Research and data can be powerful tools in your advocacy toolbox. While stories move our hearts, statistics move policy. EQUIP gathers the facts and numbers behind the stories so that practitioners, providers, planners, and advocates can get the evidence to support their cases.
Massachusetts Early Care and Education State Budgets (link to Excel spreadsheet)
Tracking the Massachusetts early care and education line items since FY01, this Excel spreadsheet provides an easy reference sheet to track changes throughout the budget process and across several years.
Massachusetts Early Care and Education State Budget FY01-FY10
Family Child Care Policy Briefs
Created with the support of the Child Welfare League of America, a series of policy briefs describing the value of systems and their role in supporting the quality and business aspects of family child care providers.
Quality Improvement Plans
Funded by a grant from The F.B. Heron Foundation, quality improvement plans to replicate the Boston EQUIP model in other local communities, and to integrate efforts to measure quality at the program and child levels (Revere and Medford).
Links:
http://www.bostonequip.org/PDF/HeronReport.pdf
http://www.bostonequip.org/PDF/MedfordQIP.pdf
Regional Workforce Work
Boston EQUIP was a key partner in New England Workforce Partners for Early Care and Education (NEW Partners) NEW Partners was a unique collaboration between Associated Early Care and Education, the Muskie School of Public Service at the University of Southern Maine, the Maine-based ACCESS Coalition, and USA Child Care. Funded by the federal Department of Health and Human Services Administration for Children, Youth and Families, the project was designed to address the challenge of early care and education workforce recruitment, retention and quality. The project brought together early care and education stakeholders from the six New England states to review, create, and implement data collection and public policy models to address this challenge, and to ultimately create a model for regional data collection and analysis.