who could then take it a step further and say let's actually set up food lockers where the food is cut up for you – which may not seem like a big difference but if you are a mom coming home after a long day…
I get it. I'm there with you.
Having it cut up for you is a night and day difference to things like great programs that run moms’ groups or father engagement.
Lauren, the navigator named Maria… it sounds like what we used to call the church in a community.
I think it is meant to get at the heart and soul of the community.
Whether it was an organization or many people talk about the woman on the block who raised us all, that's exactly who we're looking to act as our family touchpoint, and we think of Maria as being the magnet. Perhaps it is a similar role that's sitting at a community health center or a similar role that may be sitting at a church, we are going to make those connections on behalf of the family.
So in your prototype do you bring in Maria a navigator or do you team up with Epiphany or a church or a community center to be the navigator?
We bring in the navigator. We have set this up such that a childcare center will receive from Neighborhood Villages two positions: the operations manager and the family navigator. You should not be able to tell that those two staff members are Neighborhood Villages employees. They are meant to be embedded in the staffing structure and culture of the childcare center.
But you fund them?
Yes, we fund them.
What about the training part?
The training is somewhat separate from resources infused into any given childcare provider. Training is a fellowship program that we run in partnership with community colleges here in Massachusetts. They take place at the childcare center and we do that intentionally, and when I say they take place, I mean that the community college comes to the childcare center and hosts classes there on Saturdays from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m.
Are you paying for this training out of your non-profit?
Neighborhood Villages supports the fellowship as a whole where we recruit from the community then we hand it off to the community college to formally enroll them in the coursework required for an educator to obtain their license.
Do teachers have to pay to take the courses?
No. The community colleges received a grant from the state of Massachusetts to be able to offer coursework tuition-free.
What we do during that classroom time, if you will, is set up the childcare center to be able to accommodate having attendees children on-site so that if you are a parent looking to get into this field, you can bring your child with you and they'll be in a classroom doing fun things while you're getting your homework done or your assignments completed. And then we help place you with a prospective employer. Again we really invest in you as a fellow for a number of months thereafter so that we can not only ensure that we've matched you with the right employer, but that you feel like you have ongoing support as you get your sea legs and gain that firsthand exposure to what it will mean to be working in a classroom of three-year-old kids or rolling on the floor with six-month-old babies.
It sounds you're formalizing this industry. Is that what you are doing?
Yes, we are trying to demonstrate that there is a very clear career pathway opportunity with unique aspects about it. You don't necessarily need a four-year bachelor's degree to be a qualified teacher.
Here's a great opportunity to work say with graduating high school seniors who have their high school diploma or their GED who may be working through an associate's degree or interested in getting their bachelor's. In the meantime, here's a career opportunity in early childhood education.
Have you seen this prototype work in other communities countries or states?
We love the fact that when we talk about childcare reform at the policy level or down to the individual childcare center, we have a homegrown example here in the United States. You don't have to look to Scandinavia to find it. We have proven that you can run a publicly-subsidized, high-quality and affordable child care program. We do it in the U.S. military. It’s called Military Childcare and the fundamental components are: we have identified the true cost of delivering high-quality childcare – meaning we build a model around paying educators more than minimum wage. We build a model that takes into consideration that children deserve high-quality facilities as much as the instructional education and said OK true cost is X amount. What we know is that families should only be paying seven percent of household income on childcare. Right now how it looks for many families on average is 20 percent of household income for childcare Then as you lower the income scale, the more that childcare eats up your household budget.
If you bring it down to seven percent, does that assume that every single person in the state has to participate? We must acknowledge that there will be a group that will continue to have their private nanny or a parent who stays at home.
What it does assume is that public funds need to come in and offset the deficit between the cost of the product and how much the family, is required to pay for it. The military program is universal eligibility to participate. They also have family childcare providers that are part of the larger system which is very important since family childcare providers are often a family's preference or might be necessary for families who work a night shift.
Again, in your ideal plan does everybody in this country participate or is this an opt-in program?
I would say in my ideal world it's opt-in and there remains a choice. I think "choice" is fundamentally crucial to this and that families have choices. You have a choice to stay home with your children.
I was about to say that. Some people will whisper or shout that women want to be at home and they want to raise their children on their own. What do you say when you get pushback where they're saying “many women want to be at home.”
I’d say that everybody deserves a choice. And what's happened in this country today is we've taken choice away. So there should be the ability to choose to stay home.
We should also be able to choose to be in the workforce and optimize our potential. However one would define that. And to make that choice we need an affordable childcare arrangement and high quality. That's where I come back to the military because what they recognized was that more women were enlisting in the Army.
The financial reality of being a part of the military community was that, even if it was the dad who was the one in uniform, many of the women were working as well to maintain a certain family budget.
Such as family trips, financial security and the freedom of choice.
Yes, exactly. Choice. Dignity. It was then critical to solving for childcare and they use the word “readiness.” We can't expect our troops to be ready to deploy if you are unsure or anxious about what your childcare situation looks like at home. You need to know that your family and your children are in a good place. If you are going to have your full focus on your deployment. It is a Department of Defense supported program.
If we are going to preserve choice in the greater United States we need to implement structural change that abides by those same pillars to be “workforce ready.” Why don't we see greater diversity in leadership whether that's gender diversity or racial diversity? We need to ask questions that go all the way down to the root problem.
Did you see that Melinda Gates put a billion dollars behind American women and kids to help with gender equity? I was so excited to see her do this.
I think it's so critical to tie childcare into that. I came from a background in women's equity at a policy-making organization after law school, before going out on a limb here with Neighborhood Villages. We focused very much on pay equity. Let's start with reproductive choice. Critical. Pregnancy nondiscrimination. Critical. Pay equity. Critical. Family medical leave and paid family medical leave. Also critical. Childcare is the next frontier.
It is the next frontier.
If we want to see women stay in the workforce, if we want to see them remain on par in terms of their salaries with their male peers and if we want to see them get into the C suite or on boards, we need to solve for childcare.
Add financial independence because that's a lot of compound interest you lose by not having a salary in those childbearing years that male counterparts accumulate. It has been outlined again and again how much women are set back financially if they cannot stay in the workforce.
Right. And that you know even if you take say five or six years off to raise your family at home, not because it was chosen, but because it was the financial requirement in your family, you will never earn that money back.
Yes and that on-ramp is hard! Trust me. I was shocked at how hard it was to return to a meaningful and similarly paid position, after stepping out. How could my salary worth be less than when I was 31? Most women are even more capable, more valuable in leadership roles, more mature and can see the forest from the trees after that time raising kids than before they stepped off the career ladder. It was baffling to me. Still is.
I can't take credit for coining this term but I heard it used and so I'm spreading it far and wide: the sticky floor.
For many women of my generation, yes, we have a ton of work to do around breaking the glass ceiling, but as we've seen women be able to reach those positions of leadership, of power, many of us still feel like it's not necessarily that this is being denied but that we can't get off the sticky floor.
No one saying we can't do it but because of issues like childcare…
We fold.
It's why we see women and men go to graduate school at the same rate, we go into our entry-level jobs at the same rates. I know I know the law the best. When you look at partners in a law firm, equity partners or even judges and justices sitting on the bench, it's still disproportionately men.
And we need to ask ourselves why.
I'm not going to challenge you on that.
I do want to ask about health insurers the medical community and how they're looking at your prototype because one of the things that you outlined to me earlier, before our interview, is that you're hoping to pair with community health organizations for vaccination and wellness visits. I have to think that there's a motivation to improve this. Are there any Massachusetts insurance companies, health care companies, Mass General, Partners in Health… looking at this with you?
We would hope that there is a motivation and we're constantly in conversation around where there might be an opportunity for partnership. How we see the opportunity is like this: in the health sector, there is increasing attention paid to social determinants of health.
If you are trying to stay healthier and manage a chronic condition, the health sector needs to be paying attention to housing insecurity, food insecurity. We place this navigator type role in the primary care doctor's office of the pediatrician's office. We would like to show that if you took that theory and applied it to the childcare center, could you see the same or maybe even better outcomes around connecting families with the resources they need to stay healthy.
Not only are they there every day, but they also trust the people that are seeing them every day and caring for the most precious thing in their lives.
Do you have a model for the health care industry to show them that it's going to be a cost-saving? They are businesses so if it's actually to their benefit to be supporting this sort of thing, wouldn’t they help?
As an upstart organization, we don’t have independent data to show them but from the get-go, we have been working hand-in-hand with community health providers. In any neighborhood we go into, it's not only identifying the partner anchor or childcare provider, but it's also identifying the anchor community health provider. This way we can be mutually tracking family outcomes related to health and well-being.
Is there physical proximity in Dorchester, Roxbury and East Boston between this community health center and the childcare center? Are they physically next to each other?
Their walking distance which from our perspective is important because as I think many parents, particularly with very young children, will be able to identify with: If you're asked to get on one more bus in the middle of February with your 15-month-old…
It's not going to happen.
And if it doesn't happen frankly it's not your fault.
We need to ma delivery of services happen seamlessly for families, not providing families with referral cards and asking them to get from one end of the city to the other during business hours when that family is working themselves.
Lauren, your husband is running for Senate and you have young children. So how does that feel? And how are you looking for support?
You know, we just laugh and say, “why not do all the things all at once.” I think what is important, certainly to me and Joe as well, is how do we run this race together as a family in a way that works for the entire family.
In recognition of the fact that Joe may be the candidate, there is no fair assumption that his wife is there to pick up everything else happening with the kids or with the household. He has a second job too and that's being “dad”. And if the campaign is taking him away from the home front then we should be talking about changes we need to see in how you run a campaign, how you're able to finance a campaign around childcare.
One of the most exciting developments – which again you sort of scratch your head and say “How did it take this long” – was when women stepped up in 2018 and ran. The changes that were made to campaign finance laws allow the campaign to reimburse for childcare, recognizing that childcare was a huge barrier to women being able to run for office. I believe a state representative or senator here in Massachusetts recently introduced a bill to this same effect around being able to reimburse for childcare as part of running for office.
What are the policies you plan to champion with Joe? Where does he stand on women in the workforce, gender parity, equity and how would you both describe the future of the healthy American family.
He has, from the get-go, been a huge champion of women's equity or equity in general in the workforce – Certainly a champion around reproductive health, around pay equity, family medical leave and paid leave. And then you know, he really can't escape a lot of conversation around childcare in our house, at the moment.
I think what he also looks to bring to Washington, and certainly in the context of this campaign, is really diving deep into what families are grappling with at this moment when having a good job or having two good jobs in a household no longer guarantees stability or to be able to have a secure housing situation or buy that first home. What is it that we need to return to, to make sure that we're taking care of the American family at this moment in time?
I wish you both a lot of luck. Where do readers go if they want to check out what you're doing?
www.neighborhoodvillages.org and we are extremely grateful for any and every dollar you're willing to put towards our work and to changing the conversation around childcare in Massachusetts. We hope to expand this to a national dialogue as well.
Massachusetts does have a track record for starting prototypes that spread!
We did health care reform, we can do childcare reform too.