By Sawyer Bailey, AdkAction Executive Director
Between our staff members and me, a total of six different childcare centers and K-12 schools care for and educate our children, making our work at AdkAction possible. You won’t see them acknowledged in our annual report or highlighted on our website, but those caregivers and teachers are key contributors to our nonprofit impact.
Childcare is both workforce development and an investment in our community’s future. I’m grateful that when I drop my son off, he is being looked after by dedicated and compassionate people who care deeply about him and make sure he is safely learning. That is an immense privilege. And yet, these centers and home care providers deal with razor thin margins, tangled regulations, and challenging standards for staffing and facilities. Despite what you may read, universal childcare is not here in New York State. Our current solutions have been forged here at home.
Bright and talented people have been paying attention to the lack of childcare in the Adirondacks, and the challenges it creates for families and providers, for over a decade, working diligently to solve it. The problem persists because it’s incredibly complex, requires multi-party solutions with substantial state investment, and the challenges surrounding it are constantly evolving.
We want our communities to be safer, friendlier, and more supportive for people of all ages, but our region needs to pay special attention to young families. Our demographics have always skewed older than our urban counterparts. We have steadily been losing population for the last 20 years. We need working-age families to sustain our schools, businesses, healthcare systems, and communities. We want our communities to be a place where people can grow up, not just grow older.
What can a regional nonprofit organization like AdkAction do when a significant state investment is needed to solve this crisis, and when several other coalitions and organizations are championing the cause? That’s what we are taking time to discover with them, because we truly believe this is an issue every changemaker in the North Country needs to be part of. We need to speak as one voice from every sector, and use our unique strengths strategically. For a region as vast as ours, with as few people as we have, big wins are a team sport..
At AdkAction, we continue learning from our lived experiences and from a discovery-first model where we look before we leap. We are grateful to be in ongoing conversation with leaders from the Adirondack Birth to Three Alliance, the Child Care Coordinating Council of the North Country, center-based day care facilities, and home-based childcare providers. We are parents. We are professionals. We all want strong families and strong communities, and we all have a role to play in advancing new solutions to this major challenge.
