Head Start offers a critical opportunity to improve the quality of home-based child care and bolster the sustainability of providers, while enabling Head Start to meet its mission to meet the comprehensive needs of young children and families facing the greatest adversity.
Start Early and its partners supported Home Grown, a national collaborative of funders committed to improving the quality of and access to home- based child care, to organize and deliver resources and technical assistance opportunities to potential Round 4 Early Head Start-Child Care Partnerships (EHS-CCP) applicants to increase the number of high-quality EHS-CCP applications supporting family child care home (FCC) providers.
Individuals from 40 states took advantage of the technical assistance opportunities offered to support new and existing Head Start grantees to include family child care in their EHS-CCP proposals. These included well-attended webinars; an online resource library housed on Home Grown’s website; and technical assistance through group and one-on-one peer learning calls.
Bolstered by recent data demonstrating that more parents are seeking smaller home-based child care settings during the pandemic, partnerships between Head Start and home-based child care providers offer promise for dramatically expanding access to high-quality, comprehensive early care and education services in home-based settings and establishing family child care network models that provide critical supports to sustain home-based providers.
