Established 2024
The Nashville Early Education Coalition (NEEC) is a an entity dedicated to aligning resources , information, and actions that can help us move a fragmented marketplace to a healthy, integrated childcare ecosystem.
While we know that many factors influence the quality of childcare and early education programs, none matter more than the education and experience of early childhood providers. Therefore, stabilizing and developing our city’s early education workforce is one of our coalition’s core priorities. In addition, there are multiple pieces of our early education landscape housed in different organizations. NEEC will prioritize consolidating much of these existing action plans and strategies, policy agendas, initiatives and collaborations under a comprehensive, united vision.
Additional priorities include:
• Connecting with the Raising Readers Nashville landscape analysis project that is mapping childcare providers.
• Researching best practices and innovation from peer cities and communities.
• Hosting a series of prioritized convenings with key elected officials and policymakers.
• Connecting and increasing diverse funding streams to expand high-quality childcare options.
• Providing access to information and key relationships for current childcare providers struggling to stabilize or contemplating expansion
Background
Access to affordable, high-quality childcare plays a critical role in ensuring young children thrive. However, the reality in Nashville is that 53% of children do not have childcare options, with children in low-income communities facing the biggest obstacles. Although parents are not able to provide for their families without access to childcare, 60% of families in Nashville report employment disruptions related to a lack of access to affordable care. Single parents and parents living in impoverished communities often face an impossible choice of either not working or working and leaving their child in potentially unsafe and unstable care.
While numerous initiatives and partnerships over the years have worked on creating better systems and improving different dimensions of our challenges, we continue to face a fragmented, disconnected and diffuse childcare marketplace.
In the words of one leader, “there is no center”. Nashville has approximately 250 childcare centers, and a likely higher number of home-based childcare providers across the county. Despite programmatic efforts and good intentions, there is no organized “hub” that connects resources, policymakers, funders, parents and providers in a comprehensive manner. Not until children enter the K-12 education system is there an organized center with strongly connected providers to ensure services are connected and accessible.
It is with these realities that a small group of direct service providers and funders began meeting in mid-2023 to discuss the need for a new, independent organization whose job is to wake up every single day with one goal in mind—help solve our community’s childcare crisis.
