unacceptable in the richest democracy

in the history of the world.

Why do people who are up at 5 in the morning and probably at their center or their home-based care, ready to accept kids at 6, 6.30, why would they be making poverty-level wages for something that should be a public good, something that we all benefit from, healthy children? The conversations 10 years ago in New Mexico were about the fact that these providers were making poverty wages and families couldn't afford it.

And so started organizing around this issue of childcare.

A lot of it started with strategic imagination and visioning.

What would it look like to have a different kind of system where childcare was accessible to everybody, was affordable, and where the providers got paid a living wage for the work they do? And so there are several experiments around policy change over the last decade, many of which failed.

The organizing kept happening.

Is this horseshoe theory? How should we think about policies coming from the right that might be policies that the left would want?

So talk about what is the work that led to that result? And then what is the result? What does it mean to have universal childcare?

Great question.

So community change.

We were born in 1968 by leaders of the civil rights labor movements, as well as many people who worked in the Kennedy and Johnson Administration on the War on Poverty.

For almost 60 years, we have worked with grassroots community organizations around the country to provide strategy support, other kinds of resources to help people organize locally to change their communities.

That's by way of background.

About a decade ago, we were working with a group in New Mexico called OLAY, Organizers in the Land of Enchantment.

So is this horseshoe theory? I mean, how should we think about policies coming from the right that might be policies that the left would want?