The issue of delivering accessible and quality child care for families in the workforce has challenged generation after generation, but has been elevated to greater public prominence over the last five years. Driven greatly by the impact of COVID-19 —and the subsequent disproportionate number of women leaving the workforce partially or completely—child care is now just as much an issue around board tables as it is around kitchen tables.
Because of this, multiple public and private entities at every level—local, state, and national—are creating space to tackle the child care crisis, and multiple parallel efforts are arising. In fact, as San Diego County’s Child Care Blueprint Action Team began meeting in December 2022, the Kim Center for Social Balance was also organizing leaders around the business and social implications for child care as part of a larger initiative called LEAPS (Leadership in Ecosystems, Advancement, Policies, Supervisors—these are the top four areas that regions and employers need to focus on to develop thriving workplaces.)
By February 2023, these two efforts connected, and the Kim Center’s LEAPS Child Care Community Action Group (CAG-CC) decided to align their efforts with the County’s Child Care Blueprint. The goal for the LEAPS CAG-CC was to augment and support—not duplicate—the work of the Blueprint, which was contiguous to the work of the San Diego County Child Care Local Planning Council. This ensured that all efforts would be pulling in the same direction to drive more meaningful and lasting impact for the local child care sector. The Local Planning Council has adopted the San Diego County Child Care Blueprint as the current local child care plan for the region to ensure alignment.
Because the CAG-CC had aligned but different perspectives than were present in the Blueprint Action Team, our goal has been to provide a robust thought document providing helpful insights from both within and beyond the child care sector. It represents our work from December 2023 – October 2024, and outlines both research and expertise organized in the same framework as the Child Care Blueprint.
One example is our exploration into creating an automated and centralized portal of employer-offered child care benefits, publicly accessible so that, in particular, small and medium-sized businesses could learn from one another. The CAG-CC investigated multiple avenues for including this information into a business’ regular operations, for example through their regular interactions with the City. The findings from explorations like these are included in the thought document to help identify both obstacles and opportunities for the Child Care Blueprint Implementation Team. The Blueprint Implementation Team is able to use the LEAPS CAG-CC recommendations and findings to enhance and complement the Blueprint Implementation Plan, which is in development and expected to be completed in the Summer of 2025.