2025 Public Policy Agenda

For nearly 50 years, Child Care Resource & Referral (R&R) agencies have served as trusted partners in communities throughout California. Through economic and political instability, increasing economic inequality, natural disasters, and public health crises, R&R agencies remain vital in supporting families and child care providers to ensure families can work or attend school.

2025 Policy Agenda

Our Purpose: The California Child Care Resource & Referral Network (The Network) is dedicated to supporting the work and vision of Resource & Referral agencies (R&Rs) across the state of California. The Network remains committed to uplifting the vital role R&Rs play in their communities and to ensuring their ability to serve all children and families in their communities as well as respond to their community’s most immediate needs during times of crisis.

Our Vision: The Network believes that child care should be recognized as a basic, universal public good much like elementary education or healthcare. The Network also believes that a successful child care system is a balanced one, in which child care providers are valued and paid fairly for their crucial role in society, parents are adequately supported in making the best care decisions for their families, and children receive the care that allows them to flourish and become their most authentic selves.

Paving the Road Ahead

• Uplifting R&Rs: Support and affirm the role of R&Rs as critical infrastructure to their communities, especially in the preparation and response to emergencies/disasters and in times of recovery.
  • Advocate for increases in state funding so that R&Rs can continue to meet their community’s most pressing needs
  • Supporting the role of R&Rs in expanding the availability of quality child care options for families through their training and capacity building efforts.
• Equitable Access: Ensure that all families are knowledgeable and have access to the information, support, and resources provided by their local R&Rs and in their language of choice.
• Fair Provider Pay: Support the enactment of an Alternative Methodology which pays child care providers at the true cost of care without delay.
• Child Care Access: Continue to hold policymakers accountable for the promised increase in publicly funded child care spaces that has been delayed to 2027, despite ongoing need.
• Whole Child: Support policies, services, and responses with the approach that the health and well being of families and caregivers have a tremendous impact on the growth and development of children.
• Making the Federal Connection: Bridging federal policies and fiscal changes with state impacts on children and families and ensuring our ability to respond as a statewide network.

Approved by the Network's Public Policy Committee on March 5, 2025.

Behind The Network’s Public Policy Directive

Cultivate Relationships to Uplift Child Care as a Policy Priority

In order to advocate for an inclusive and diverse universal child care system, The Network is committed to cultivating and strengthening both cross-sector and national relationships with child care champions in policy, national coalitions, among R&R colleagues, state and federal advocates, and community groups who center child care provider and family voices. New legislators, staff, and administration may not be familiar with the child care issue, presenting an opportunity for outreach to develop new child care champions.

Protect State and Federal Investments in Child Care

The creation of a robust, equitable child care system requires both meaningful and steady public investments. During a time of increasing political, social, and economic uncertainty, we reaffirm our commitment to protecting both state and federal investments in child care, a vital safety net that supports our most vulnerable communities, including Black, Latine, Asian and Pacific Islander American, Indigenous, and mixed-status children and families, and the children and families utilizing these services

As private investors pursue profit opportunities in the child care sector, R&Rs have a role to play in guarding against the over privatization of a public good that erodes efforts towards recognizing child care as a basic, universal public good. R&Rs are uniquely positioned to serve the entire ecosystem of families and stakeholders and beneficiaries that have interest in creating a robust child care system that serves all needs.

Uphold the Commitment to Serve All Families

The Network stands in community with R&Rs, whose services support all children and families in the State of California. We will boldly advocate for funding and policies that increase public knowledge of R&Rs, which includes challenging harmful narratives that discourage the use of publicly funded social services, particularly among mixed status citizenship communities who often fear public charge consequences.

Support Funding Increases for R&Rs

R&R services continue to grow beyond what their current funding levels can withstand. During emergencies such as wildfires or earthquakes, R&Rs have continued to play a crucial role in response and recovery, providing direct aid to children, families, and providers, as well as real-time communication and data collection to emergency responders and state agencies. R&Rs also prepare and support mitigation efforts as outlined in the State’s Child Care Disaster Plan. The Network supports funding increases to R&Rs to support their ever-expanding scope of work.

Ensuring All Families Have Access to Affordable Child Care

We support the vision for universal child care, which includes the need for ‘well-resourced’ R&Rs who are best poised to help families navigate their child care choices, build supply and quality of child care, grow the child care workforce, help families and businesses solve their child care challenges, and deliver on-the-ground information and solutions. This includes:

• Advocating for investments to increase the number of publicly funded child care spaces to address growing family needs.

• Building the supply and sustainability of quality child care, which requires fair pay for child care providers, increased professional development opportunities, access to resources in multiple languages, and reductions in administrative burdens and costs.

• Identifying and advocating for state and federal fiscal policies that put children and families first, ahead of short term profit interests that push back an equitable, universally accessible, fair, quality child care system.

Advocating for Parent Choice

We recognize that families have unique, individual needs and that they are best positioned to make those decisions for themselves. We therefore continue to advocate for a diverse range of child care options that work for all families. This includes:

• Ensuring all forms of child care are equally recognized and supported, and that families are aware of their options to choose the best form of child care for their individual needs/requirements.

• Encouraging and supporting parents’ rights to inform policies and practices that reflect their expertise, lived experience, and agency to contribute to policy decisions affecting them.

• Ensuring Family Child Care Homes (FCCHs), Child Care Centers (CCCs), or Family, Friend, and Neighbor (FFNs) are included in Universal Pre-Kindergarten (UPK) and Transitional Kindergarten (TK) options through referral processes, data sharing, and public education.

Wage Justice and Equity

The Network recognizes the importance of paying providers living wages based on the true costs of care and the impacts this has on child care affordability for consumers. The Network also recognizes that low provider wages is directly tied to a long history of racism and sexism that has largely de-valued child care as an essential resource enabling people to work, go to school, or operate businesses. The Network therefore supports:

• Strengthening the Child Care workforce by adding wage protections for workers in public contracts and minimum guarantee for continued years of operation when accessing public facility funds. Public dollars should not be used to exploit child care workers, or low income communities for short term profits.

• Streamlining administration and reducing repetitive burdens by supporting small independent providers to help bring down operational costs through back end support with enrollment, billing, hiring, purchasing, etc. also known as backend “shared services” so they can focus on serving children and families.

• Elevating the profession from within a system that undervalues caregivers (stemming from a long history of racist and sexist legacies rooted in Enslaved Black women caring for white children and in which child care was deemed as a ‘women’s duty), to one that acknowledges the true value of caregivers and their inherent role in strengthening economies and communities.

Whole Child/Family Equity

The Network acknowledges that children grow within the contexts of their families and communities, and that their well being is directly impacted by the resources, opportunities, supports, and safety nets in their environments. Creating a community ecosystem where children can thrive requires a diverse range of services that work together in support of families. The Network therefore continues to work toward:

• Moving beyond single-issue advocacy to support all aspects of child and family wellbeing such as: economic security, food (GBI), shelter, environmental justice, and health access (including mental health supports).

• Eliminating structural and institutional inequities that harm children and families.

• Protecting children and families who are currently under threat due to their immigration status, race, gender or sexual orientation, and recognizing that the fear, and trauma of being “othered” is deeply disruptive to a child's development and a family’s well being.

• Supporting remedies to past injustices through reparations and restorative justice movements, and offering energy and support to black and BIPOC leadership and voice.

View Our 2024 Network Policy Agenda