What Does the Childcare Action Lab Do?
Child care in this country is treated as a private family burden instead of a public good, and the people who provide it, disproportionately women of color, have long been asked to carry that burden for free or next to nothing. The result is a system that fails almost everyone and fails Black and Indigenous women first and worst.
The Child Care Action Lab brings together organizations working across child care policy, guaranteed income, paid leave, narrative change, direct family support, and public education to understand their work in relation to each other's. Our aim is to move beyond a single-issue frame and build the shared belief that care is a collective responsibility we owe each other, not a private problem to solve alone.
How we are doing it:
Cross-Movement Alignment
Bringing organizations from adjacent movements into shared analysis, so the child care debate is shaped by more than the organizations doing child care work alone.
Narrative & Norm Change
Naming the racial and gendered roots of the care crisis and building a belief arc that can move public opinion toward a caring economy, not child care alone.
Testing Ground for Strategy
Giving partners a space to pressure-test research, policy frameworks, and messaging with each other before taking it public.
Six organizations and a shared case for care
Common Future convenes six organizations working at the intersection of child care and economic justice for a structured, cross-movement lab: Child Care for Every Family Network, UpTogether, Maven Collaborative, Springboard to Opportunities / Magnolia Mother's Trust, Family Values @ Work, and Alliance for Quality Education.
The cohort spans direct service and national advocacy, the rural South and the urban Northeast, state coalitions and federal policy work. They have different starting points but are leaving with shared language, new working relationships, and a common direction: building a belief arc around a caring economy, so that no single organization has to carry the whole case for care alone.
"This was my constant place to go back to and be able to say, yes, this is what we should be doing [in re-imagining childcare]. It's one of the few spaces I've really heard that in the past year." — Child Care Action Lab participant
What drives this work
Care is universal. Everyone will need care, or become a caregiver, at some point in their life.
Care shows us the economy plainly: essential labor, systematically devalued, extracted from those with the least power. Get care right, and you have a blueprint for getting the economy right.
The undervaluing of care is not an accident. It traces back to who has long been assigned to do it, enslaved Black women, and later immigrant women and women of color, whose labor was extracted for free or near-free and written out of what the economy counts as work.
Winning a caring economy will take the same kind of narrative scaffolding that won marriage equality: years of building public belief around a shared value before policy could follow. That is the work this cohort has committed to next.
Our Program Partners
Child Care for Every Family Network
Anchor partner and session co-facilitator; national organizing and policy network working toward universal, publicly supported child care.
UpTogether
Provides direct, unrestricted cash to families and challenges deficit narratives about people with low incomes.
Maven Collaborative
Narrative and economic policy organization centering Black women's economic experience.
Springboard to Opportunities: Magnolia Mother's Trust
Jackson, Mississippi; direct support and guaranteed income for Black mothers in federally subsidized housing.
Family Values @ Work
Network of state coalitions winning paid leave and paid sick days.
Alliance for Quality Education
New York's statewide education justice coalition, connecting early care and learning to public education funding.
Get involved and help fuel this work!