New Orleans Coalition Pushes for Child Care Measure with Multigenerational Effect
Lesley Brown Rawlings (VP of Strategy) and Rhonda J. Broussard (Founder and CEO)
In February, J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. awarded a $5 million Advancing Cities prize to the NOLA C.A.R.E.S. coalition (New Orleans Louisiana Creating Access, Resources and Equity for Success) to help child care workers and to expand access to affordable childcare. “This is one issue that everybody gets,” says Erika Wright, the bank’s vice president of global philanthropy. “People feel this acutely. Families are struggling, and the ripple effects impairs our economy’s ability to function.”
The award coincided with a campaign in support of a $21 million millage (a kind of tax). The measure, which has the support of Mayor LaToya Cantrell, is up for a vote on April 30. Via email, Beloved Community leaders Rhonda J. Broussard (Founder and CEO) and Lesley Brown Rawlings (Vice President of Strategy) were interviewed by Early Learning Nation columnist Mark Swartz.
What do our readers need to know about children and families in your community? And about your organization?
Collectively as a nation, families and communities have spent the last two years grappling with both the importance of child care, as well as the crippling impact of its absence. Within the City of New Orleans, our families have experienced a gap in child care that emerged long before COVID. Over 78% of our children are Black and Latinx, and our child care providers are predominantly Black and Brown as well. Yet the lack of access to capital and resources that these critical caregivers experience means that every year thousands of families are left unserved. In fact, recent data suggests that more than one third of Louisiana child care facilities are expected to close in the coming year due to insufficient funding and lack of operating capital.
What does this crisis mean for New Orleans?
As we have seen, when families are unable to find reliable, safe, high-quality care for their children, then guardians, disproportionately women, are forced out of the workforce as a result. Therefore in New Orleans, we are seeing a compounded effect. We’re observing BIPOC women who run small businesses suffer from structural racism that blocks their access to open and sustain child care facilities that serve the majority of children in the city. While, at the same time, we observe the guardians of those children, mostly Black and Brown women, losing access to employment opportunities in order to step into the full-time caregiver role. This results in a wholesale lack of economic mobility for BIPOC women across the city...