United Way study calls for business engagement

With the completion in October of a state-funded child care study, the Granite United Way reports “remarkable progress in engaging New Hampshire’s business community to enhance child care initiatives.”

But much more needs to be done, according to Joelyn Drennan, senior director, early childhood initiatives at Granite United Way (GUW).

Using a $1.5 million state Department of Health and Human Services contract, the Child Care, Business and Employer Partnership Project sought to quantify the child care challenges in New Hampshire and to engage the business community by offering ideas and incentives to adopt more family-friendly policies when it comes to caring for children.

According to Drennan, who was responsible for the project, the child care issue in New Hampshire has several layers of concern in terms of accessibility and affordability. Those factors, she noted, often keep parents — mostly mothers — at home caring for their children instead of working.

“Child care, its affordability, accessibility, and then the quality, impacts everyone,” said Drennan. “My responsibility is to make sure that the business sector is aware and has the resources and the tools to support their employees with child care access, because it really is an everyone problem. It’s an economic issue.”

Project takeaways

The one-year project, funded with federal money from the COVID-era American Rescue Plan Act, sought to survey and identify the needs for child care in the state, its costs, its accessibility and the role that employers have in making child care more accessible and more affordable. The project included pilot programs that tested out ideas on how that could be carried out.

“This project represented a strategic effort to address the urgent need for child care solutions that benefit both working parents and employers,” Drennan wrote in her report to DHHS. “With additional time and investment, this initiative is poised for lasting impact on New Hampshire’s workforce by engaging the business sector as key stakeholders, ensuring child care access and family-friendly policies bolster economic stability and enhance workforce retention.”

To delve more deeply into the issue, a re-survey could cost upwards of $300,000, according to Drennan.

“While the project had only one year for execution, I approached it strategically as a research-driven initiative, fully recognizing the importance of grounding recommendations in data and designing precise and effective solutions to ensure the resources were used efficiently, and in alignment with genuine feedback from survey respondents/stakeholders,” said Drennan. “We learned a lot and covered a lot of ground in a short period, but I could do so much more with additional time.”

Here are some of the statistical takeaways from the project from the parents’ point of view:

The bulk of child care (24.3%) is carried out by a parent at home, followed by a child care center (23.9%), a relative (12.2%), and an after-school program (10.3%).

The most challenging factor to finding child care (64%) was related to affordability, followed by having space available at the facility of their choice (59%).

39% pay between $150 and $300 per week per child, while 24% spend more than $300 a week.

Here are some takeaways from the employer part of the survey:

92% believe offering child care support of some kind contributes to employee satisfaction; 87% believe it’s the right thing to do, and 80% say it helps reduce employee turnover.

52% say child care support is very important for employee recruitment, and 44% say it’s somewhat important.

“It puts people in a position to, if you have to make a choice, you save more money by staying home with your children,” she said. “You’re not making as much money as it costs to keep them in child care, so you’re essentially working to pay for child care. And women are the most likely to leave the workforce, because women are the primary caregiver.”

The effect that child care challenges have on the state economy are well documented.

For example, the New Hampshire Fiscal Policy Institute in a May briefing concluded: “Without investments to address supply challenges, families may struggle to access quality child care for their children. These challenges extend to the entirety of the Granite State, as individuals who do not have access to child care cannot join the New Hampshire workforce and help build a more vibrant New Hampshire economy.”

Similarly, the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire reported in November that in 2023, the average price of full-time, center-based care for an infant and a 4-year-old in New Hampshire was nearly $32,000 a year. That’s the equivalent to 28% of median family income for New Hampshire households with children under 5 ($112,230).

“At current prices, a New Hampshire family with two young children would need to earn $455,257 a year for the average price of early care and education (ECE) to remain ‘affordable,’” it said.

All the studies cited multiple factors that contribute to the child care crisis in the state: lack of child care where it’s needed, lack of qualified staffing, low wages for staff, high turnover of staff and high costs for parents.

Pilot programs

The local United Way project included pilot programs to test out certain theories about child care.

One of the pilot programs involved employer supported child care. The project provided four businesses with access to Tootris, which connects parents with child care based on their location, schedule and budget.

“We provided them one-time funding to offer to their employees as a stipend so that they could transact on the website and test it out,” said Drennan. “The goal of that pilot was to give the employers a low-risk opportunity to test this out, see how it impacts their recruitment, retention and then employee satisfaction, and to see if it’s something that they may want to implement beyond the pilot.”

Another pilot in the program was creating a family-friendly workplace designation for businesses in local partnership with a national organization, The Best Place for Working Parents.

A local business can take a short survey and, based on their responses, earn a badge as a family-friendly workplace that they can then use in their marketing and recruitment.

Going forward, Drennan wants to continue to engage state policymakers and businesses.

“Long term, I would love to really establish a coalition of business leaders that are interested in connecting further and really championing this issue and looking at policies and how they can partner with the state to implement public-private partnerships, and to incentivize businesses to support their employees with child care, with other family-friendly benefits and policies but around child care, specifically,” said Drennan.

“If we had, perhaps, a state tax incentive for employers that provides either stipends or on-site child care, or are doing something that might encourage more businesses and more employers to do so,” she added. “Right now, there’s a federal tax credit for employer-sponsored child care, but it’s fairly inaccessible unless you’re a really, really large business.”