Implementing in Public: Sharing Lessons Learned from Across the Country in the Open

When we first launched the ECE Implementation Working Group, we were motivated by the need to collectively surface and address the common challenges organizations face when administering early childhood programs. The continued fragmentation and scarcity of federal funds for early care and education has led to a proliferation of locally-funded initiatives. Cities have long been incubators of innovation. But too often, local leaders are left to their own devices when it comes to implementation. There is no playbook for standing up local early learning programs, there are too few opportunities for local implementers to learn from each other, and there is understandably rarely the space and time for local leaders to pull up and learn from others

While every locality is different, and the context for implementation is unique, some of the same challenges will pop up in every place, and can slow down implementation — leading to inequitable outcomes and other unintended consequences. However, with dozens of examples of city and county-driven early childhood initiatives around the country — some of which are now in their second or third decade of operation — it does not need to be this way. If we create the space for local leaders to come together, build the trust and relationships needed to share candidly, and facilitate conversations to draw out the expertise from those at the table, we can more effectively transfer lessons from locality to locality and together, move toward the outcomes we all hope to see for our children and communities.

This hypothesis was confirmed last month in Alameda County, California, when ECE Implementation Working Group leaders, from Multnomah County, Oregon; New York City; and San Antonio, alongside leaders from San Francisco spoke to an audience of child care providers, community members, and local officials to share lessons learned as the county embarks on an ambitious expansion of their early childhood support system.

[Emmy Liss, author of this piece, was present as the facilitator of the ECE Working Group and to speak about New York City’s implementation of universal pre-K.]

Encompassing much of California’s East Bay community, Alameda County is home to about 100,000 kids under five. Oakland is the county seat and its largest city; the county is also home to the University of California at Berkeley, wine vineyards in Livermore Valley, and over a dozen smaller cities. Poverty rates range widely, from 30 percent in Oakland to just 5 percent in neighboring Piedmont.

In 2020, voters in Alameda County approved Measure C, a 0.5 percent sales tax that will generate over $150 million annually to support early childhood education. After years of legal delays, the Alameda County Board of Supervisors voted to adopt the Measure C 5-Year Plan in June 2025, allowing implementation to finally get underway.

Specific and sizeable investments that will be made under Measure C include:

• One-time Emergency Grants for child care providers, ranging from $40,000 to $100,000, for a total investment of over $80 million.
• A wage floor of at least $25 per hour for early educators in Year 2 and wage raises for an estimated 3,000 early educators
• 2,400 new subsidized child care slots
• Increased funding for Family, Friend, and Neighbor caregivers, including $4,000 grants in Year 1 and a ~$500 monthly voucher enhancement in Year 2 for an estimated 2,500 caregivers
• Significant family-serving investments, including $1 million for inclusion supports, $5 million for community-based Family Resource Centers and $1.5 million for navigation to connect families to services

In designing the Measure C 5-Year Plan, community leaders centered the voices of child care providers and families to make sure that the scope and prioritization of the work reflected their needs. This process involved making hard trade-offs; as Alameda County leaders have acknowledged, truly addressing all early care and education needs in the county would cost at least a billion dollars annually. Measure C generates $150 million.

Leaders and community members were able to have honest, clear-eyed conversations about the trade-offs because of the strong foundation they have built together in crafting the legislation that became Measure C. Even the five year delay in implementing the measure had its upsides, allowing First 5 Alameda County (the public agency charged with administering the early education funds) to plan and prepare for implementation with the Community Advisory Council (CAC).

Written into Measure C, the CAC is an advisory body appointed by the County Board of Supervisors and Local Child Care Planning Council whose membership includes 11 child care providers, parents, labor and community leaders. While the CAC’s advisory role is mandatory, First 5 Alameda gave the council an even broader role and more direct access to planning work to ensure that program design reflects community input.

As members of the ECE Implementation Working Group, leaders at First 5 Alameda understood there were insights about implementation that could be shared from other communities around the country; during their planning process, they had taken lessons on process questions, like how to write an effective procurement, and on philosophical ones, like how to balance investments in educator wages and family access.

Normally, our ECE Implementation Working Group discussions happen behind closed doors, offering city and county leaders a chance to candidly learn from each other. However, following the passage of Measure C, members of the CAC asked First 5 Alameda to help them better understand how the experiences of other communities implementing early childhood programs could be used in Alameda. This created an opportunity to bring ECE Working Group members to Oakland.

At the advisory committee’s September meeting, First 5 Alameda’s CEO, Kristin Spanos, and CAC member and Director of a local Alternative Payment Agency, Kym Johnson, moderated the public discussion publically - in front of the full CAC and an audience of about 60 people, including many child care providers. Leaders shared how they have each grappled to balance universal services with equity for the most marginalized families; how each system worked to be inclusive of home-based providers; the trade-offs of a rapid versus a measured implementation; and why participatory planning matters.

For the Alameda County audience, this discussion:

• Validated Measure C’s path, This is a program designed to specifically support families and child care providers who have been underinvested in and marginalized. Bringing as many people into the room as possible supports the inclusive nature of the plan.
• Gave some level of political cover to Alameda County’s leaders. Leaders will have to make difficult decisions. Hearing the experiences from other places underscores that the county is not alone in the challenges it has faced, or in the tough trade-offs that will need to be made in implementation.
• Surfaced new ideas for the CAC to consider. The group is maturing in its advisory role, but these kinds of roles are often voluntary and do not necessarily come with opportunities to network at a national scale.Bringing a “mini conference” directly to the CAC provided the space to network and engage in ways that are not always possible.

The trip to Oakland also provided a robust opportunity for shared learning with the Alameda County team. The next day, in a day-long session with the First 5 Alameda team, the group of national leaders pulled the curtain back on some of the tougher challenges and decisions that come up when implementing large-scale publicly-funded programs.

This included a very candid conversation about:

• The political and community pressures of "implementing in public" and the challenges that emerge when leaders set a high bar for transparency and ambitious timelines to impact.
• The difficulty of systems building, underscoring the time that it takes; as one leader said, “There is no such thing as pop-up ECE.”
• The nitty-gritty of public sector change management and tools for collaboration.
• Impact, quality, measurement, and what data is really needed and for whom.

Opportunities for this in-depth lesson sharing are hard to come by, and it was a meaningful experience for the visiting leaders as well.

Why share the story of this content-rich trip to Oakland in a blog post? The working group’s full, in person convening earlier this spring surfaced many lessons, but chief among them: define our own needs or someone will define them for us, and make every story a child care story. This is evergreen wisdom, but particularly important now. When the political climate feels bleak, it can be tempting for local leaders to focus inward and shift into a defensive posture to protect existing systems from funding cuts and policy whims.

However, now more than ever, local leaders can benefit from time and space to learn together. There is great power that comes from the peer effect, and the reassurance that what any locality is experiencing is not unique; there are others who are ‘in it,’ too, and have come out the other side. This can have a buoying effect for the public sector workforce, who are at high risk of burnout. But it’s not just about the people inside the system: learning from each other will lead to better outcomes for children and families as well.

Note: Those interested in learning more about early childhood education in Alameda County are encouraged to check out the new documentary Make a Circle, directed by Jen Bradwell and Todd Boekelheide, a film that profiles early childhood educators in Alameda County and across California. First 5 Alameda was an early contributor and supporter to the film, hoping it could be used to raise awareness. The film chronicles the fight for early educators to win a wage increase and the first state pension for family child care providers, offering valuable and nationally-relevant examples about how to push for change in the early childhood sector.