photo by Ian Christmann
Thank you for lifting up the recent landmark victory in Connecticut’s child care policy and practice, for our conversation today. Can we begin a bit earlier, I’m curious how you found the field of early childhood care and development, or how it found you?
The Why — yes. I think that bigger Why roots all of us who are in this work. Mine is very particular and very personal, I would say, as most of ours are.
I grew up in a setting and household that had an utterly confusing, dissonant combination of privilege alongside — to be blunt — physical, sexual and emotional abuse.
I was white, and had access to very strong, private school education opportunities, which created a definite level of privilege. I had the opportunity and ability to escape into school, which always was safe for me. But at the same time, my home situation was not safe at all. I was put in situations that created multiple traumas before I was ten years old. I have no memories before 10; my first memory is of a school setting and my teacher, just feeling safe. School was my escape.
As a result, I’ve really thought a lot about both privilege and oppression.
When you don’t have early memories — or you have repressed memories, I should say — there’s all this impact on your life and you don’t really know where it’s coming from. Things were happening that I knew were not healthy. But I was young, and didn’t have any tools to understand the situation I was in, what had happened or was happening, or why.
To anyone around me not from my own household, I was just seen as a young, privileged, white girl who likes school. There were big assumptions that everything else was fine — I mean, people who have privilege are allowed to do whatever they want, they’re left alone.
So this meant there was no intervention, no pause, no moment at which people were like, “Hey, something’s wrong here, this isn’t healthy.” And believe me, I also realize there is lack of intervention and resources for so many children and families; I’m just speaking about my own experience.
From birth all the way through college, I had no stability. I didn’t know what was happening, I couldn’t figure it out, couldn’t understand. I didn’t have coping tools, and I would never have asked anyone about it. So, it was all just too much; my first suicide attempt was when I was 15. And that continued for about a decade — time gets a little gray for me in all of it.
When I started to climb out of the sense of not belonging anywhere, not wanting to belong anywhere, I also started to form a missive that allowed me to get outside of myself, and create hope. I was going to grow up and create safe spaces for children.
Amen.
Right. That was really, really important to me. And the only way I knew how to do that was through schools and educational settings.
So, voice was really the driving factor. I wanted to give voice to children. Later on, it also evolved to include family voice and teacher voice.
Do you mean giving voice, or amplifying their voice?
I appreciate the question, I literally mean giving voice. When I was a child, I felt completely voiceless — I really could not speak about the things happening to me. And, literally some of our children do not have voice, they are pre-verbal.
Thank you for sharing your story. I respect and honor your naming the pain of the past, and how it steered you into a life of positive contribution.
There are always things we don’t talk about, right? I’m letting go of that cultural shame around abuse, or suicide, or more recently, MS [Multiple Sclerosis]. We’re conditioned to pretend these things don’t exist, like they’re not there.
I’m so grateful the culture is changing in that way, where we offer and respect a fuller humanity with ourselves and each other. It feels so much less isolating and lonely.
I agree. I’m leaning into it.
Did you discover the idea of early childhood development as a field when you were in college?
I went to Union College in Schenectady, New York, and actually studied English and economics. It became more focused for me in grad school, at the Bank Street College of Education in the city. I got a dual-degree in early childhood and elementary ed.
So all through my young adulthood, into my first jobs, I was on this pathway with a clear mission, gaining experience in early childhood education, birth to sixth grade, curriculum writing. It was always about that. It’s still what drives me every day.
And today, at Friends Center we’re committed to and we’re creating spaces for children and a community, supports for teachers and families, and I’m thinking about all the children who do not have, who are not in our program. How are we creating access and voice across the state?
I appreciate that space for a vision of both-and, not either-or — local and state.
Yes. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve learned so much more about our societal structures and our systems of oppression. The way our racism and our sexism creates oppression and marginalization is an intentional system, designed to do that. That has led me to thinking about how we do large, systemic change across the state and ultimately across the country.
Which actually brings us to this watershed moment of childcare reform.
It’s a great moment in the state, and for the coalition that together made it happen. The most significant childcare legislation in a generation just passed for our state, at the end of this 2025 legislative session last month.
It’s the most comprehensive early care and education legislation in the country right now. It does all these things that — sadly — no other state has yet, all at the same time:
- It is a 0 to 5 scope, so birth to five year olds.
- It has a 16,000 increase in the number of childcare slots.
- It has a portal, which will be basically a common application portal, so families can access childcare in a way that has never been available before.
- It will achieve wage parity between early care and education teachers and public school teachers.
- It includes health coverage for early care and education teachers.
- It caps the parent fee at 7% for families over $100,000, and it makes it free for those under $100,000.
- It creates a permanent, early care and education endowment fund.
- And it has what we call facilities grants; center-based childcare providers and also family-based childcare providers will be able to access facilities funds to grow.
That’s great to hear; I deeply appreciate this ray of hope, especially in our current national climate — also intentional — of fear, loss and division.
I really want to highlight exactly that — it’s taking place against this profound national retreat. At the federal level, the so-called “Big Beautiful Bill” gutted SNAP and Medicaid, and is attempting to change the criteria for access to Head Start — slashing support for families that are really holding up our whole economy.
So while Washington is sending a signal that early care education and families and children are expendable and the women who do this work don’t matter, Connecticut is doubling down, understanding that this is essential infrastructure.
That contrast is really stark, and it makes the achievement and the work we’ve done here in the state not just meaningful, but actually revolutionary at this moment.
So, we’re really proud, just to be part of this amazing coalition. It’s not just a win for policy, it’s a win for people. It’s for parents, for providers, for children. We’re building something really powerful together. I’m really excited about that.
I’ve been in settings in Washington since we passed this legislation, and Connecticut is being lifted up as what needs to happen at the state level while we’re under this administration.
Thank you all for your leadership, it’s very inspiring. Here’s to coalitions and partnership.
That actually points to what’s important for me — how it happened.
There’s this belief, I think, when these sweeping legislation or other ‘victories’ happen — that they happen overnight. That’s not the reality ever. It happens over decades.
This type of leadership rarely makes the front page, right? It’s behind the scenes, relationship building, navigating tensions, stitching together, the work that can actually hold. And that’s how we fix childcare in Connecticut. And to be clear, this is the beginning, not the end; it’s a good start.
Especially for our industry, which is based on invisible work by women, and especially women of color. They have been subsidizing our economy with their unpaid labor, and underpaid labor, for hundreds and hundreds of years. Our early current education system is born out of slavery — that was the first early care system.
When you have a system that’s done that, that’s born out of that, it’s going to be steeped in it. So we have to actively do anti-racist work to counterbalance it. And as a country, we’re not.
Thank you for naming the larger history. It’s been shocking, and also not surprising, to see so much explosive reaction and attempts to censor efforts to tell the truth about our history.
Right. And from that long baseline and history of racism, patriarchy and diminishment of the childcare field and caregivers in general, add COVID-19.
All of a sudden, the rest of the world saw what those of us in the field already know — every industry in America rests on the shoulders of early care and education. We’re literally the backbone of the economy.
When care shut down, everything stopped. That crisis really forced us out of our silos in the field, to try to solve it. Informal connections became formal strategic partnerships, and out of that urgency beginning in 2020, we formed a coalition called Child Care for CT.
It was made up of providers and advocates, aiming for one goal, which was to fix childcare in the state.
Coalition work isn’t glamorous. This is hard work. Weekly calls, emotional debriefs, years of unpaid organizing. We had what we called an ACT Committee, which stands for Action Community and Tenacity — to bridge statewide policy goals and on-the-ground, community work. We started the Morning Without Childcare movement, which was a single day of action. Our rallies started with maybe a hundred people, which turned into thousands rallying across 14 cities and towns. Now it’s in 27 states across the country.
That happened because all the people who are part of this system kept showing up. They kept calling, translating, inviting, reminding, just being there.
We were grassroots and all-volunteer for the first year or so, which served our gathering and early planning well. And then, we knew we needed and wanted to make the organizational leap to a staff director, so that we could all coalesce around a single leader.
Having one person front and center really helped the movement. As the first board chair, I knew It wasn’t just about us all advocating, it was about listening, and aligning, finding funders and shifting structures, moving from voting to consensus-based decision making.
We were really thinking about how we wanted to be in partnership with each other as we formalized, because a lot of times when all-volunteer grassroots gets formalized, we can start to lose authenticity and voice and connection.
As I thought about how do we make it happen, I think it was a lot of CLP learning — or, rather, CLP DNA.
CLP DNA; I love that and relate to it.
Yeah, being community-centered and being strategic. The rare balance of, deep, deep care and sharp clarity. We’re moving from a rally to a movement, from an organized coalition to a force that passed legislation — groundbreaking legislation.
I think leadership is really invisible until it’s not. The kind of leadership like ours that fixes childcare in the state doesn’t come with a podium, a press release. It’s texting everybody you know, pivoting mid-meeting, being the first to show up and the last to leave, and it comes from every corner of our community — it’s not because of one particular person.
That’s beautiful. I really appreciate your thoughtful navigation of that fork in the road when movements sometimes get wrapped up in ego and power. It was about all of you.
Every single person plays a role, right? And, you know, it’s interesting you say that because someone said that to me the other day too. I was reflecting that one of the things that comes out of a childhood where shame is your resting state, you’re just not going to lead with ego.
Wow.
Right? I mean, the healing that has to take place to even get to a baseline! I’m 55. So we’re talking, maybe 30 years to heal enough to get to a baseline where shame is not the resting state. There isn’t room for ego almost — you know what I mean?
I know exactly what you mean. With a background like that, the harder thing would be to claim credit, the harder thing would be pride.
Yes, yeah.
Amazing; the superpower that grows from toxic soil.
That’s the thing. That is the framing. I say this a lot when I’m in rooms with early care and education experts, pretty much anywhere. And I say “experts” not meaning degrees, but in the full sense of that word — people who really understand and appreciate children, and everything that surrounds the child, the family, the educator. We do not see our own power. We’ve just been conditioned to believe that we are inconsequential, because we have been told that for so long.
It’s a culture in the field, because we’re reflecting what society is trying to tell us. That we don’t matter.
It’s steeped in patriarchy and racism.
That’s exactly right.
I really appreciate you naming it.
Absolutely. And it’s really uncomfortable for us as a society to talk about these things.
I just listened to Bill [Graustein] talking with Dr. Khalilah Brown-Dean about his photography exhibit. He said that in between ‘talking the talk’ and ‘walking the walk,’ we ‘stumble the mumble.’ Any work to bridge our cultural denial to empathy, curiosity, understanding and connection is good work. And each time we do it, it gets less uncomfortable.
Yeah, and honestly, there’s individual discomfort and there’s societal discomfort. You move through one, but the other still remains. So you move through individual discomfort. You get to a place where you can handle the tension. And then everyone is on a different plane. And then it’s really fascinating.
Like I said earlier, it’s a good start.
Interview with The Circle’s Creative Director & Editor, Lara Herscovitch (Cohort 10). To reach Lara directly: thecircle@clpnewhaven.org or Lara@LaraHerscovitch.com
Connect with Allyx directly at LinkedIn or aschiavone@friendscenterforchildren.org
Learn more at Friends Center for Children and Child Care for CT