The Future for Feminists: All Our Kin and Child Care Advocacy

Photo: allourkin.org

By JESSICA COLE

September 27, 2010

The children could be given to a grandmother, a neighbor, an uncertified stranger whose basement is crowded with cribs. They could be playing near open sockets or sharp table edges. Many of them could be spoken to significantly fewer times than they require each day; they could then end up in kindergarten as the youngest members of the achievement gap that this nation so decries. They could come from any demographic, though low-income neighborhoods are hit the hardest, and wind up in any school, paid for by any taxpayer.

Or, if Jessica Sager and Janna Wagner have any say in the matter, these children can succeed.

Sager and Wagner are the co-directors of All Our Kin, a New Haven-based non-profit, and through their organization, they make it their mission to change the standards and availability of child care across the city and state. In order to do this, they go straight to the hearts (and, in a very real sense, the homes) of the issue: the family-based child care providers themselves.

“OUR COMMUNITY HAS OVERLOOKED ASSETS, AND THESE ASSETS ARE WOMEN.”

Prior to All Our Kin’s founding ten years ago, New Haven’s women always seemed to be the caretakers, especially the single moms. For many of them, motherhood was their primary identity in the community, and the community, in turn, pigeonholed them into that position. That changed in 1996, when former president Bill Clinton changed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act and, with it, the ability for those women to be the primary care providers for their children. All of a sudden, in order to receive welfare, single parents had to quickly begin moving into the workforce and job training programs if they still wanted to receive cash benefits. For these women, the act left out one huge detail: where would they put their children?

At the time, Sager was at the Yale Law School so as soon as she recognized the crisis she went with her legal instincts: “I looked at the law and said, ‘Hey, they have to be in a work training program. But there’s nothing that says your work training can’t be with children.’ I hypothesized that there are women out there who are really struggling [with this law] specifically because of their deep commitment to their families. What these women want is to have careers that let them spend time with their kids.”     Meanwhile, Wagner had just finished a job with Teach for America in New York City and was struggling to decide on her next step after, as she put it, “living the inequity” of the educational system. An introduction ignited discussion, which in turn ignited a non-profit, and in 1999 a new organization was born: All Our Kin.

From the start, the mission flew in the face of traditional community interventions. Rather than only trying to bring the women that they worked with up to the average skill level in the area, they trained them instead to become local resources and taught them how to become state-certified as child care providers. The women’s earnings as providers, which had often been meager to begin with, skyrocketed, sometimes by rates of 20% year over year as they gained a sense of professionalism in their work. And, just as importantly in Sager and Wagner’s eyes, for each woman who they trained, six children (the legal ratio of children to provider) could find a spot in a safe, loving, well-equipped home while their parents went off to work knowing that their kids were well cared for. “This is not about training low-income women for menial jobs,” Sager said. “Caretaking work is often seen as women’s work, work that is specifically done by women of color [in these communities]. These women are assets, they are worthy of investment, but I think it’s sometimes hard for people to hear or recognize that the work they do is worth taking seriously.” In Sager’s eyes, the work that these women do is undervalued in their communities. particularly in situations where women have never been seen as adequate primary breadwinners, and it is only through programs like All Our Kin that women begin to gain the status that they deserve.

Since those opening years, All Our Kin has continued to train and support child care providers, though they no longer operate their own child care cooperative. Instead, they host workshops (many of their recent ones focused on the business and entrepreneurship side of the providers’ practices), offer a zero-interest loan and grant program for providers looking to develop their own initiatives, lead providers through the certification process and then through additional certifications if they are interested, and administer an Early Head Start program. They also host a conference each year for the providers. Like most of All Our Kin’s outreach and staff, it is entirely bilingual; last year, presenters and translators spoke with attendees in both English and Spanish about everything from planning curricula around nature to dealing with families as they go through difficult times. For family- as opposed to center-based providers, support like this is crucial as they often do not get to otherwise interact with the other professionals in the field.

“THERE REALLY HAS TO BE ADVOCACY THAT SEES THAT EDUCATIONAL REFORM BEGINS AT BIRTH.”

Outside of their direct work with providers, Sager, Wagner, and the rest of their staff spend time advocating for better laws, more benefits, and more recognition for and of family-based child care providers in the state. Their moments of success have been many but their answer remains the same when asked whether enough people are aware of the need for programs: a resounding “No!”

For Wagner, the inequity she saw in New York classrooms and the inequity she sees today in the range of child care options are one and the same. “Kids don’t just show up at kindergarten unprepared by some miracle. They come because they come from some crappy child care or home where no one talked to them… Those kids show up in our schools and they impact us all.” Her sentences start coming faster with the weight of emotion. “We can’t see the investment even though the rate of return is so high. We’d rather put a Band-Aid on something right now than invest in something that actually makes a difference because we don’t have the patience to see it through.”

“CHILD CARE SEEMS LIKE A BENIGN ISSUE, BUT IT REALLY ISN’T.”

The two still think back to one afternoon in the Yale college seminar they taught last spring. That day, they posed a question that divided the room along unfamiliar lines – by personal choice, rather than academic belief. “When you graduate and have kids,” they asked their students, “what will you do? Will you forgo your career and stay home as a mom or dad, or will you take the job and put your child into daycare of some kind?”

For a few girls, the answer was simple. They had grown up anticipating a family and knew that it would be their priority. Others, though – often the ones who had been the most vocal about the need for reform – tried to verbally negotiate their own path, as Sager and Wagner empathized and looked on.

“Progressive girls are interesting because they think that they can have it all, when all of this research says they can’t. Women still are the main caretakers of children and are the ones who do most of the work,” Wagner said. Sager proposed a solution where men and women tried to equally divide up housework and other child care duties, but after vigorous discussion, the class shot that down, too.

“It’s hard reconciling that to our romantic ideal of couplehood,” Sager reflected.

All Our Kin, for its part, attempts to create a space for women (and, it should be mentioned, the occasional male provider too) to succeed both by working within existing gender-related social frameworks and by working to change them. “If you really want to change a community,” Sager said, “you invest in women – women providing a service caring for children that also helps others.”

Jessica Cole is a junior in Yale College. Last year, she worked with All Our Kin as a Dwight Hall Urban Fellow. She is a staff writer for Broad Recognition.