Your voices are powerful. NAEYC is here to help you share your stories, get information, build relationships, and access supports, so you can be part of an advocacy community. Together, we are committed to equitably increasing access to affordable, high-quality child care and early learning for families by ensuring early childhood educators are fairly and professionally compensated for their valuable and complex work.
Following are some examples of NAEYC resources that you can use to support your advocacy. Visit NAEYC.org/policy and select “Expand Your Public Policy Knowledge” and “Build Your Advocacy Skills” to access these resources and many more.
How is child care funded? What do all the acronyms mean? What are the key federal programs that support early childhood education and educators? If you’re an advocate for child care and early learning, it is helpful to understand how policy change happens on the federal level, including how child care gets funded, how bills get passed into law, and what federal programs deal with early childhood education. These titles are a great primer on how change can happen:
Sharing your stories with policymakers and members of the media is a critical part of being a champion for early childhood education. Here’s how you can build relationships with policymakers and execute effective meetings with them. We’ve also included NAEYC’s federal agenda so you can understand what NAEYC is currently advocating for:
While sharing your experiences helps to illuminate the realities of child care and early learning, it is helpful to leverage data to turn your advocacy into action. NAEYC’s surveys of the early childhood education workforce provide key national and state-based data points and fact sheets on everything from educator compensation to workforce shortages. These will help to put your stories in a broader community and context and serve as a guide when engaging in conversations with policymakers or the media:
Check out previous agendas and resources and plan to join NAEYC’s annual Public Policy Forum, where you can join hundreds of your fellow educators and advocates from across the country and be part of powerful, diverse teams working to advance federal and state early childhood policy:
Get updates and information about the work of the Commission on Professional Excellence—the next step from the Power to the Profession initiative—as it works with educators to implement and support the Unifying Framework for the Early Childhood Education Profession. Find out more about what you can do to move the vision of the Unifying Framework closer to becoming a reality in your state and community:
You can start small with advocacy in two easy ways: NAEYC is continuing to collect quotes and stories from educators on the importance of long-term, substantial, sustainable funding for child care and preschool. We’re also hoping to identify and turn to a growing and diverse range of educators from all states and settings who are interested in policy or media opportunities or in sharing their experiences in some other way. Your voices are incredibly valuable, and we want to help you share your stories.
You can also reach out to your member of Congress today to ask them to prioritize child care and early learning. Your engagement matters—and it gets results!
