Like it did for many communities across the United States, the COVID-19 pandemic highlighted major access and affordability gaps in the child care system in Austin, TX (located in Travis County). While the pandemic brought Austin’s child care challenges to the forefront for the general public, United Way for Greater Austin and its community partners were well aware of the problems and working toward solutions long before 2020. 

Since 2012, the United Way for Greater Austin has led Success By 6, an early childhood coalition made up of more than 50 community organizations. After the passage of the American Rescue Plan in 2021, Success By 6 and the Early Childhood Council led efforts to advocate for allocating a portion of Austin’s Local Fiscal Recovery Funds to meet the child care and overall needs of infants and toddlers and their families. Due in part to the strong foundation of advocacy and community engagement that the coalition cultivated prior to the pandemic, Austin city leaders allocated more than $15 million toward programs that benefit infants and toddlers, such as child care and home visiting programs. Recognizing that the recovery dollars were a one-time investment and would need to be sustained for impact over time, community partners also committed a portion of the city’s overall recovery funding to the following activities:

1. Pay for an early care and education cost model to better understand the true cost of child care, in particular for infants and toddlers.
2. Provide initial funding for the salary and benefits of a children’s funding coordinator whose first task would be to complete the early care and education cost model.

Austin Hires the Nation’s First Children’s Funding Coordinator

Children’s Funding Project developed the concept of a children’s funding coordinator to help communities identify ways to increase funding and resources for young children through strategic public financing. We define strategic public financing as a process that allows states and communities to assign a cost to their goals and policy priorities for children and youth and, ultimately, to identify ways to cover those costs. Since strategic public financing requires significant amounts of research, cross-sector collaboration, and strategic communication, Children’s Funding Project believes it’s crucial to have a person (a children’s funding coordinator) whose job it is to wake up every morning thinking about how to increase funding, resources, and access for children in a local community.

In January 2023, the United Way for Greater Austin hired Margo Kinneberg as the nation’s first children’s funding coordinator. Kinneberg was a great fit for Austin because her background as a public school teacher provided a deep understanding of what children and families need to thrive, as well as her work in public policy. Additionally, she consistently demonstrated what we often refer to as “curious enthusiasm.” Curious enthusiasm refers to a collection of personal and professional qualities like persistence, meticulousness, passion for learning, the ability to ask great questions, and commitment to building trusting relationships in community. 

The decision to hire a children’s funding coordinator embodied Austin’s commitment to finding long-term solutions to improve child care program affordability and access for Austin’s youngest children. Since then, other communities nationwide have followed Austin’s example. As of September 2024, there is a growing national network of 10 children’s funding coordinators working across the country to advance their communities’ goals for children and youth.

Assessing the True Cost of Child Care

As part of her initial training as a children’s funding coordinator, Kinneberg worked with the Children’s Funding Project team to determine the scope, purpose, and overall goals for a child care cost model. Because of all the deep work and hard-won consensus cultivated by Success By 6 and other core early childhood partners, Austin’s city leaders and advocates worked together to identify a clearly defined goal for the cost model. Austin’s initial cost model would focus on estimating the true cost of providing high-quality child care and pre-K to infants, toddlers, and preschoolers in Travis County.

Basing the form and function of the cost modeling tool on this goal, Kinneberg collaborated with our team to learn the full process of building and using a robust, dynamic cost analysis tool as part of the cost modeling process. While Austin’s goal statement for the cost model clearly defined a focus on infants and toddlers, it’s important to remember that infants and toddlers do not receive child care in isolation. In most cases, a provider cares for a mix of children in different age groups, all with different funding needs that must be addressed relative to one another. For this reason, our work with Austin included infants, toddlers, preschoolers, and school-age children in the cost model that Kinneberg developed to ensure the cost model could inform effective child care policies.

By taking this comprehensive approach to understanding Austin’s child care landscape, Kinneberg was able to answer some hard, but important questions:

• How could Austin bring salaries for child care providers—including those who serve infants and toddlers—closer to a living wage?
• How could Austin support child care providers with the funding necessary to raise the quality of their programs?
• How could the city support the varied funding needs in a system of mixed delivery child care?
• How could the city provide coordinated support for the varying child care costs of different age groups, knowing that providing care for an infant is much more costly than providing care for a 4-year-old?

Over the course of about 16 months, Kinneberg and our team met with a working group to devise a plan to answer these questions and secure new funding for those strategies. The working group included Austin City Council members and representatives from United Way for Greater Austin, Austin Early Childhood Council, Early Matters Greater Austin, Office of Travis County Judge Andy Brown, and Travis County Health and Human Services. Together, the members recognized that pursuing a local ballot measure could offer an opportunity to generate new public funding for infants, toddlers, and other age groups of children. In this case, they identified the opportunity to pursue new funding via a Tax Rate Ratification Election in Travis County that would generate more than $75 million annually via a method that essentially is a property tax. The working group identified four priority areas for this potential new funding and the cost model played a crucial role in putting a price tag on how to accomplish these goals to support children’s needs across the cradle-to-career spectrum:

1. Provide subsidies to support child care spots for children from birth to age 3.
2. Expand child care during nontraditional hours for children up to age 13.
3. Build quality and capacity of the child care system in Austin by creating shared services hubs, funding workforce capacity building, funding training and quality improvement for family-based child care providers, and providing “gap funding” designed to make up the difference between the cost of quality care and the current subsidy reimbursement rates for child care slots for children from birth to age 3.
4. Create a business-government alliance to incentivize employers to help cover child care costs for their employees by matching city or county funding contributions.

Additionally, based on input from community members, the working group ensured that the ballot measure would include provisions to expand after-school and summer programs in addition to child care. The working group envisions that funding the four strategic priorities it identified will create roughly 1,900 child care slots for babies and toddlers from low-income households, create nearly 3,900 after-school and summer program slots for elementary-age students, and strengthen Travis County’s workforce by creating incentives for businesses to create or grow their child care options for employees. This four-part strategy is a fantastic example of how a community can come together to craft informed and bold policy plans with the whole child and whole family in mind. Austin’s strategic approach recognizes that a community is stronger and more effective when it works collaboratively to support children across all age groups and developmental stages.

Looking Ahead to November

The working group then set out to get the initiative on the ballot. In June 2024, the Travis County Commissioners Court voted in favor of placing the proposed tax increase on the November ballot. This is a significant and necessary step forward for all involved, as city and county governing bodies must approve these types of ballot measures before they can appear on the ballot for voters.

As we get closer to Election Day, the coalition continues to make its case to voters in Austin. Kinneberg’s cost modeling analysis made it possible to build a clear and data-informed case for Travis County voters to say “yes” to new funding in November.

Be sure to check Children’s Funding Project’s updates page around election time for coverage of Austin’s results at the ballot alongside the measures we are tracking in communities across the country!

Kylie Wheeler is manager of products and capacity building, and Kenny Francis is director of coaching and capacity at Children’s Funding Project.