is out October 24. She’s also a speaker and journalist who writes on mothers, caregivers, and gender equity and the creator ofrica Gallegos, who worked as an organizer in New Mexico a decade ago, at one point had “stepped foot in every single childcare center in the state,” she told me, sometimes spending a week in small towns five hours from her home, getting to know people, hearing their concerns and building trust.
While getting funding for kids on the ballot might seem like a quick workaround for politics as usual, there typically is no such thing as an overnight success – although our current nationwide childcare catastrophe may create more urgency for this type of action. The campaign did not go well. The opposition to cutting the library budget was fierce, and those pushing the initiative had a hard time generating enthusiastic support in the community about adding only 100 new seats. “Our childcare-provider advocates were out waving signs on Election Day, and motorists were stopping to cuss at them,” Simons-Jones recalls. “They’d yell, ‘You're taking money from libraries!’ It was terrible.
And it’s not just New Orleans that has been able to find bipartisan support for these funds. In 2020 Escambia County in the Florida panhandle approved the creation of a children’s service trust with 61% of the vote at the same time Trump won the area with 57% of the vote. Child advocates were able to bring on business leaders to support the proposal.