Rochelle Wilcox, Hamilton Simons-Jones, and Jillian Delos Reyes were instrumental in the success of the Yes for NOLA Kids campaign. Together, they achieved a major victory for early childhood in New Orleans on April 30 when 61% of voters approved a ballot measure that will dedicate approximately $21 million in property tax revenue annually to new, high-quality, full-time early care and education. The new fund will provide opportunities for more than 1,000 infants, toddlers, and 3-year-olds. The measure also will support wraparound services for families including mental health consultation, social work, teacher professional development, and health and developmental screenings.

Rochelle Wilcox is the executive director of Wilcox Academy for Early Learning and has been an early childhood education professional in Louisiana for more than two decades. She took the lead on organizing providers and families.

Hamilton Simons-Jones is a consultant to United Way to support the Campaign for Grade Level Reading and was the secretary of Ready Kids New Orleans, the committee formed to lead, promote, and raise funds for the Yes for NOLA Kids Campaign.

Jillian Delos Reyes is the director of education and youth initiatives at United Way of Southeast Louisiana. During the campaign she mobilized community partners via the New Orleans Campaign for Grade Level Reading.

We spoke with these three advocates about their campaign and recent victory. You can watch the full video interview and read an edited version of our conversation below.

Children’s Funding Project: Rochelle, we’re gonna start with you. As someone who’s worked in early care and education in New Orleans for over 20 years, can you tell us what this win means for infants, toddlers, families, and providers?

Wilcox: Absolutely. It’s monumental. It is life changing. It is something that is gonna change our early care and education for generations to come. I’ve been in early care and education for over 20 years and have often felt undervalued, marginalized, [like] nobody really cares. But the success in this millage says different. It says that New Orleans is a trailblazer and we really want to put our money where our future lies—and our future lies in our youngest, most vulnerable learners.

Not only will our most vulnerable learners and their families get access to high-quality care but the wraparound services [as well]. We are in an environment [and time] that has a lot of trauma. When kids get into the school system, they may have someone look at them for mental health or other stressors. However, to be able to catch a developmental delay, to be able to have a family have resources for infant and toddler mental health, is mind-blowing. These children will have early intervention sooner and maybe not even need it for a very long time. The fact is that this is monumental and so important in framing the rest of the trajectory of a child’s life.

Children’s Funding Project: Hamilton, you’ve been working toward this win for years. Where did the idea for a dedicated, voter-approved early childhood fund come from? How long did it take to make that idea a reality in New Orleans?

Simons-Jones: That’s a great question. It really builds on a lot of work that goes back about a decade [that looked] at how do we expand access to early care and education in New Orleans? There were a number of working groups over the years and there were two major things that happened. One is, we were really trying to get steady investment in early care and education and that first happened with the budget the city council approved in the fall of 2017 that supported us with $750,000 that seated a pilot with 50 children for what became called the NOLA City Seats Program. That city money grew over time up to about $3 million a year. One of the challenges was we really started intentionally advocating in about 2019 to say, “Look, this money is great [but] it’s destabilizing to families and to child care providers to not know whether they’re gonna have a seat next year and whether you’re going to find the money in the budget next year.” That was when we really started to organize a consistent and persistent call for dedicated recurring money that we know will be there from year to year.

We also failed. We tried in fall of 2020 and it didn’t work. It was a much smaller ask in terms of the amount of money. But it also was a key step in building the momentum for people to support [the second campaign]. The other thing, one of the other groups we had really gone to for funding was the school board because the school board at the time was sitting on an $80 million reserve fund and there are these huge unmet needs. While we weren’t able to get the school board to make a direct investment in seats, we got them to create a working group. Rochelle was part of that group as well as myself and a number of others, including the president of the city council. We spent about six months really looking at every possible strategy that we thought could provide dedicated funding for [the] expansion of early care and education. One of the strategies was this property tax. What’s interesting is [that] about 80% of the strategies required some state legislative action. Much of those we’ve also been working on, but this was probably the biggest one that we knew we had the ability to move on locally and they’re really excited that it happened.

Children’s Funding Project: Jillian, we get a lot of questions these days about what are the messages that bring folks together and unite a broad range of stakeholders into a unified coalition. I’d love for you to share a little bit with us about how you unified the coalition and what those messages were.

Delos Reyes: One of the auspicious things about this whole time period is the timing. The pandemic has really put a spotlight on the need for quality early education and it has brought it to a level of national conversation that really helped our campaign. Folks across the country were feeling that squeeze of meeting quality child care. That was a main driver of why this is so important.

The messaging was driven by good data. The partners that we had at the table, especially the Louisiana Policy Institute for Children and others, could help us tell the story. This is the need. This is how we can address it and this is how this lack of child care and access to it is affecting our economy and all the different levels of our community.

In addition to that, there’s a moral imperative but also a strategic imperative. The moral imperative is that every child should have access to a quality early education. All of our children deserve that. We can tell that narrative from a heart space but also from a head space. This has a direct impact on our community. So all the messaging was a little bit different but all rallied around [the idea of] let’s have a child-centered city [and] what that could look like. For the business sector, it was around economic returns for our families, economic stability within our community, and reliable care. For our community partners doing grassroots, on-the-ground work, it’s all about labor equity and taking a different lens on what public safety and community justice could look like when you make early investments in our children. So I would say the shared messaging is the moral imperative, that this is the right thing to do but also it’s the smart thing to do for all of us.

Children’s Funding Project: What particular challenges did you have to overcome during this campaign?

Wilcox: This was our second attempt. So when we were going back it was like trauma. It was like, “Oh my god, we’re not sure about this.” I know I wasn’t as on the ground, having to talk to providers, reengaging parents and our teachers [during our first campaign]. That first [campaign] go-around was rough and it’s our faces coming to our centers. However, it’s the heart of the work that made us say, “It does not matter how hard it is. We’ve learned from it, coming back to the table and then seeing who we had left with stakeholders [and who] we had left out.” So this [second] time we really engaged the business community. Engaging  the business community and really seeing who we didn’t include in the table [the first time] and bringing them to the table really expanded our partnerships in our communities and allowed them to be surrogates for us. That was, I think, the most challenging part, reengaging people and seeing who we did not include that we needed to include to move [the campaign] forward.

Children’s Funding Project: Thanks Rochelle, Jillian, and Hamilton. We have been so lucky to have you as a part of the children’s funding cohort, and getting to know all of you at Children’s Funding Project. Thank you so much for speaking with us today! To learn more about how communities like New Orleans are funding increased access to high-quality early childhood opportunities through ballot measure campaigns, visit our website at childrensfundingproject.org. Thank you for watching!