Neighborhood Villages applauds the Massachusetts Senate for passing An Act to Expand Access to High-Quality, Affordable Early Education and Care. | Press Release

Lauren Kennedy, co-founder of Neighborhood Villages, an early education and care advocacy group, said the grants have “been really crucial to providers’ ability to sustain existing payroll and make investments in increasing salaries, which has been critical in this labor market in which there is an early education and care workforce crisis that’s built upon a wage crisis.” | Commonwealth Magazine

"You can not overstate how valuable these C3 grants have been to early education and care providers, to center-based care, to family care, to after school programs," said Lauren Kennedy, co-founder of the non-profit advocacy group Neighborhood Villages. | NBC Boston

Fifty years later, American families have taken the leap anyway, said Latoya Gayle senior director of advocacy of Neighborhood Villages, an early education and child care nonprofit. A 2019 industry report found that roughly three-quarters of Massachusetts children under 5 are in child care for at least part of each week. “Women go to work and fathers go to work. And so who's taking care of that child?” Gayle asked. | WBUR

“It’s hard to overstate how important they have been to stabilizing our early education and care field, to keeping providers open, enabling providers to retain teachers, and making sure families have access to care solutions they need,” said Lauren Birchfield Kennedy, co-president and chief strategy officer of Neighborhood Villages, a Boston-based nonprofit. | Boston Globe

Highlighting the need for meaningful child care reform, Neighborhood Villages — a Boston-based nonprofit that advocates for solutions to the greatest challenges faced by the early education sector — applauded the movement of early education and care legislation, which was reported out of the Joint Committee on Education today. | Press Release

$1 million for Neighborhood Villages to provide bilingual workforce training, instructional coaching, and COVID-19 testing. | Patch

Last fall, Neighborhood Villages partnered with Massachusetts Department of Early Education and Care (EEC) and Boston-area community colleges to start Career Pathways for Early Educators, a unique program that supports educators in their attainment of advanced early education and care credentials. | Early Learning Nation

Neighborhood Villages hosted a virtual event with change-makers from across the country to discuss what local governments can do now to ensure that all children have access to a high-quality early education and all families have access to the care solutions they need to thrive. | Press Release

Neighborhood Villages and Strategies for Children are urging the Massachusetts legislature to prioritize this grant funding for the child care sector in the FY23 state budget and to appropriate $480 million dollars to extend the program through the fiscal year. | Press Release

Neighborhood Villages, a Boston-based non-profit that advocates for solutions to the greatest challenges faced by the early education sector, today announced the launch of the second season of the podcast, “No One is Coming to Save Us,” in partnership with Lemonada Media. | Press Release

Since last summer, the state has been ramping up a program to provide free COVID tests for thousands of daycare operations, but the contract for that program is up in the summer, and the state has not yet committed to extending it. That worries some experts who fear that COVID cases may rise again in the fall. | WGBH

Yesterday, Neighborhood Villages, a Boston-based nonprofit that advocates for solutions to the greatest challenges faced by the early education sector, hosted a virtual discussion on the impact of the child care crisis on Black children, families, and educators, centering the voices and experiences of Black mothers. | Press Release

Lauren Birchfield Kennedy, Co-President and Chief Strategy Officer at Neighborhood Villages, a Boston-based nonprofit that advocates for solutions to the greatest challenges faced by the early education sector, issued the following statement after Boston Mayor Michelle Wu announced the creation of a new Office of Early Childhood. | Press Release

While the women behind Neighborhood Villages do what they can to keep childcare centres open, co-president Lauren Kennedy warns the pandemic has only exacerbated existing problems confronting the sector. | ABC Australia

"We don't look at parents and ask them how they're going to afford the cost of their education for their 8-year-old," Lauren Kennedy, co-founder of Neighborhood Villages, told CBS News. "Why should they bear the full responsibility for the cost of their 2-year-old?" | CBS News

Neighborhood Villages is administering Massachusetts' new COVID-19 testing program at child care centers, which are now eligible to receive free antigen tests in an effort to keep facilities open | NBC 10 Boston

Licensed Massachusetts child care programs can start receiving COVID-19 rapid antigen tests later this month, Gov. Charlie Baker announced on Wednesday afternoon in a growing effort to protect the state’s youngest residents from the surging omicron variant. | MassLive