Lessons Learned from
The Quality Child Care Initiative (QCCI)
A Project of the Early Childhood Funders
Presentation for the
Early Childhood Funders
October 28, 2003
Deborah Kogan
Social Policy Research Associates
QCCI Evaluator
QCCI Emerged as a Project of the
Early Childhood Funders in 1997
To increase the availability of high quality child
care for low-income families in Bay Area.
In response to welfare reform pressures to
move large numbers of mothers with young
children into the workforce.
Supported by research findings on the
importance of quality child care for early
childhood development.
Goals of QCCI
Illuminate critical issues in child care.
Increase the knowledge base of various sectors
of the child care community.
Develop new partnerships between the
philanthropic and government sectors.
Form a child care response that addressed
regional and local needs.
Distinctive Features of QCCI
 A comprehensive vision of the issues that affect
quality child care, drawing on input from
experienced funders, experts, and the child care
field.
 A program of joint grantmaking that drew on both
pooled and directly aligned funds.
 A multi-pronged approach that made direct grants,
sponsored community forums, funded technical
assistance resources, supported grantee
convenings, promoted public-private partnerships,
and engaged in dissemination of best practices.
Distinctive Features of QCCI, Continued
 The availability of a wide range of engagement
levels for participating funders.
 An open and highly collaborative leadership
structure.
 Use of an action learning loop that unites funders
and practitioners in a shared learning community.
 A regional approach to quality child care issues.
 An ability to support flexible responses to
changing circumstances.
Two Rounds of QCCI Grantmaking
 During Round 1, QCCI raised $1.2 million in
pooled funds and made 67 grants to 56
organizations targeting five strategic areas:
training, advocacy, linkages, facilities, and
consumer education.
 At the end of Round 1, participating funders felt
that their work together was not yet complete.
 Funders contributed $2.1 million to support a
second round of QCCI grantmaking. A total of
29 grants were made under Round 2.
Framework Guiding Round 2
Grantmaking
Four Strategic Goals:
Build a sustainable child care workforce.
Strengthen advocacy for child care.
Create new/improve existing child care
facilities.
Make child care more accessible to families.
New Approaches Tested During Round 2
In response to review and feedback from
Round 1, new features included:
A reduction in the number of grants made.
An increase in the average grant level.
Focus on a priority issue: compensation and
retention of the child care workforce.
Grounding of advocacy efforts in focused
high-stakes issues.
An increased emphasis on disseminating best
practices using resource/TA organizations.
Support for Local
Compensation/Retention Projects
 Provided coordinated support ($865,000) for
local projects and regional technical assistance
efforts.
 QCCI support was valued by grantees, because:
QCCI support was timely and flexible.
Funding enabled several counties to weave together an
integrated project from multiple funding streams.
QCCI supported networking and information sharing
among grantees on challenges and accomplishments.
QCCI encouraged grantees to think about both shortterm and longer-term strategies.
Lessons Learned from
Compensation/Retention Projects
 Workforce compensation/retention worked well
as an organizing issue for advocacy projects:
It brought together center-based staff and familybased care providers.
It enabled child care advocates to build broad
coalitions of parents, educators/trainers, labor
organizations, worthy wage coalitions, and care
giver associations.
 Successful public education campaigns
emphasized the link between improved
compensation and improved quality of care.
Lessons Learned from
Compensation/Retention Projects, Continued
 Grantees found it difficult to sustain involvement
by child care teachers in advocacy/organizing
efforts.
 Planning grantees said that design of local
stipend programs will be a “work in progress” for
some time. Design issues include:
How much to raise the bar between initial and
continued eligibility? How to reach family child
care providers and individuals from
underrepresented groups? Whether to link
stipends to permit applications?
Lessons Learned from
Compensation/Retention Projects, Continued
 Implementation project grantees found it
essential to build partnerships with key players in
the education/professional development arena:
To facilitate access to professional and career
counseling for child care providers.
To expand opportunities for classes and
workshops needed by individuals participating in
the stipend program.
To increase early childhood education offerings at
non-traditional sites, during evening or weekend
hours, and for Spanish-speaking participants.
Support for Provider Training
and Leadership Projects
 Support included $100,000 to each of four
resource organizations, with a focus on underserved groups and local areas, to expand training
on:
Providing quality care to infants and toddlers.
Providing quality care to an increasingly diverse
population of children and families.
Providing quality care to children with a wide
array of special needs.
Leadership development for child care center
directors.
Lessons Learned from Provider
Training and Leadership Projects
 Grantees found that training projects were not limited
to delivery of training. Rather, needed steps
included:
Meeting with representatives from targeted communities to
build trust and identify needs.
Developing training curricula and resource materials in
appropriate languages and with culturally sensitive content.
Recruiting and training trainers.
Arranging for academic credit for successful completers.
Conducting outreach to potential participants.
Delivering training.
Providing ongoing hands-on support to providers.
Lessons Learned from Provider Training and
Leadership Projects, Continued
 Projects reaching out to underserved populations found
that intensive interpersonal outreach efforts by community
organizers were needed to recruit targeted individuals.
 Sometimes the necessary precursors to training took time:
One grantee found it necessary to work at the system level
to raise the visibility of children with special needs before
undertaking intensive practitioner-level training.
Another grantee entering a new geographic area found that
it had to talk with caregivers and build a trusting relationship
before offering training on serving infants and toddlers.
 Practitioners valued training that offered academic credits,
which helped practitioners advance on the permit matrix
and qualify for local stipends.
Lessons Learned from Provider Training and
Leadership Projects, Continued
 One grantee emphasized the importance of mentorto-trainee and peer-to-peer dialogue during and
after training to share experiences and solidify
learning.
 Organizational (employer) involvement in planning
and delivery of training supported individual caregiver
participation and made it easier for caregivers to
apply their new skills in the workplace.
 When preparing a curriculum for use by a new
cultural and language group, a process of “cultural
translation” was often needed to reveal the hidden
cultural assumptions in the training content before
the language translation was made.
Support for Parent Advocacy
 The Parent Action for Child Care Today (PACCT) project
received a QCCI grant of $80,000, designed to:
Develop and promote a parents’ platform and communicate
it to key state and local decisionmakers in a public Parent
Summit.
Support three local chapters of Parent Voices in recruiting
parents and involving them in meaningful child care
advocacy work.
Increase the stature and maturity of Parent Voices as a
parent advocacy organization and public policy stakeholder
at the state level.
 Using the Parent Summit as a stepping stone, the project
helped mobilize parent energy around a key state budget
issue (reduction in funding for child care set-aside for
families who had recently left welfare).
Lessons Learned from Parent
Advocacy Project
 It is possible to focus parent advocacy efforts around
a critical issue and to influence key decisionmakers at
the state level.
 The work of paid staff is essential to sustain the
momentum of parent involvement.
 Interest from parents in additional counties around
the state demonstrated the potential to form new
local chapters of Parent Voices.
 As a result of its involvement in state budget issues,
Parent Voices has been collaborating closely with
other child care, labor, faith-based, and non-profit
groups.
Support for Child Care Facilities
QCCI provided a $100,000 grant to Low
Income Investment Fund (LIIF) to:
Provide technical assistance to build provider capacity
on business practices and facilities development.
Link child care providers to expert consultants in the
fields of facilities financing and development.
Create a Predevelopment Fund to support individual
planning and predevelopment grants to licensed
nonprofit child care centers (12 grants awarded).
Expand LIIF activities beyond San Francisco to eight
additional counties.
Lessons Learned from Facilities Grant
 Building relationships with child care organizations and
prospective applicants in new counties requires personal
contacts and a substantial investment of time and effort.
 A number of applicants lacked the threshold organizational
capacity to manage a capital development project. Used
referral linkages to basic capacity building resources.
 Priority centers (those serving low-income families and
children with special needs) often need the greatest
amount of technical assistance and capacity building.
 Predevelopment and planning activities are only the first
step in a long process. Need to develop outcome
measures that track progress toward actual facility
development.
Support for Centralized Eligibility Lists
(CEL Project)
 During Round 2, QCCI continued to play an important
supporting role in its partnership with the State of
California Department of Education/Child Development
Division supporting the development of county-level
CELs (lists of families eligible for subsidized child care):
Facilitated meetings of the state’s CEL Task Force.
Supported networking among counties on CEL design and
implementation issues.
Lessons Learned from CEL Project
 Modest but strategic investments by the philanthropy
community can stimulate the public sector to make
significant investments in projects that address the
needs of children and families.
 QCCI support helped ensure use of uniform design
and data elements across county CELs, which was
critical to build the potential for state-level
summaries.
 Without continued state funding, many counties were
unable to continue/move forward on CEL
development.
Evolution of QCCI During Round 2
Funder participation grew from 16 to 21
foundations. Nine new foundations joined
the initiative.
Second-round participating funders were
more comfortable contributing to the pooled
fund.
QCCI handled turnover in administrative
staffing without disrupting operations.
Evolution of QCCI During Round 2, Continued
QCCI Leadership Team remained in place
overseeing shared funding until the end of QCCI
Round 2 grants; led planning for end of formal
QCCI grantmaking.
Group of interested ECF members met to
develop new ECF leadership and assess the
feasibility of continuing some QCCI-related
functions as part of ECF.
Exit Strategy for QCCI
 Short-term funding to leadership and training
grantees to support planning for organizational
sustainability.
 Clear communication with grantees about the end of
the formal QCCI collaborative grantmaking program.
 Dissemination of lessons learned:
About funder collaboratives.
About regional projects supporting quality child
care.
 Discussions about continuing some QCCI-related
functions as part of ECF or as independent projects
by individual funders.
Funder Perspective on QCCI
Accomplishments
 Funders particularly valued QCCI’s contribution to:
Increasing the visibility and priority of child care issues on
the public agenda.
Viewing and addressing child care issues from a regional
perspective.
Helping document and disseminate information about best
practices in the child care field.
Providing grantees with a single point of access to potential
funders.
Reinforcing funders’ decisions to make independent grants in
the areas of QCCI’s funding priorities.
Grantee Perspective on QCCI
Accomplishments
 Grantees particularly valued the following aspects of
QCCI:
Grant flexibility; the willingness of QCCI to adapt terms of grant
to meet changing conditions.
The fact that QCCI gave attention to issues not recognized by
other funders, such as advocacy, community organizing, and
inclusion of children with special needs.
Modest and streamlined oversight and reporting requirements.
Provision of valuable and interesting information at grantee
convenings.
Assistance in developing relevant outcome measures.
Grantee Interest in Continued Philanthropy
Support for Quality Child Care
 Surveyed grantees indicated that they hoped the
philanthropy community would continue to:
Support innovative projects, such as CARES, that build on
current efforts and require an extended period of time to
mature.
Support advocacy efforts to help protect hard-won child care
quality improvements.
Help broaden the child care discussion to include voices not
always heard, including parents and teachers.
Convince the business sector of the economic benefits of
quality child care.
Convene regional stakeholders to develop new strategies for
quality child care in today’s difficult economic and political
environment.
Lessons Learned About Funders’
Collaboratives
 Most funder staff that participated in the funder survey
would recommend that their foundation participate in
future collaboratives.
 Perceived benefits of collaboration included:
Ability to leverage individual foundation’s investment with
pooled funds from other funders.
Ability to learn from other funders (about the field and about
other approaches to grantmaking).
Coordinated grantmaking strategy that resulted in a greater
impact on the early childhood education field.
Lessons Learned About Funders’
Collaboratives, Continued
 Funders identified the following factors as
contributing to the success of QCCI as a funders’
collaborative:
Having strong but flexible leadership.
Using a multi-pronged approach that includes both individual
grants and grantee/community convenings.
Securing funder buy-in to a broad regional picture of the
issues and grantmaking strategies.
Allowing funder participation at a variety of different levels
of commitment.
Offering both aligned and pooled funding opportunities.
Coming together in a flexible and time-limited project, rather
than creating a permanent program or organization.