NYC Families

New York City offers subsidized child care for thousands of eligible families, including for infants and toddlers, and seats in 3-K and Universal Pre-Kindergarten. We hope to reach up to 1,000 parents across New York City to hear from them both about the barriers accessing early care and education alongside their parent-led solutions. Our goal is to bring these solutions to our advocacy with New York City officials and City Council to ensure NYC families have access to programs that support their children’s healthy development and their household’s economic security.

Many families who might be eligible for subsidized care do not know it is available to them or have challenges applying for it. Seats in 3-K and Universal Pre-Kindergarten programs go unfilled because they do not match parents’ working hours or might not fit other unique needs that families have. These are missed opportunities for supporting children’s healthy development and and parents’ stable employment that contributes to their family’s economic security.

We have been partnering with more than two dozen child and family serving organizations across the city to reach parents and caregivers of young children to develop solutions that fit their family’s needs. We have launched a multi-lingual survey of parents. As a thank you, everyone who completes the survey will receive a $5 digital gift card, and we will also share back the results with everyone who participates, including the organizations who outreach to families. All responses are confidential.

Our goal is to bring parents’ solutions directly to New York City officials and City Council so they understand the NYC families’ needs and fund child care and early education programs that fit these diverse needs. We’ve already spoken with 160 parents who have provided a wealth of information. We now need to reach parents across NYC, at least 1,000, to make sure what we learned from the smaller group of parents represents the diverse views of families across NYC. Based on the conversation with parents, we developed survey questions with staff at child and family serving organizations. The questions address key issues that parents raised so far, such as the need for child care hours to fit with families’ work schedules, how transportation costs need to be considered, and why many families need more information to pick the best option for their family.

Like so many issues, when we tell our personal story, it may be viewed as anecdotal—that is, one story may not represent what is happening for most people. But when individuals stories are systematically collected together, data on these shared experiences can be a powerful tool in advocacy. While the initial direct benefit to families may be small, we know that parents value knowing what other parents think about similar challenges they all face, which is why we will share the survey results with them. The larger benefit is to leverage the survey results alongside the voices of child care and early education providers in advocacy toward making child care and early education more accessible. Help us include your voice in advocating for better access to early education and care programming in New York City.

The survey is available in English, Spanish, Chinese, and French. Below are flyers you may use for distribution online and in print. This page is available in English only because it was developed with staff at child and family service providers organizations who more often than not are fluent in English.

We have temporarily paused receiving responses to the English version of the survey during January 2023 while we outreach to families speaking Spanish, Chinese, French, or other languages. If you would like to support outreach to families, including English speaking families, please contact Bijan Kimiagar and Cristina Onea, data@cccnewyork.org.