Backed by a Broad Swath of Patient Funders, Early Ed Advocates Scored a Major Win in New Mexico

Patience and persistence are essential qualities for advocates of early childhood education in the U.S. Most recently, for example, Congress refused to pass a legislative package that would have significantly expanded early care throughout the country — despite an enormous body of research demonstrating the long-term benefits, and a national child care crisis that is increasingly impossible to ignore.

Early care advocates were hopeful that a Democratic administration full of early childhood education (ECE) champions might finally succeed in addressing the issue, and the Biden team certainly tried. But ECE provisions in the administration’s Build Back Better package didn’t make it through Congress (thanks, Joe Manchin!). The White House is vowing to make another push this year, and there is bipartisan support for other early care measures.

As Washington wrestles over the issue, early care advocates and their funders have continued to work at the state and local levels, where many believe progress on early care is likely to happen first. As Elliot Haspel, one of those advocates, told IP for our recent report “Giving for Early Childhood Education,” “Look, if the federal government really pulls something off, I’ll be shouting from the rooftops. But traditionally, states have tended to lead the way.” Haspel is a senior program officer at the Robins Foundation, and author of the book “Crawling Behind: America’s Childcare Crisis and How to Fix It.”

In fact, that scenario is already beginning to play out, with K-12 funders providing some of the wind for advocates’ sails. This past November, ECE had a major win in New Mexico, when voters overwhelmingly supported a constitutional amendment that makes early childhood education a right, and provides funding from the state’s Land Grant Permanent Fund to support it. Under the new measure, close to $150 million more will be allocated for early childhood education over the next year alone.

Early ed advocates and grassroots organizations deserve most of the credit, but private funders like the W.K. Kellogg Foundation and a pooled fund rallying dozens of foundations played a key role. Rachel Schumacher, an early childhood policy consultant who directs the Raising Child Care Fund at the Early Childhood Funders Collaborative, said they did so by providing support — and not getting in the way.

“The way funders deserve credit is that we centered the voices of those most impacted by the challenges of the child care system and all the ways it doesn’t work, and invested in groups on the ground that are closest to those folks,” she said. “And for the amount we’ve put in, think about the incredible return — $150 million a year for child care. Philanthropy can’t pay for that, but if we help groups on the ground that build the power to make those kinds of changes, we have a more lasting impact than if we just do direct expenditures for child care.”

Building a movement

The victory in New Mexico is an example of relentless organizing and advocacy on the ground, fueled by a small army of patient funders that aren’t afraid of movement-building, policy work and 501(c)(4) support, yielding major change.

On the front lines of the effort was grassroots organization OLÉ, which has been fighting for child care in New Mexico for over a decade. The recently passed ballot initiative was blocked over and over again in the state legislature, but OLÉ just kept trying — all the while building its coalition of working families, educators, labor unions and other grassroots groups.

Matthew Henderson, who heads OLÉ, said the main obstacle was the state Senate Finance Committee, which kept opposing the measure, despite a massive organizing effort by his organization and other groups. Henderson’s coalition decided to challenge committee members obstructing the bill in the 2020 primary elections and managed to defeat five of them. “The very next legislative session, in 2021, we passed it out of the legislature. And then it went before voters this past November,” he said.

Building enough support to ensure passage required even more organizing. “We reached out to allies with whom we’ve done electoral work in the past but who had never worked on child care issues, and enlisted them in the campaign,” Henderson said. “We reached out to voters in every manner possible: digitally, on the phones, and of course, canvassing door to door. We knocked on about 500,000 doors to make sure people were aware of the amendment and to get out the vote. That’s why we were able to pass it with such a strong majority — 70% support — because we had such a large base of organizations that understood it was a game-changer for their communities.”

Henderson says philanthropic support was essential, including vital funding from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation. Also undergirding the effort was the Raising Child Care Fund, which pools money from 14 nationally focused funders — including the Annie E. Casey Foundation, the Bezos Family Foundation, the Irving Harris Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and others — combined with dollars from close to 20 state and local funders. RCCF supports organizing at the community level across the country, while seeking to build a national movement to make child care a public good.

“OLÉ probably has three staff who work full time on early childhood organizing, and a handful of other staff who spend some of their time on it,” he said. “Without philanthropic resources from the Raising Child Care Fund, Kellogg and others, we wouldn’t have been able to build such a sizable movement as quickly as we were able to, and really sustain it.”

According to Henderson, many funding partners in the Raising Child Care Fund didn’t have a history of supporting grassroots organizing. “In previous years, they had been offering support to traditional child care advocates, so this was a departure for some of them,” he said. “To their credit, they really listened to organizations like ours to better understand that we had a different theory of change, that we believe in mass-based organizing to be able to build the political power to win change. They have been very supportive of that and really understand the difference it’s making.”

When it came to the election itself, the campaign was supported by several funders with 501(c)(4) status, which means they aren’t prohibited from lobbying or supporting specific legislation as 501(c)(3) nonprofit organizations are (learn more about the difference here). The Heising-Simons Foundation’s 501(c)(4) sister fund provided support. Other backers include the global philanthropic investment firm Imaginable Futures. “They made their very first C4 contribution to our campaign,” he said. “So yeah, we’re hoping this is a sign of more C4 funding to come in the future from foundations that really want to see early childhood education change.”

“It really took a broad swath of philanthropic organizations supporting us over the long haul, and specifically over the last year, to be able to win this,” Henderson said.

From grantees to partners

Henderson believes New Mexico’s win will inspire ECE efforts in other states. While they may not have access to funding sources like New Mexico’s Land Grant Permanent Fund, Henderson believes there are other roads advocates can take to get to the same place. “We’re really excited to see what people come up with and are eager to offer whatever support we can,” he said.

Rachel Schumacher is also hopeful about ECE campaigns in other states and localities around the country. She pointed to Massachusetts, where a coalition is pushing legislation that would provide universal child care, along with ECE efforts in Missouri and Ohio.

Schumacher is used to taking the long view: She has worked on ECE policy in various capacities, and was the director of the Office of Child Care in the Obama administration. “I’ve come to believe that this is the most important thing I can do with the rest of my career,” she said. “Early childhood and the overall care issue and how they impact women and family wellbeing and the ability of children to succeed in school — they cut across so many of the issues facing us.”

Schumacher is particularly positive when it comes to the role philanthropy can play. She has seen this role shift over time, including at the Raising Child Care Fund. The fund now calls its grantees “grantee partners,” a change that represents the organization’s embrace of trust-based philanthropy. “We’ve made an effort to learn about the folks that we want to partner with and adapt our practices by listening and sharing and really trying to be responsive to their realities,” she said.

Those realities may include tiny administrative staffs that don’t have the bandwidth to submit multiple grant applications, for example, or to respond to frequent reporting requests from funders.

“These are folks who know how to build power and have trusting relationships with parents, providers, early educators — the folks most reliant on child care or working in the child care sector,” she said. “They have an incredible amount of experience, expertise and energy; the thing they don’t have is money and resources. Philanthropy may not have the answers, but we do have the resources. If we can recognize that it’s OK that we don’t have the answers and offer the resources and maybe get out of the way a little bit, I think great things can happen.”

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