Scaling Solutions for the Childcare Crisis: Technology and Shared Services

In this October 13, 2020 webinar, speakers outlined the case for technology and shared services as a promising set of solutions to our nation’s childcare crisis. Moderator Chelsea Sprayregen, Entrepreneur in Residence, Promise Venture Stuido, was joined by lead presenter Sharon Easterling, Consultant, Opportunities Exchange, and discussants Shannon Cotsoradis, Chief Executive Officer, Nebraska Early Childhood Collaborative (NECC); Ariana Shapiro, Business Mentor Coach, All Our Kin; and Sue Renner, Executive Director, Merage Foundations. 

Sprayregen first laid out stressors on the childcare sector: high cost, limited availability — further compromised by COVID-19 closures — and low wages paid to childcare educators, leading to turnover and compromised quality of care. Sharon Easterling outlined the theory of change between shared services, the childcare business model and improved child outcomes, and the ways in which technology and shared services can address inequality, improve compensation and stabilize businesses. Said Easterling: “We have to pay attention to both pedagogy and business leadership if we want to get high quality.” 

Easterling made the case for the myriad ways that childcare management software (CCMS) can improve business practices, including CCMS’s role in payment automation, child-staff ratio management, enrollment, and waitlist processing, compliance, childcare assessment, parent engagement and staff management. Providers can channel savings gained through CCMS into teacher pay and mentoring and supporting childhood educators. She emphasized the need to support childcare providers to maximize CCMS’s functionality: “It’s not enough just to purchase software or encourage providers to buy software. We actually need to support them in using it.” 

Cotsoradis outlined the importance that technology plays in NECC’s work with both local early learning schools as well as staffed family childcare networks across the state of Nebraska. “To be able to scale and reach providers, technology is a real necessity” in working across a large geographic area, said Cotsoradis. Ariana Shapiro lifted up the theme of training and coaching as important complements to shared services technology, reflecting that “tools plus knowledge equals power to providers.” Shapiro also discussed strategies to build trust among providers, including opportunities for peer networking and empowering providers to share their direct experiences with each other. 

The session also highlighted the role of policymakers and funders in supporting shared services. Sprayregen noted that states are critical stakeholders — not only in enabling automation across the childcare sector, but also in putting up barriers to more widespread use of technology. She stressed: “At every level in our early care and education system, we need to spend time helping children and families, not doing paperwork.” Sprayregen presented the case for more streamlined data sharing and interoperability between providers and public systems, raising the question: “Imagine what we could know if we had access to the data that we needed, which providers and families create every day.” 

Renner offered reflections on how philanthropy can play a lead role in advancing shared services, drawing from the work of Early Learning Ventures in six states. Philanthropy is an essential partner at multiple stages in this work — from seed funding and incubation efforts, to support of more established alliances, to advancing policy reforms. Renner stressed that shared services require both technology and partnership: “The technology is a tool that enables the partnership to function really well and at an efficient level.” 

Participants left with a deeper understanding of the following: 

• Changing business practices through shared services directly affects child outcomes.
• Technology is essential to changing business practices. Increasing the use of technology is an important pathway to scaling shared services.
• States have an important role to play in enabling technology use at every level of early care and education, from providers to shared services alliances to systems.
• Philanthropy is essential risk capital. Philanthropists can start shared services alliances and help states change their own technology systems.