About Us
Neighborhood Villages envisions a transformed, equitable early education and child care system that lifts up educators and sets every child and family up to thrive.
Our Mission
Neighborhood Villages designs and scales innovative and collaborative solutions to the biggest challenges facing early education and child care providers serving families with young children ages 0-5 and advances sustainable, equity-driven systems change through advocacy, education, and policy reform.
We advocate for early education and care policy reform and implement innovative, scalable solutions that address the biggest challenges faced by early education and care providers and the families who rely on them. We specialize in ground-level, strategic interventions aimed at building the capacity of the early education and care sector, and advocate for the public investment it needs and deserves. We show systems change in action, to push policy forward.
Why Do We Do This? Because Child Care Isn’t Working. For Anyone.
Access to early education and care is foundational. It’s an important driver of employment opportunity, financial security, and economic mobility for both families and their children. It’s critical to preventing the achievement gap, and core to gender and racial equity. But early education and care has long been undervalued in our country. As a result, it’s not working for anyone—families, providers, or educators.
Until we treat early education and care as a public good, we’ll continue to see the same outcome: a system that fails everyone.
Despite being an industry essential to family financial security, child development, and a healthy economy, our country’s early education and care sector receives no meaningful public investment. Rather than making a societal commitment to provide child care solutions for all families, we’ve forced parents to bear its full cost. The result? Families struggle to find the care solutions they need to work and children are denied equal access to education.
In states like Massachusetts, early education and care tuition fees exceed the cost of in-state college. Yet, even with sky-high tuition rates, providers struggle to pay their staff more than minimum wage and to keep their businesses afloat. Educators can’t afford to stay in the field because their pay is so low.
No one can afford the early education and care system as it works right now—not parents, not providers, not educators.
This is a fundamentally broken sector. It’s failing everyone.
So, we’re doing something about it.
