Community Change Action’s three-day convention kicked off a nationwide campaign with providers and parents from 39 states, D.C., and Puerto Rico, to make universal childcare a defining political issue of the 2026 midterms.
Watch our program livestream – keynote speakers included parents and providers, community organizers, and elected officials including Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson and Rep. Analilia Mejia (NJ-11), and virtual messages from folks including Senators Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Mark Kelly (D-AZ), Representatives Delia Ramirez (Il-03) and Sara Jacobs (CA-51), and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani.
Chicago, IL — Over the weekend, more than 1,300 childcare providers, parents, and allies from 39 states, Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico gathered for the first-ever National Childcare Convention, hosted by Community Change Action. The three-day gathering was a strategy session to build the roadmap to win the universal childcare system our communities, families, and providers deserve.
Community Change Action is demanding a universal childcare system built on racial and gender justice, with care for every child and every family, and thriving wages and benefits for providers.
Attendees left the convention with commitments to implement a 2026 midterms strategy, host universal childcare now events, and launch Community Change Action Childcare Changemaker Chapters across the country. Over three days, attendees built skills, trained in policy and campaign leadership, and got organized to escalate this fight in the next election and beyond.
“The childcare system in this country is not broken. It was built this way on purpose,” said Dorian Warren, Co-President of Community Change Action. “It was built on the stolen labor of Black women — forced, under slavery, to rock somebody else’s baby while somebody sold their own. When slavery ended, care work was one of the only doors open to Black women– the rules that cheapened Black women’s labor set the price of care for every woman who ever did this work. But here is what I know: what was designed can be redesigned. What was built can be rebuilt. What was constructed can be reconstructed by us.”
The Convention comes at a moment of escalating crisis: Trump’s funding cuts, targeted attacks on Black and immigrant providers, and an affordability crisis that has made childcare one of the largest bills families face have exacerbated the cracks in our nation’s failing care system. In May, Community Change Action launched its campaign for universal childcare with the largest Day Without Child Care in history — nearly 4,000 parents and providers in states from Louisiana to New York stopped work to demand action.
“We depend on care collectively but we force families and providers to pay for it privately,” said Community Change Co-President Lorella Praeli. “You know what it is to watch the cost of care consume a paycheck and still wonder whether you have found the care your child needs. And providers, you know the other side of that equation. You know what it is to want to pay your staff more but fear that raising tuition will push families out. To absorb the cost yourself because the alternative is closing your doors. The system has placed parents and providers on opposite sides of an equation that neither created and neither can solve alone.”
Delegations came from every corner of the country — red states and blue states, rural towns, big cities, the suburbs, and even the islands of Hawaii and Puerto Rico. Almost 200 Utahns made the trip, joined closely in number by parents and providers from New York, Mississippi, Indiana, California, Texas, Georgia, and Nevada.
“Our kids deserve a childhood where the people caring for them aren’t one missed paycheck away from closing their doors,” said Cale Nelson, a parent from Minnesota and Community Change Action Childcare Changemaker. “I’ve done the math on childcare too many times — between rent, groceries, and what it costs to leave my children with someone who loves them, something always has to give. Universal childcare isn’t a nice-to-have to me. It’s the ultimate thing my family — and families like mine — need to stay afloat.”
“Parents can’t pay more, and providers can’t make less — that is the simple truth of where we are,” said Emma Biggs, a center-based childcare provider in North Carolina with 35 years of experience. “I’ve dedicated my life to caring for children in my community, and our childcare crisis has never been this urgent. We’re trying to keep our childcare system from collapsing. We are demanding thriving wages, real benefits, and respect, because we can’t care for families if we’re not cared for, too.”
“We are showing up to be the deciding force in who represents us and what policies they fight for — and we are doing it together, with joy, in a room full of people who refuse to be invisible,” said Candice Williams, Director of For All Families Oregon and program emcee for the National Childcare Convention. “We are not backing down until we win the universal childcare system we deserve. Let’s get to work.”’
Other notable speakers include Bry’AnA Wallace with Parent Voices Oakland, Tami Lunan with Ohio Organizing Collaborative, Bishop Royster with Faith in Action, Ai-jen Poo with National Domestic Workers Alliance, Brynn Seibert with HCII SEIU, Kacy Panteah with Organizing in the Land of Enchantment (OLÉ), Afua Atta-Mensah, Aisha Nyandoro with Springboard to Opportunities, Lenise Parker, a Tennessee Childcare Changemaker, LaDon Love with SPACEs in Action, and Janna Rodriguez, a New York Childcare Changemaker.
