New Report: Employing and Engaging Families with Young Children, 2024

Your Guide to Supporting Families in the Workforce

Investments in Caring PA is Pennsylvania's resource for employers to assist their employees in finding access to quality care. This toolkit provides information and resources to identify new or expanded ways to strengthen your workforce, the early childhood system and your bottom line.

Explore the Toolkit

The State of Childcare: Statistics & Impact

Businesses

Businesses

Lack of child care costs businesses 20% of an hourly employee's salary and up to 150% of a manager’s salary. Explore the economic impact of insufficient child care. 
Working Families

Working Families

As parents struggle to balance work and family obligations, employers are losing out. Discover the cost of child care and try an interactive living expense calculator.
Children

Children

Quality child care is a two-generation workforce issue, essential for parents to work, and a critical foundation of early learning and development for young children. Learn about the benefits of quality child care.
ECE Workforce

ECE Workforce

Strong child outcomes are attributed to early childhood teachers' credentials and nurturing, consistent caregivers. Explore information about the child care workforce, equity, and a broken business model.

Explore The Business Tool-Kit

Get Started

Businesses and families are impacted by a lack of access to affordable, quality child care. Employers who better understand the child care needs of their workforce can respond with a variety of effective solutions.
 

 

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HR Benefits & Policies Guide

Review best practices and HR benefits designed to support working families.
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Tax
Credits

Explore business tax credits to offset the cost of internal and community-based child care supports.
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Offering Child Care Guide

Learn about creative ways for employers to help working families be strong employees while also supporting a quality child care system.
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Support
Guide

Invest in technical assistance to guide business strategies and advocate to advance the child care system.
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Working Family Toolkit

Sharing the working family toolkit with employees is an easy way for employers to provide resources and information on child care access, affordability, and quality.
Access Employee Toolkit

Success Stories

The ABK Collaborative, Tearing Down Employment Barriers While Teaching the Teachers

The Housing Authority of the City of Pittsburgh (HACP) offers programs that help residents build job skills, but HACP discovered a problem. For parents working nontraditional hours or looking for new jobs, lack of access to child care created a significant barrier to participation. That gap inspired creation of the ABK Collaborative, a multi-faceted public-private partnership that offers families access to quality care while giving college students studying early education real-life experience in the art of dynamic learning.
 

Learn More: Resource Library

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State of ECE in PA: August 2023

This report looks deeper at Pennsylvania's child care and pre-k system complexities and recommends the improvements necessary to ensure the system functions equitably and increases access and affordability for all families in the commonwealth.

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Why Does Child Care Cost So Much Yet Providers Make So Little?

The Center for the Study of Child Care Employment at UC Berkeley and Child Care Aware® of America teamed up to create a new video that explains why parents cannot afford to pay and educators cannot afford to stay and proposes a solution for a better way to support children, their families, and early educators.

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The Impact of Childcare on Business and the Workforce (2021)

The majority of businesses in Pennsylvania report needing better access to resources to better support their working families and child care.

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Small Business Strategies

Small businesses can make a big difference simply by understanding what resources exist for their working families with young children and making that information readily available.

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Economic Impact Calculator

Calculate how insufficient child care impacts your company's bottom line.

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The Growing Annual Cost of Pennsylvania's Child Care Crisis (2023)

Impact on families, businesses, and taxpayers has more than doubled since 2018.

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Simple Next Steps

  1. Share the Employer Toolkit with your HR and leadership teams.
  2. Share the Working Family Toolkit with your employees.
  3. Choose one strategy from the toolkit that you can easily implement as a first step.

Employer Options

The work of the Pennsylvania Early Learning Investment Commission is possible through generous contributions from:

Vanguard
William Penn Foundation
The Grable Foundation
Heinz Endowments
Investments in Caring PA

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