Bostonians Sarah Siegel Muncey and Lauren Birchfield Kennedy recognize this landscape from multiple vantage points: as mothers who scrambled to find good care for their children, as professional women working in education and health care policy, and as citizens committed to a society that works. | Early Learning Nation

“We’re in a workforce shortage. We’re in a wage crisis. We’re hemorrhaging people—there’s no bodies, the lights are off,” says Sarah Siegel Muncey, cofounder of Neighborhood Villages, a Boston-based childcare nonprofit that advocates for early education and care policy reform. | Fortune

Neighborhood Villages commended the Massachusetts Legislature for passage of An Act relating to economic growth and relief for the Commonwealth, which includes critical funds for the early education and care sector.

LAUREN BIRCHFIELD KENNEDY, J.D. ’09, and Sarah Siegel Muncey, Ed.M. ’05, met through a mutual friend when they were both pregnant. “Our babies were born within just a couple days of each other,” Kennedy says, “and like so many working moms, we thought, ‘How is it still like this for working parents? How am I supposed to figure out what my career looks like now? How am I supposed to find childcare?’ Sarah and I spent a very long time really thinking through the contribution we could make to this dialogue about the imperative to fix the childcare crisis on so many different levels.” | Harvard Magazine

Neighborhood Villages today applauded the Massachusetts Legislature for prioritizing funding for early education and care in the FY23 budget. | Press Release

"Extension of the C3 Stabilization Grant Program, coupled with an investment in salary increases for early educators serving lower-income children, will be critical for retaining early educators and keeping classrooms open for children and families," Lauren Kennedy, co-president of the Boston early education nonprofit Neighborhood Villages, said. "Moreover, ensuring that state reimbursement for child care subsidies is now tied to enrollment of children, rather than attendance, marks an important change in policy, one that will help to strengthen and build the capacity of the early education and care sector." | WBUR

"This is a down payment," said Lauren Kennedy, co-president and co-founder of the nonprofit Neighborhood Villages. "We're very excited at the legislature's commitment, but certainly, there remains more work to be done over the long-term." | WBUR

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