October 2021 Monthly Update
October 29, 2021
This month has been filled with exciting wins! As the month of October comes to an end, we are happy to announce that our team has grown and our new members have settled into their roles. Candace Weber is serving as our Director of Partnerships and Victoria Gudino is serving as our Operations and Communications Associate.
In the aftermath of Hurricane Ida, we launched the Hurricane Ida Recovery Fund in partnership with the Agenda for Children, designed to offer child care providers most heavily impacted with the hurricane recovery funds. We are proud to report that we have raised $333,000, and, to date, $311,000 has been distributed to providers. We are still accepting donations for our Hurricane Ida Fund to support child care providers in the aftermath. If you would like to contribute to this Fund, which will provide our child care providers with money they need while awaiting insurance payments and other forms of relief, please do so here.
On October 18th the Louisiana Policy Institute for Children in partnership with the New Orleans Campaign for Grade-Level Reading, Agenda for Children, and For Providers By Providers (4PxP) organized a webinar informing candidates running for office in Orleans parish about the importance of investing in early care and education, a candidate platform to support young children, and the New Orleans City Seats program. To view the webinar, click here.
We also co-hosted a webinar about the business case for investing in early care and education with the Association for Chamber of Commerce Executives, Todd Murphy, President of the Jefferson Chamber of Commerce, and Timothy Magner, President of the Greater Shreveport Chamber of Commerce. To view the webinar, click here. As always, we appreciate the tireless advocacy and unwavering support from our partners in the business community who champion early care and education. Your efforts continue to raise its profile as an issue that impacts our workforce of today and our workforce of tomorrow.
Recently, the US Senate Committee on Appropriations released an appropriations bill that makes major investments in high-quality child care and early education programs including the Child Care Development Block Grant (CCDBG), Head Start programs, and Preschool Development Grants totalling $19.8 billion. The House has not yet voted on the infrastructure package nor the Build Back Better Act. We reached out to our Senators through the Ready Louisiana Coalition urging them to support both early care and education for infants and toddlers and universal pre-k as well as the expanded child tax credit for families as a poverty alleviation measure.