Lauren Kennedy and Sarah Muncey Want to Solve the Massachusetts Child Care Crisis
Lauren Birchfield Kennedy and Sarah Siegel Muncey want to change child care as we know it.
The cofounders of Neighborhood Villages have been working since 2016 to rethink Massachusetts’ approach to early education, recognizing that the state has some of the most expensive child care costs in the US. In 2023, care for a toddler cost an average of $19,961 annually at a child care center in Massachusetts, almost twice the national average, according to the Annie E. Casey Foundation. That, say Kennedy and Muncey, is a problem in desperate need of solutions.
The two women met a decade ago when they were both pregnant, and quickly bonded over the struggle to find child care. Kennedy had worked in health policy in Washington D.C., and Muncey had been a teacher and administrator at Boston Collegiate Charter School in Dorchester. Their first thought was that they’d collaborate to design a new kind of school.
They they realized that there was a much larger problem to tackle: “The schools are great,” Muncey said, but the issue was that “they have no support.”
In the ensuing years, they’ve worked to build the scaffolding for the precarious but essential child care system by creating models that can be the foundation for public investment.
“We support real programs all over the state of Massachusetts,” said Muncey. “Both center-based care and family child child care in homes.”
“Because of how the system is structured and because nobody was intentional about trying to build infrastructure around it,” child care is simply too expensive, Kennedy said. The only way to fix that, she said is devoting to younger children the same kinds of resources we devote to K-12 schools.
It’s a hard problem, but one of the sort that has been tackled before, they say. Just look at how Massachusetts was first in the nation to create the healthcare prototype that became the Affordable Care Act.
Neighborhood Villages has developed tools and trainings to support early education teachers and administrations, creating free curriculums and offering career advancement coaching. They provide trainings in early relational health — a critical need in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic — and help providers learn management and operation skills.
All are designed with replication in mind. The goal is to demonstrate how these support systems can work, and then secure state funding to reinforce them. Last week, they celebrated the inclusion of $1.7 billion to early education and care in the fiscal 2026 state budget proposed by the Massachusetts State Senate.
A critical component of their work has also been incorporating wraparound services into child care centers, which can offer families help with an array of issues, like securing housing, job hunting, or food assistance.
“From the beginning, we’ve seen a huge opportunity to think big about what the early education and care system could be once we give it the public resources it needs,” said Kennedy. “And this is a phenomenal opportunity to meet children and families where they are at, quite literally every single day, during some of the most critical developmental years of a child’s life.”
With their investment in family navigation, over the last three years, they’ve managed to keep 40 families housed, a savings of $4 million to the state in taxpayer dollars, Kennedy estimates.
They’ve also stepped in to create early childhood solutions where ones currently don’t exist, by retrofitting two school buses into “Colori Express” classrooms on wheels. The buses travel to hotels and motels throughout Massachusetts to serve refugee families. Children aged 0-5 can climb aboard for trauma-informed lessons, giving their parents time to complete important paperwork, get rest, or just have the space to take care of themselves.
Five years ago, as Massachusetts reeled from the pandemic, the extent of the child care crisis came came into focus. Now, Muncey said, it’s more important than ever to address it if we want to remain competitive.
“Massachusetts wants to be the best state to live in. They want to be the best state to raise a family in the country,” she said. “This is a direct line to that. And so this needs to be top of mind for everyone. It’s an intersectional issue, but it also stands on its own. And it’s time.”