Financing Child Care in the United States - Ewing Marion Kauffman ...

This revised, expanded edition of Financing Child Care in the United States highlights strategies
currently employed in states and communities, using public, private and mixed sources of funding
to finance child care. 1 The focus is on strategies that generate new revenue or that increase
the share of current revenue allocated to child care. Only financing mechanisms currently being
used are profiled. The exception is the fifth chapter—“Looking to the Future”—which presents
strategies from other fields that might be applied to child care. This approach allows us to broaden
our understanding of potential resources, to demonstrate that greater investment in child care is
both needed and achievable, and to stimulate strategic thinking and action to better finance child
care in the future.
INTRODUCTION
The strategies fall into four broad categories:
CHAPTER 01
GENERATING PUBLIC REVENUE
FOR CHILD CARE
CHAPTER 03
FINANCING CHILD CARE
IN THE PRIVATE SECTOR
Generating public revenue includes innovative tax– and
fee–based approaches to financing child care. Two
federal financing mechanisms are included because they
are less well–known and less well–understood than are
other federal programs. These are: (1) the federal income
tax credit for child and dependent care and (2) the
federal provisions authorizing employer–sponsored
dependent care assistance plans.
CHAPTER 02
ALLOCATING PUBLIC REVENUES
FOR CHILD CARE
Child care also is financed by allocating existing state
revenue streams for child care. As the profiles illustrate,
this financing strategy can be based on several state
policy rationales that recognize the impact of child care
on welfare–to–work, education, health and crime–
prevention goals.
The third chapter, private–sector financing of child care,
focuses on business and labor–initiated programs that
improve access to child care as well as its quality and
supply. Philanthropic efforts to improve child care and
to develop durable systems at the community level also
are included.
CHAPTER 04
FINANCING CHILD CARE VIA
PUBLIC–PRIVATE PARTNERSHIPS
The fourth chapter explores public–private partnerships
in which public and private sector funds are deliberately
blended to support child care, including capital investment
partnerships for financing child care facilities.
Following a brief overview of each strategy, the profiles
illustrate how the strategies evolved and were implemented.
Not all the possible applications of any method are given.
This catalog focuses on 78 leading examples.
2