A substitute caregiver pool for when local daycare centers need backup. A budding mentorship system to support the next generation of child care providers. Recruitment efforts aimed to attract more people to the child care profession. These are a few of the areas where Child Caring Now has made gains in 2023.

When The Ticker last touched base in January, the local collaborative project had recently established seven “action teams,” each focused on a different goal around strengthening child care across the five-county region. The seven teams are working to 1) expand credentialing and career pathway opportunities for prospective caregivers; 2) create a system-wide substitute caregiver pool; 3) recruit parents and others to support the child care system; 4) expand new provider recruitment and support; 5) establish caregiver mentorship programs; 6) generate funding for providers and initiatives; and 7) support employers and other organizations in the community that are working to expand child care capacity.

According to Norika Kida Betti, who leads Child Caring Now in her capacity as early childhood system coordinator for United Way of Northwest Michigan, several of the initiative’s action teams have made big breakthroughs.

“There’s been some exciting movement with the substitute pool team, especially,” Kida Betti says. That action team is working to navigate the regulatory and logistical hurdles that make it difficult for daycare centers or preschools to bring in substitutes when caregivers are ill or otherwise unable to perform their usual responsibilities. Right now, those types of situations often leave parents and families without child care for a day or longer. A substitute pool could help avoid those gaps.

Per Kida Betti, the substitute action team is working to train “a small pilot group” of substitutes, with hopes of eventually growing that program into something more substantial. “We were fortunate to get some funding from the Grand Traverse Regional Community Foundation to do this pilot,” she says. “We have eight individuals who started the training that will be required for them to be able to go into any early care and learning setting and be a substitute provider. We have a few specific providers that have expressed interest in substitutes, and we’re going to work with them to figure out coordination and chart out the next steps.”

The action team working to build a local mentorship ecosystem has made similar progress. “They’ve started talking with potential mentors, who are seasoned providers that have been working in the child care field for quite a while,” Kida Betti explains. “Now, the action team is working to drill down on what those individuals want to offer to a potential mentee. The mentee would likely be a newer provider or someone who's considering becoming a provider.”

Child Caring Now’s efforts to recruit new caregivers are also gaining ground. Kida Betti tells The Ticker the action team working to recruit parents into the child care system recently “worked with the MiSTEM Network to create career profile cards” for child care professions.

“Each card profiles someone in the region and their specific job, including how they got to where they are and the various aspects of their career,” Kida Betti explains. “Our action team partnered with this already-existing program to create a handful of career profile cards that can then be used in places like a Head Start preschool classroom, where parents might come in and see the card. Then it’s an opening to talk to a parent and ask, ‘Hey, have you ever considered volunteering, or maybe even becoming an assistant, which could lead you to become to becoming an early childhood teacher?’ The cards are really just the first step in thinking about what tools we can make available system-wide for our partners to bring more people into the system.”

Beyond recruiting parents, Robin Hornkohl – Great Start Collaborative Coordinator for Northwest Education Services (North Ed) – says there are promising signs that more young people are considering careers in early childhood education, too. Hornkohl points to another Child Caring Now action team – the one looking to expand credentialing opportunities – as a key asset in “supporting local students in getting their child development association (CDA) credential.

“In the past year, there have been 30 area students that have gone through [the CDA credentialing process], which means they’re exiting their schooling ready to work in childcare settings,” Hornkohl says. Those students are coming through programs at the North Ed Career-Tech Center and Northwestern Michigan College (NMC), and could bring a significant injection of new talent.

Having more licensed caregivers, in turn, leads to more child care capacity, and Hornkohl says northern Michigan has seen growth in that area this year. “In our five-county region, there have been 21 new licenses or expanded licenses in 2023,” she notes.

Many of those new licenses came online in Leelanau County, which earlier this year launched an innovative pilot initiative to expand care options specifically in the infant and toddler age ranges. Thanks to the success of that pilot – which led to the opening of several new “micro-center” daycares in Leelanau – Kida Betti says “there is some state money that has been allocated to replicate that model in Grand Traverse and Benzie counties.”

All this progress doesn’t mean northern Michigan’s child care crisis is over, though. Hornkohl notes that the region (and most of the state) “is still in a child care desert” – an area where three or more children are competing for every child care slot. Furthermore, with ARPA dollars and other COVID-era funds drying up, Kida Betti worries that making progress with child care challenges could be harder in 2024 than it has been this year.