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Advocating for children, families and communities facing barriers to high quality child care. | |
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Advocating for children, families and communities facing barriers to high quality child care. | |
The demand for child care has increased as more parents find it necessary to work outside of the home in order to make ends meet. Public benefit programs, such as welfare, have mirrored this tendency by requiring recipients to work or participate in training. This increase in demand has not resulted in a concurrent increase in supply. Despite the drastic shortage in child care supply, those wishing to develop and operate family child care homes and child care centers often face difficult legal barriers, including land use and deed restrictions, zoning ordinances, objections from landlords, and liability concerns. CCLC works to empower local child care advocates, who are then often able to remove these barriers by educating and working with local lawmakers, mayors, policy groups, planning departments, city managers, and other officials. We collect and update information on zoning policies that affect child care from localities across the country and help advocates working to enact statewide zoning protections for family child care.
We advise local advocates and providers on zoning, land use issues, developer tax incentives, and landlord-tenant and other issues. By helping providers untangle the web of zoning and local use restrictions, we enable individuals and community groups to operate family child care homes or child care centers.
In response to the woeful lack of child care capacity in low-income communities, we have analyzed public housing authorities’ policies regarding family child care in federally subsidized housing to ensure that they offer the child care services needed by their low-income tenants. We also offer training designed to increase the retention of family child care providers by equipping them with the information necessary to operate their small businesses successfully.