United States
Jessica Sager is the co-founder and chief executive officer of All Our Kin, a nonprofit that trains, supports and sustains family child care providers to ensure that children and families have the foundation for success in school and in life. Through All Our Kin, caregivers succeed as business owners; working parents find stable, high-quality care for their children; and children receive early learning experiences that lay the groundwork for achievement in school and beyond. A graduate of Barnard College and Yale Law School, Jessica co-teaches a Yale University seminar on “Child Care, Society, and Public Policy,” and is a trustee of the William Caspar Graustein Memorial Fund. She has provided commentary on child care issues for Time, The Hill, New America, the New York Daily News, and Education Week. Jessica’s honors include the US Small Business Administration’s “Women in Business Champion” award (2012), the Connecticut Women’s Hall of Fame (2013), New Profit’s “Extraordinary Social Female Entrepreneur” designation (2014), the Roslyn S. Jaffe Award Grand Prize (2015), and the Ashoka Changemakers/Robert Wood Johnson Champion of Children's Wellbeing award (2016). She is an Ashoka Fellow, a Fellow of the 14th class of the Pahara-Aspen Education Fellowship, and an Aspen Braddock Scholar. Most recently, she was named to the CARE 100 list of the Americans doing the most to re-imagine and re-humanize our care system.
When Mayor-elect Eric Adams gave his victory speech last week, he spoke heartfelt words about his mother, a single parent of six, "who struggled day in and day out." As she fought to give her children opportunities that she never had, she had to "do it on her own because the city was not there for her."
Each morning, Tennille Smalls welcomes the children of hospital workers into her family childcare program. They've established a routine: The parents stop six feet away, and the children, all 1- and 2-years-old, run to Smalls. She takes their temperatures, takes off their shoes and washes their hands. Only then can the day begin.
The availability of affordable child care in the United States has reached a crisis point. Faced with a scarcity of options, parents increasingly have to make impossible choices between affordability and quality. Waiting lists to get a child into center-based care can take months or even years.
Hi, I'm Jessica, creator of: All Our Kin - we're transforming childcare in the U.S. by giving power, tools, and voice to home-based childcare providers. These women are the first teachers of so many of our children. They must be honored, paid decently, and supported as educators and as business people.
Childcare, especially for infants and toddlers, is in short supply. For many, it is also tremendously expensive, and few childcare settings meet quality standards for supporting children's healthy development. In response to the need for flexible, affordable childcare programs, family childcare providers operate small, home-based programs that are the primary source of childcare for infants and toddlers in low-income neighborhoods.
This blog was written by Jessica Sager as part of Child Care NOW's guest blog series. At the National Women's Law Center gala last week, Elizabeth Warren spoke from the heart about the critical importance of child care and its impact on her own life.
Commentary The empathy gap is a deficit that most of us suffer from unconsciously. And in education, it is paralyzing the progress of many students. The empathy gap is an inability to recognize and respond to the feelings of others, especially others we perceive as different from us and, most perniciously, those whose race is different from our own.
Labor Day is not only a day off work for many Americans to acknowledge the contributions of millions of workers; it is also a day off from childcare for millions of American children and the educators who work to care for them.
Jessica Sager is the founder and executive director of All Our Kin and a lecturer at Yale College. She is a Pahara Aspen Fellow and a Ms. Foundation Public Voices Fellow through The OpEd Project. I like to wake up early.
All Our Kin grew out of a very particular historical moment--the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996, which ended welfare as we know it." The law imposed new job training requirements on welfare recipients with young children, and created a lifetime limit on their eligibility for benefits.
The best holiday gift I ever received came from my daughter's preschool program. Every year around this time, the teachers would compile scrapbooks for each child, with photos and captions like, "Fingerpainting with friends," "Exploring shapes," or "Jumping in leaf piles!" These books are still among my most treasured possessions.
In her hometown of Rio de Janeiro, Olympian Rafaela Silva, 26, was Brazil's first gold medal this year. The winner in women's judo, Silva was raised in poverty in one of the city's infamous favelas. Olympian Mavis Chirandu, now 21, was years ago abandoned by the side of the road as an infant and grew up in an SOS Children's Village.
In choosing the next president of the United States, many bandy about the need for candidates to be "presidential." But in selecting America's chief executive officer, it would be better to discern which candidate possesses the critical skill set of executive function.
On February 21, parents and advocates gathered at the capitol to testify to the legislature on the importance of Care4Kids, Connecticut's child care subsidy program, which provides critical assistance to help low-income working parents pay for child care. Since August, new parents can no longer qualify for support, unless they receive TANF dollars; under Gov.
Last week, parents, childcare providers, and legislators gathered in Hartford to discuss the crucial role childcare plays in supporting Connecticut's economy. The forum was held in response to recent news that the Care4Kids childcare subsidy program, which helps low-income families pay for childcare, will be closed to almost all new applicants.
Ivanka Trump recently visited Success Academy, a charter school in Harlem. It's possible that her visit meant that she was thinking about what her father's presidency could mean for children. She's spoken up before on children's issues, highlighting, for example, the importance of paid family leave and the high cost of child care.
ABC/ Ida Mae Astute, Disney | ABC Television Group on Flickr, under Creative Commons (WOMENSENEWS)-Here's a good question for the next presidential debate you watch or the next politician you size up: What's the plan for child care in this country?