Shift Work Forward – a national organization aimed at redesigning workforce systems to advance racial equity and improve job quality – recently released a report on the national crisis facing the child care sector and the work done in four communities that focused on the workforce.

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The report, Breaking the Triple Bind: How Worker-Centered Solutions are Transforming Childcare, details the partnerships between Shift Work Forward and organizations from Pittsburgh, Baltimore, Akron, and Des Moines. As part of the Shifting the Childcare Industry initiative, local partners worked in their communities to build or strengthen cross-sector coalitions that took on a shared challenge: improving job quality in childcare by centering the people who do the work.

Each community involved in the initiative approached it from a different starting point and pursued a different intervention that was shaped by local conditions. 

Trying Together was part of a tri-sector coalition in Pittsburgh that also included Partner 4 Work and the Allegheny Department of Children Initiatives. This coalition focused on educator mental health and co-designed workplace-based supports to improve teacher retention and job quality. 

During the project, 168 frontline educators across 10 Pittsburgh programs shared their experiences, providing data for the initiative and helping to shape its direction. These educators identified mental health support as the priority.

The Pittsburgh organizations launched mental health supports with a shared coach across 14 centers and co-created an onboarding passport that standardized onboarding and aimed to ensure that new hires felt capable and confident in doing their jobs.

The coalition also created a Wellness Navigation model designed around how workers experience stress, burnout, and other mental health concerns on the job that was piloted by eight child care centers that embedded mental health support directly into child care workplaces.

Each participating program chose an educator to serve as a wellness navigation champion – a peer who was trained and compensated for their time. Champions provided support to their colleagues, helping them navigate wellness resources and connect to the type of help they needed. The local coalition also partnered with a licensed therapist to develop on-demand, one-on-one mental health coaching support through a team of practitioners for early educators. 

“We ask educators to hold so much – children’s emotions, families’ stress, systems that are under-resourced,” explained Cara Ciminillo, executive director for Trying Together. “This project starts with a simple truth: If we want children to thrive, we have to care for the health of the people who care for them.”

Shift Work Forward supported the coalition through the process with equity-centered coaching and technical assistance that helped the partners navigate their differences and stay focused on job quality as the through-line from design to implementation.

To learn more about the initiative and the work that was accomplished by the Pittsburgh coalition, read Shift Work Forward’s report.