Funder Briefing: New Mexico’s Universal Child Care Initiative

On November 1, New Mexico became the first state to offer universal child care for all families regardless of income. Funded by a portion of the state’s Land Grant Permanent Fund, the program includes child care centers, home-based providers, and before/after-school programs.

The New Mexico Early Childhood Funders Alliance invites ECFC members and all interested funders to a briefing and Q&A session with Secretary Elizabeth Groginsky, the first-ever Cabinet Secretary of New Mexico’s Early Childhood Education and Care Department, to learn more about the state’s strategy to implement the initiative.

The NM Universal Child Care movement holds important lessons for other local, state, regional and national funders, including:

• The role of public and private partnership and long-term relationships necessary to move and sustain this work;
• Community capacity and workforce supports needed to implement the initiative;
• How funders can help create conditions in their own places to support improvements and expansions to child care opportunities.

This work also holds lessons for child care systems in states with diverse, multi-lingual communities, including Tribal communities, and states with substantial geographic diversity.