Wayne Ysaguirre has spent years thinking about the early childhood workforce and its weaknesses. Then he found a historic opportunity to work with the CAYL Institute and the City of Boston, using federal funding to make the workforce stronger and creating a model that city and state governments could replicate.
“When I was at Nurtury,” serving as the Boston-based, early childhood program’s president and CEO, Ysaguirre says, “staff turnover was around 10 percent which was a lot lower than the rest of the industry, which was at about 33 percent. But I watched Nurtury’s rate increase over time, and I keep thinking, What can we do differently?
“But it became clear that it didn’t matter what we did. This was an industry that was losing talent quickly.”
A glance at U.S. Department of Labor statistics confirms that one nagging challenge is the level of salaries. In 2024, the median income for child care workers was $32,050. But at the older end of the Care industry spectrum, the median income for the health and personal care aides who tend to provide elder care was $34,900, making it financially smarter for people to work with aging baby boomers instead of young children.
Ysaguirre believed that the growing shortage of early childhood talent—as well as shrinking interest in the field—would take a toll on those who stayed in early childhood. Their work would be harder, and the chances of burning out would increase.
It was a problem he wanted to solve. Then, as he says, “Covid happened.”
“But in the midst of Covid, the federal government did a really good thing,” Ysaguirre explains. “Federal officials said there’s a need for new talent to work in good jobs. So the Department of Commerce awarded grants to communities to develop a strategy to create good jobs. But they weren’t thinking of child care.”
Ysaguirre, however, had developed a pilot program to create a child care talent pipeline as part of his work at the Care Institute. He was helping businesses that needed employees and were trying to employ more women, which made it wise to fund the pilot program to create the child care some women would need.
Ysaguirre took this program and the idea of applying for a Good Jobs grant to CAYL Institute CEO and President Valora Washington, and he won her support. The City of Boston served as the fiscal agent. And in 2022, Boston Mayor Michelle Wu announced that the city had received “a $23 million American Rescue Plan Good Jobs Challenge grant” from the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Economic Development Administration to set up a Regional Workforce Training System that would “focus on training and placement for 4,618 quality jobs within targeted industries including healthcare, clean energy, and child care.”
“That made us the only child care-focused, Good Jobs grant recipient in the nation, which was really exciting,” Washington says. “Typically funding for child care comes from the federal Departments of Education and Health and Human Services, so this was a game changer. Child care funding from the Department of Commerce changes the paradigm. Instead of focusing on child care as a support for other industries, this grant focused on child care as an industry in its own right.”
The goal was to upskill and employ 850 early childhood professionals.
To accomplish this, CAYL put together a team that included more than 80 employers, six colleges, and a large group of workforce development and community organizations, that served as sourcing partners by finding and referring participants. This led to a mutual understanding about how training programs could best provide employees with the specific skills that employers needed.
Participants from across Greater Boston ranged in age from 18 to 71, with most being in their 30s and 40s. They received training, enrolled in college courses, and benefitted from supports and wrap-around services, including computers and technical assistants.
“We had people volunteer or work in centers,” Washington says. “And the secret sauce of this whole project were the navigators and coaches who worked one-on-one with people. They are the true heroes of this story.”
Kori Bardige, who was CAYL’s Director of Operations for the Good Jobs Challenge, adds, “We had people who started as brand new hires, and then they wanted to continue. So their navigators said, Let us connect you with another partner who’s helping people to upskill. And in family child care it was very similar. There was lots of community outreach and lots of connections made.”
“We heard from individuals about how important the program was. And we heard from our employer partners how important it was that we offered the training for free.”
Among the success stories was a family child care provider who developed extensive financial skills that made it much easier for her to work on her taxes with her accountant. Another participant, a program director, said that in her 20-plus years in early childhood education, she had never felt more connected, supported and valued.
And overall, the impressive statistical result is that instead of reaching 850 people, the program upskilled more than 1,000 people.
CAYL held a program celebration in August, acknowledging the power of a team approach. To learn more, join The 9:30 Call on Tuesday, October 7th, when CAYL will share its Good Jobs experiences. And stay tuned in the coming months for a webinar where CAYL will share more details about its results.
For now, there are key lessons that stand out.
“I think we’ve demonstrated proof of concept that this could work in many communities,” Washington says.
Ysaguirre agrees. “We proved that this infrastructure can and should be replicated. Child care employers by themselves don’t have the capacity to build this pipeline of sourcing and developing talent. Other large institutions, especially in health care, do this all the time. They outsource their talent acquisition.”
The next step is to build on this success, to create a permanent structure for attracting, training, and nurturing talented early childhood professionals who can work with young children and help them thrive.