Prelude: What Just Happened in Vermont?

May 2023

It was lunchtime and Aly Richards was sitting at a cafe, only a few blocks from the Montpelier office of Let’s Grow Kids, when she received a text on her phone. 

I think we are there. Come to the State House now.

It was from Rebecca Ramos, one of the lobbyists that Let’s Grow Kids had hired to work on their campaign to bring child care infrastructure to Vermont. The House and Senate would be adjourning that week—they had only a day left to move forward on the legislation. 

Lunch was abandoned as Richards and her team rushed across the street. Waiting for her on the steps of the State House was Conor Kennedy, the chief of staff to the Speaker of the Vermont House of Representatives. 

“We found a path forward,” Kennedy said.

Richards knew Kennedy from her days working in the former governor’s office. When she leaned forward to shake his hand, it turned into a hug, the professionalism of the moment temporarily suspended as the enormity of what was about to happen sunk in. For the past eight years Richards had run Let’s Grow Kids, a child care advocacy group that had focused on a singular goal: bringing affordable child care to the state of Vermont. They’d commissioned a study, come up with a system of subsidies for families and payments to educators, and now needed agreement on the final detail: how to finance it. When Kennedy said he found a path forward, he was referring to the House and Senate coming to an agreement to create a new payroll tax in Vermont to make significant investments in child care infrastructure. 

This financing decision was a victory for Richards—the business community had pushed for a payroll tax over an income tax or property tax increase. 

If they could get a dedicated stream of funding for a universal child care system agreed upon, could this pass? Could it really be happening?

For weeks, since the Vermont legislative session began in January 2023, Richards and her team had provided real-time updates for their supporters and team of advocates. The wide-ranging coalition that had been built across the state in support of child care was one of the strongest pieces of evidence that support for a child care system would sustain broad, bipartisan support at the statehouse level. Every Friday they’d send a Rocket Memo update to the entire staff, board, and team of close partners. But during the last week, as the House and Senate hashed out their differences, they’d moved to Zoom updates. Earlier that week, Richards and her political director were in the Speaker’s office for a tense meeting about needing to come to an agreement before the legislature adjourned. 

Time was running out. They had a broad coalition (Republicans, Democrats, Progressives, and Independents), and they’d have enough support to override a veto, should it come to that. They’d just need the House to agree with the Senate and take the final votes. 

As news of the financing agreement spread, Richards and her team rushed to the chamber, where they watched the House pass the Senate version of the bill, and the Senate concur. At her side was Rick Davis, the philanthropist and entrepreneur who’d set aside his own artistic dreams to focus on early childhood education in Vermont. Across the room she made eye contact with a longtime early child care provider and Let’s Grow Kids teammate, LouAnn Beninati. It’s taken us 50 years, Richards remembers thinking. Fifty years ago, Beninati had co-founded a child care center, Robin’s Nest, in Burlington. She had been one of the original renegades to demand the state do more for child care providers, even hanging a banner across Burlington’s main thoroughfare in the 1990s proclaiming, “Vermont Doesn’t Work Without Child Care.” It had been a pipe dream then to imagine a comprehensive plan with a funding mechanism being signed into law, but now it was happening. 

Walking out of the Senate chamber, after the legislation had passed, reporters swarmed Richards with microphones, with rapid-fire questions and comments: 

What does this mean for Vermont?

What just happened?

You did something real here.

The irony wasn’t lost on Richards, who’d spent much of the past eight years convincing the press corps to cover their efforts. But she also knew that what she’d done—what Vermont had done, what Let’s Grow Kids had accomplished—was just beginning. The press was interested now, she knew, because their long shot cause had won. 

What just happened, Richards calmly explained to them, was that Vermont just became the first state in the nation to pass a bill creating a comprehensive child care infrastructure.¹ They did so by creating a payroll tax that would help fund it, raising reimbursement rates for early childhood education, and providing breaks to most families to cover the cost of care.²  

Vermont is a state with an aging population and a business community that knew they needed a stable workforce, and that child care was key to that stability. It was less a battle of one side for building child care infrastructure versus another side opposed to it, and more a singular focus and collaborative effort to build a large coalition within the state and business community, come up with the right funding mechanism, and find policymakers who would get behind the effort. 

They’d had almost a decade to achieve their goal to improve the state’s early care and education, which at the time was both unprecedented and unlikely. 

How could a small state, with an aging population and dwindling workforce, be able to set up a child care infrastructure system that did not exist anywhere else in the country? How could child care ever see a legislative victory in a country that had gone almost 50 years between the presidential veto of the Child Development Act in 1971 and the Senate’s opposition to the Build Back Better legislation in 2021, the two failed national-level attempts to create child care infrastructure?³

They did it through creating a group called Let’s Grow Kids, which had a singular focus and mission. They did it with both philanthropic funds and small-dollar fundraising. They did it through coalition building—in the business community, in the legislature, and within the early childhood educator community of longtime child care providers and advocates. 

And they did it with a deadline—created in 2015, the plan had been for Let’s Grow Kids to sunset after 10 years, and hand the reins over to someone else. Win or lose, they’d have 10 years to try. 

The final votes to pass the budget and then adjourn the legislative session came at 11:00 p.m. that night, when Richards and her team had gone home. Richards and her husband sat outside in their backyard where they’d rigged up a TV—a way to entertain during the COVID-19 pandemic. They lit a fire and watched the final votes come in. It was official. They had done it. 

Richards still didn’t know what was to come, or that more obstacles would be in their way, or how Let’s Grow Kids could sunset now. Were they actually “done” now, or was the work still ahead? And if Vermont was going to become the singular example in the country of what near-universal child care would look like, what would happen if their new system failed?

But answers to those questions could come later. For that night, they could just be winners.