Document Tag: childcare

Three-Year Outcomes for Low-Income Parents of Young Children in a Two-Generation Education Program (2023)

Increasingly, parents of young children need postsecondary credentials to compete in the labor market and meet basic family needs. This study uses a quasi-experimental design to examine the effects of CareerAdvance, a two-generation education intervention that offers postsecondary career training in healthcare for parents paired with Head Start for children. Overall, we find that CareerAdvance promotes low-income parents’ educational advancement during the first three years after program entry, with weaker evidence of benefits to career progress and psychological wellbeing, and no evidence of economic gains. The two-generation program promotes greater educational and career advancement among parents without postsecondary credentials at baseline, than for parents who began the program with postsecondary credentials. In contrast, exploratory analyses suggest that parents entering the program with postsecondary credentials experienced benefits to some individual makers of economic and psychological wellbeing within three years.

ECMC Foundation Basic Needs Initiative Evaluation Report 1: Sustaining Basic Needs Services at Postsecondary Institutions (2023)

In the past few decades, the cost of college has risen significantly, while federal, state, and institutional financial aid and family income have remained stagnant or declined (Goldrick-Rab, 2018). As a result, many college students struggle to afford the full cost of college attendance, which includes tuition and fees, expenses to cover food, housing, transportation, child care for student parents, school supplies and access to the internet, and other living expenses (Duke-Benfield & Sponsler, 2019). College students may experience basic needs insecurity, including the lack of access to healthy food, stable housing, reliable transportation, affordable child care, physical and mental health care services, the internet and technology, and other necessities they need to survive and thrive in a postsecondary academic setting. Meeting college students’ basic needs is essential to their well-being and ability to learn and succeed in college (Daugherty et al., 2016; Goldrick-Rab, 2021; Hallet & Freas, 2018; Haskett et al., 2020; Maroto et al., 2015; Phillips et al., 2018; Silva et al., 2017; Trawver et al., 2020; Zhu et al., 2018). To support students’ postsecondary success, ECMC Foundation launched the Basic Needs Initiative, funding seven organizations (hereafter “BNI grantees,” see sidebar) to further the development and sustainability of basic needs services at postsecondary institutions through direct service, technical assistance, and research.

Basic Needs Insecurity in Texas Community Colleges: Landscape Analysis (2023)

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Texas community colleges increasingly focused on addressing students’ basic needs insecurities (BNI), such as food and housing insecurity, so that students could continue to make progress towards their academic goals. As colleges continue to recover from the pandemic lockdowns and prepare for the winding down of historic levels of government support, faculty, staff, and administrative leaders are poised to consider how best to refine, scale, and sustain their BNI service offerings to most effectively support student success.
Over the past decade, the research on BNI has grown dramatically, documenting the widespread prevalence of BNI among the student population, the negative effects of BNI on student outcomes, and promising solutions colleges have implemented to best support students. This report documents findings across several critical issue areas relevant for community college leaders to consider as they make plans for enhancing BNI service offerings.

Care(ful) Relationships Between Mothers and the Caregivers they Hire (2024)

Care(ful) Relationships between Mothers and the Caregivers They Hire offers an interdisciplinary and international approach to the complex issues of carework, primarily focusing on childcare. The diverse collection of authors center their examinations of care by interrogating how class, race, and gender interplay to create inequity and potential. The work shared in Care(ful) Relationships draws from various disciplines, including sociology, anthropology, media studies, literary and dramatic analysis, history, and women’ s studies while also addressing carework as it is depicted in ages past and contemporary culture. The collection not only seeks to challenge misconceptions and inequity but also examine how the unique personal relationships that form in the labor of care can yield prosocial change.