“We’re happy to be supporting the community first. There’s nothing to say that this will be our only strategy forever, but we have felt really good about this collaboration with our community.”

– Kim Thomason, Program Manager for Virginia Tech, Early Childhood Education Initiatives (ECEI)

Advocacy and Solutions for All

Located in a rural community, and home to 38,000 students with 13,000 full and part time staff, Virginia Tech (VT) is committed to providing access to high-quality, accessible, flexible and affordable early care and education opportunities for the children of faculty, staff and students. This includes outreach, programming, and partnerships with the local child care industry to ensure that community and child care provider needs are not forgotten. They focus on 3 areas:

1) Increasing employee and student access to high-quality early education

2) Supporting employees and students as parents and caregivers

3) Working within communities to support early education as a larger community issue and increase access for all.

It All Started with Data

In 2019 a care-focused executive working group analyzed input from the greater New River Valley community in which VT sits and established the Early Childhood Education Initiatives (ECEI) in April of 2021 to address the needs unearthed by the data. The ECEI, still working today, includes staff who work collaboratively across the university and with local experts and community members to provide caregiving resources to the Virginia Tech community. They additionally support local initiatives and programming related to caregiving, using surveys and other information to assess and respond to the needs of the community and advocate for necessary funding to support new and enhanced programs and services.

At the time of their latest survey in 2023, 76% of employees and students who responded needed or used some form of child care and 47% reported that their current child care arrangements did not meet their needs in terms of reliability, flexibility, or accessibility.

The Community Model

Virginia Tech uses varied strategies to partner with local child care providers, lift up the early educator workforce, and support the greater community along with their own staff, faculty, and students.

Child Care Partnerships: VT enters into agreements with multiple early care and education programs to provide enrollment opportunities directly to Virginia Tech families. For faculty, staff, and students that live locally and in Roanoke, there are five local partnerships that ensure a set percentage of new enrollment opportunities are available for their families. This strategy differs from many agreements where businesses can purchase spots for their workforce. Instead, VT purchases a percentage of the available enrollment. This guarantees that the VT community is a prioritized group when spots are available. “We want the child care partners to feel like this is a collaborative effort,” said Kim Thomason, program manager for ECEI. “We have specific goals to support our students, faculty, and staff, but we want to be a community partner and ideally these contracts help the community at large because it offers the center another form of income. Our hope is that this type of collaboration helps them stabilize and provide the maximum access their program allows.”

Backup Care and Flexible Solutions: VT has recently added two partnerships offering back up care support for their target audiences through Care.com and Cultural Care Au Pair. VT employees have unlimited, premium access to the Care.com network through their university affiliation. They can also receive a $500 discount when starting with Cultural Care Au Pair and can sign up directly through the partner’s website. “All of this is trying to think about flexibility and parent choice. We have employees that are teaching night classes or are here from early morning and leave at 2pm,” said Thomason. “Most child care centers operate on traditional hours, and we need to be able to provide employees and students the flexibility they need.”

Community Partnerships: VT also works closely with the New River Valley Community Foundation and the New River Community College to support workforce development. Annually, these partners bring together high school students from 5 localities for a full day of learning and networking with early care and education professionals. The focus of the day is to recruit and develop  early childhood career pathways from high school to community college through graduate level degrees. VT also facilitates an annual day of professional development for any early childhood educators or administrators in the New River Valley to network and learn together. “It helps,” Thomason states, “because in our rural area, often the educators can’t pay for or take the time to travel to a state or national conference. So, we bring the topics and learning to them.”

Caregiving Hub: And lastly, “One of our biggest successes,” Thomason shares, “is the caregiving website for the Virginia Tech Community. It offers quick and accessible information for anybody who needs information on child care solutions. The hub features community engagement, parenting/caregiving workshops, peer-to-peer office hours for advice and answers to the most common questions about child care resources and benefits for working parents.

Outcomes

Through this robust menu of child care solutions for the VT community ECEI leaders have seen:

• Improved employee satisfaction, and positive feedback on the increase in depth and breadth of resources available
• Increase in child care enrollment by employees and students
• Increased collaboration and communication across campus groups that work to support parenting employees and students

Challenges

Of course, they have seen bumps along the way as well.

Supporting all choices: As a university located within the largely rural Appalachian region of Virginia the communities outside of Blacksburg tend to be conservative. They value self-reliance, connections to neighbors and family, and Appalachian traditions. In this area where resources are limited, the community often utilizes family, friend, and neighbor care to meet child care needs. While providing a menu of options to support parental choice in child care is foundational, Thomason said that in an area that has limited variety in types of licensed early care and education, it is hard to ensure.

De-mystifying the process: For the partnerships with local child care centers, Virginia Tech relies on a robust RFP (Request For Proposals) process through their procurement office, which is often an intimidating activity. With their goals of building collaborative partnerships with the community, Thomason admits that receiving successful RFP from a provider who may not have ever engaged in a process before has been a challenge. “It entails access to and understanding of the RFP process and goals,” said Thomason. “Many local programs have never had to apply or put in a proposal, so we learned that we have to help them know what it looks like and give them an opportunity to ask questions.”

Advice

Thomason shared her top four pieces of advice for implementing partnerships with the local community:

• Clearly define the roles and goals for your organization around early care and education. 
• Build strong relationships within the local early care and education community, have regular and transparent communication with all partners.
• Once partnerships are in place, implement strategies to assess the partnership from both the perspective of your group and the partnering program to maintain alignment. 
• Base adaptations and new strategies on data and build a structure that allows for reflection that identifies what to discard and keep in current and future practices.