Why You Should Care About Child Care

person housed as immediately as possible, and the highest score on the scale is chronic homelessness that requires more intensive intervention through social workers.

For people requiring housing after being evicted, the city of Dallas, Mesquite, and North Texas has tackled the growing problem of housing through a $10 million Rapid Rehousing initiative from Congress with another $10 million through private donors. The motto is that people have a right to be housed and need housing first. This is also helpful for people who are homeless that also have substance addictions and mental health disorders because the theory is that the substance abuse and mental health disorders gradually decrease when someone is stably housed.

Links:

1).https://www.dmagazine.com/frontburner/2021/06/to-reduce-homelessness-dallas-plans-to-give-peopl e-somewhere-to-live/?fbclid=IwAR2aiUt59Vo3lX4cSaBcCpNgkUR0aFCGqrjQJvnE59PJSGcCAPvv6baS2j8 2). https://michiganlegalhelp.org/coronavirus/eviction

WhyYouShouldCareAboutChildCare!

By Maddie Elliot, Ferency

There’s some very exciting investments for children and families coming down from the feds! The American Rescue Plan (ARP) and the previous two covid relief packages (CARES in March and CRRSAA in December) have made record investments in child care. The American Families Plan, with even more child care funding, will be up for a vote in the next few months in Congress and has a decent chance of passing! It’s definitely not time to sing Congress’s praises, since the child care system has been chronically underfunded since its inception, and it took a pandemic to increase funding, but anyways, here are some investments to look forward to and talk with your representatives about:

★ $1.4 billion to begin repairing Michigan’s broken child care system (from ARP and

CRRSAA federal dollars) which has yet to pass the Michigan Legislature. ○ Gov Whitmer proposed using these funds to increase eligibility for families to access subsidies for child care, increase subsidy payments to child care providers (which are dismally low at $1.75-$5.80 an hour), offer start-up grants to help new child care businesses open, and other grants to keep child care centers open! ★ In the American Families Plan, which also has yet to pass, Pres Biden has proposed $225 billion over ten years to subsidize child care so that low and middle income

families don’t pay more than 7% of their income on child care for children under 5, saving the average family $14,800 per year. DHHS determined that child care is affordable if it takes up no more than 7% of a family’s income, so this funding would be a game-changer.

Why should you, a college kid, care about child care? The idea of being a parent is terrifying and feels a million miles away for most of us, but most of us have friends and family who are parents. We were once little kids ourselves, and our parents likely had to make hard decisions about whether to work and pay child care fees that rival college tuition costs, ask a loved one or nanny to watch you, or quit their job to care for you. This is a huge gender and racial equity issue. Roughly 136,000 Michigan women left the workforce during the pandemic, many of them women of color, and lack of child care was a main reason for this “she”cession.

Whether or not you ever have kids, the lack of affordable, high-quality child care in Michigan will influence your loved ones and your community. You may become a business owner who struggles to find employees because they can’t accept a job offer until they find child care. You may be the person that your sibling relies on to care for their child while they work. So it’s time to make some noise to your representatives and show them that they need to prioritize funding child care by: ★ Passing Gov Whitmer’s child care funding proposal, & ★ Passing Pres Biden’s American Families Plan If you are registered to vote in more conservative districts, your phone calls and emails are even more crucial to getting child care funding passed in Michigan. Speak up, it’s their job to listen to you! Legislative staff share the most common topics with your Legislators, so spread the word! If you are registered to vote in East Lansing these are your representatives: ★ Julie Brixie - Michigan House of Representatives ★ Curtis Hertel - Michigan Senate ★ Gary Peters - US Senate ★ Elissa Slotkin - US House of Representatives

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