Beyond The Pod: S5E4: Make Child Care Supportive of Children, Families, and Educators

In the Season 5 finale of “No One Is Coming to Save Us,” listeners get an in-depth look at Neighborhood Villages’ extensive efforts to reform early education and child care in Massachusetts and beyond. Our very own Co-Founders, Lauren Kennedy and Sarah Muncey, and Chief Program Officer, Binal Patel, join host Gloria Riviera to discuss what a child care system can and should provide to children and families and to the educators nurturing our littlest learners. 

The episode tells the story of how Neighborhood Villages started and how, together with our partners, we are creating a roadmap to guaranteed, high-quality, accessible, and supportive child care.
The inspiration behind Neighborhood Villages started in 2016, when Lauren and Sarah were sitting on the couch with their newborns. Confronted with the challenge of securing child care and the stress of maintaining a healthy work-life balance, one thing became clear: if they were struggling this much despite their privileges, what were we asking of parents in this country, especially those less resourced? 

“You are not experiencing this alone,” Lauren Kennedy, Co-Founder of Neighborhood Villages emphasizes in the episode. “You are experiencing this with hundreds and thousands of other families out there, women out there, who may be sitting thinking, why am I failing as a parent if I can't find child care that allows me to go to work or pursue my career the way I want to?”

Today, through a variety of initiatives, Neighborhood Villages advances solutions that address the biggest challenges that families and educators face in early education. 

Supporting Families

In order to achieve a child care system that works for everyone, we need to support families. This means ensuring that low-income families have access not only to high-quality early education for their children, but also to essential items and resources, like food, diapers, and clothing. A high-quality child care system is one that sets children and families up to thrive—where all children have the supports they need to learn and grow.

At Neighborhood Villages, we understand how critical it is to meet families where they are in order to support them. One way we’ve accomplished this is through a collaboration with Baby2Baby, distributing essential items and material goods to families across the Commonwealth who are served by Neighborhood Villages’ programs. This past holiday season, we successfully distributed over 240,000 free diapers to emergency shelters, child care programs, family and community engagement offices, and other organizations that support families and young children in Massachusetts.

“When we're thinking about as a society (and social justice, honestly) and bringing the resources that families and children need at this young age, it's about where they are and a place that's accessible to them and a place that they trust,” Neighborhood Villages’ Chief Program Officer, Binal Patel, tells host Gloria Riviera.

This includes when children may be facing difficult transitions. When Massachusetts faced a shelter crisis last year, we partnered with Amal Alliance, Horizons for Homeless Children, and the Healey-Driscoll Administration to launch the Colori Express, an innovative mobile early learning initiative that brings developmentally appropriate, child-centered programming and trauma-informed care directly to young children living in shelters. The Colori Express buses are ensuring that children receive the quality education and care they may not otherwise have access to but unquestionably deserve.

Another key area of focus at Neighborhood Villages is Early Relational Health (ERH). Our Early Relational Health pilot reimagines early childhood education as ecosystems of comprehensive supports for children, families, and educators. By equipping educators, providers, and family caregivers with ERH tools to meet children’s emotional and developmental needs, we're setting a new standard for equity and excellence in Massachusetts and beyond.

Supporting Educators

In addition to supporting families, prioritizing the needs of early educators is essential, and that starts with providing the resources and guidance they need to effectively nurture our children. Unfortunately, for too long, our child care system has taken early childhood educators and providers for granted, offering low wages and very little career support, contributing to a workforce crisis in child care. 

Our programs aim to ensure that early educators can grow and thrive on this career path. Neighborhood Villages currently operates the largest early childhood Registered Apprenticeship Program in Massachusetts and recently became the first in the country to graduate educators seeking to become program directors.

Since 2022, we’ve also hosted an annual professional development day for educators in the network of partner early learning centers in Boston where Neighborhood Villages tests and evaluates solutions to transform the early education sector. This year, we’re opening our professional development programming to the public, with our first annual early childhood conference, Playtopia.

It’s all part of building a system that goes beyond the basics to one that fully meets the needs of children, their families, and the child care workforce, connecting all of the complex layers and systems influencing child care.

“I see these four layers, and on the bottom, the first layer, is the family, and then you have the child care setting, and then you have sort of the region, and then you have the state, the government,” says Neighborhood Villages Co-Founder, Sarah Muncey. “Everything in my mind is like Tetris, how all the pieces fit together.”

At Neighborhood Villages, we’re putting those pieces together. A fully supportive child care system is not just an idea—it’s a fully realized mission to ensure that our children are set up to achieve their fullest potential. A child care system is possible, and Neighborhood Villages is helping to show us how.